Happy International Women’s Day! While there is some dispute about when [...]

Happy International Women’s Day! While there is some dispute about when “the first” IWD took place, the holiday was adopted and promoted by socialist movements around the world following the March 8, 1917 Women’s March for Bread & Peace in Russia

The earliest IWD celebrations in the Bay Area were organized by the Communist Party. The first that we know of was in 1935 at the Finnish Comrade’s Hall in Berkeley. Early IWD celebrations featured dancing, spaghetti dinners, and speakers such as SF suffragist Anita Whitney

In the late 1960s, IWD was revived by a feminist group in Chicago which included the daughters of communists who remembered the holiday from their childhoods. The Bay Area’s first revived IWD took place in Berkeley in 1969

Berkeley Women’s Liberation members marched through downtown dressed as Alexandra Kollontai, Emma Goldman, and Cuban revolutionary Haydée Santamaría. They performed a 3-act skit about 3 types of exploited women: a factory worker, an office worker, and “a wife-mother-helpmate”

They sang a feminist version of “Solidarity Forever” (“too long we’ve typed the stencils, run the mimeo machine/kept our mouths shut, done the shit work while the others make the scene/if we stand outcast, degraded revolution is a dream/but the movement makes us strong”)

In 1970, a split led to two different IWD events: one in SF, which foregrounded antiwar and anti-racist politics, and one in Berkeley, more narrowly focused on ‘women’s issues’. Tensions between anticapitalist and liberal feminists have been a mainstay of Bay Area IWDs ever since