WITHIN the last 20 years many thousands of women worldwide have begun to celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD). However, the way in which the day is marked often bears little resemblance to the original IWD purpose and origins. 

This is a great misfortune, especially in the current climate in which there is an attack on the fundamental principle of women’s rights. 
IWD was founded at the beginning of the last century to both highlight and celebrate the struggle of working women against their oppression and double exploitation. 

Today this fight has not been won — their struggle is still our struggle. Thus it is timely to remind women and men in the labour movement and elsewhere of the inspirational socialist origins of IWD in the hope that it will ignite again a progressive socialist feminist women’s movement rooted in an understanding of the class basis of women’s inequality. We can learn from our history, but first we must rediscover it.