International Women's Day is celebrated every year on March 8. It is a day for international recognition of the economic, political and social achievements of women.
It started only as a political event for women – socialists. The icon is Clara Zetkin.
A little-known fact is that the main demands of women are a reduction in the working day to 8 hours, equal pay and the right to use contraceptives so that they are not seen as a baby factory.
However, the holiday is gradually becoming part of the culture of many countries. In some of them, the day loses its political color and becomes simply an occasion for men to express their sympathy and attention to the women around them — something like a combination of the Western holidays Mother's Day and Valentine's Day. In other countries, the topic of women's political and human rights, advocated by the UN, is strongly advocated, and the struggle for the recognition of these rights of women around the world is viewed responsibly and with hope.
The first Women's Day was celebrated on February 23, 1909 in the USA at the initiative of the American Socialist Party. The idea of creating an international women's day appeared after the rapid industrialization and economic expansion at the beginning of the 20th century, which gave rise to protests for improving working conditions. The calendar date is associated with the first mass demonstration of women workers, which took place on March 8, 1857 in New York. Women from sewing and textile factories went out to protest against poor working conditions and low wages.
The workers were attacked and dispersed by the police. Two years later, in the same month, these women created their first labor union. However, there are opinions that this fact is not confirmed, but was invented in 1955, probably with the motive of considering the holiday as a communist ideology. This was important for women's rights activists in Western Europe and the United States during the Cold War. In the following years, other protests followed, the most famous of which was in 1908, when women organized a march through New York with demands for a shorter working day, better pay and the right to vote.
On August 27, 1910, the first international women's conference was held in Copenhagen, organized by the Socialist International. At the suggestion of the German socialist Clara Zetkin, it was adopted: Every year on one of the first Sundays of spring, the day of working women and their international solidarity should be celebrated, in order to mobilize the broad masses of working women to fight for equality with men in all spheres of public life.
The following year, International Women's Day was celebrated by more than a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, and in 1913 in France and Russia. However, a fire in a garment factory in New York killed more than 150 workers. The high mortality rate was attributed to the lack of preventive measures. In the West, International Women's Day was celebrated in the 1910s and 1920s, but gradually faded away. It was renewed with the emerging feminism of the 1960s. Women's demonstrations in Russia are considered the first stage of the Russian Revolution of 1917. On March 8, that same year, women workers from Petrograd went on a demonstration against hunger, war and tsarism.
After the October Revolution in Russia, on behalf of the Bulgarian participants in the Second International Conference of Communist Women in 1920 in Moscow, Anna Maimunkova recommended March 8 as International Women's Day. In 1965, March 8 was officially declared a non-working day and a women's holiday in the USSR. Today, the day is still a non-working day in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union - Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, as well as in the Republic of Macedonia and Mongolia.
In Bulgaria, March 8 was initially celebrated with talks in a narrow circle of socialists in 1911, and in 1915, the first public celebration was held. As a national holiday, March 8 began to be celebrated after September 9, 1944. At first, meetings were held at enterprises, factories, and institutions to recognize the contribution of women to production, culture, science, and public life. After 1960, the celebration took on particularly wide proportions and became a favorite holiday for women of all ages.
In Bulgaria, the day is also celebrated as Mother's Day, although according to many Bulgarians, the Annunciation (March 25) is the Christian holiday of mothers and women.