Well look-ee here, it’s International Women’s Day.
Even Google got in on the commemorating. Here’s what the banner over their search bar looks like today.
What exactly is International Women’s Day? Today’s Christian Science Monitor has a lot of interesting background on it. To summarize: in the U.S., the American Socialist Party first declared a National Women’s Day in 1908. It gained world-wide traction during the International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, where the over 100 women from across the world voted for a holiday to recognize the efforts of striking garment workers in the United States.
In an era of dangerous working conditions for millions of immigrant women, tragedies like fires in garment factories that killed hundreds of workers in the early 1900’s led to the formation of the Factory Investigating Commission that Frances Perkins, the first female secretary of labor, was involved in. In essence, thousands of people across the world organized to make this day happen to recognize the atrocious working and living conditions of women workers.
Turn the page to 2013.
My Facebook page is blowing up with little notes of congratulations and recognition to women for International Women’s Day. But like Mother’s Day—its philosophical bedrock was based on groups of mothers who had lost their sons in the Civil War coming together in peace and reconciliation—the true meaning of today gets lost behind the buzz of, “We are all women, and let’s celebrate this.”
I’m starting to sound like Bill O’Reilly, a.k.a. Mr. Let’s-Keep-the-Christ-in-Christmas.
I guess my tagline would be: let’s keep the plight of undereducated, exploited, poverty-stricken, and subjugated women across the world in mind when we talk about International Women’s Day.
Nicholas Kristoff, one of my favorite columnists for the New York Times wrote for a few years back for the the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day about the three steps he believes advance the plight of women across the world the most. These are: education of girls, deworming and micronutrients, and support of female-owned businesses.
I’m with him on the education and business aspects. I’m also fully on the access to contraception bandwagon. My friends and I bitch and moan about how “hormonal” birth control makes us. Sure. But it seems as educated women we’ve almost completely lost sight of how unaccessible, underfunded, and culturally unacceptable birth control still is for millions of women. And how access to birth control saves women’s lives and allows them more control over their own future. Then again, we have educated male partners willing to wear condoms, something many of these same women don’t have.
These are my thoughts on this day: if girls had access to education and women access to birth control, world domination would be in our hands. (Cue evil, estrogen-infused laugh~Bua ha ha HA!)
But in all seriousness (let’s play make-believe for a minute) if you could pick two global interventions to improve the lives of women and have them fully funded, what would they be?