The International Women’s Day we know today bears little resemblance to what German socialist Clara Zetkin instigated at the beginning of the 20th century. Zetkin had watched an eruption of the labour movement as women workers, specifically garment workers in the US, went on strike. Women demanded better pay, safer working conditions, fairer treatment. In 1910, at the International Women’s Socialist Conference, Zetkin suggested a ‘Women’s Day’ was needed to recognise this struggle, and International Women’s Day (IWD) was born.
More than a hundred years later, and now supported by the UN, IWD has lost most, if not all, of its roots of class and struggle, hijacked by corporations presenting a sterile, shiny and safe version of women’s fight for equality. Rather than IWD being a record of direct action, often the only ‘action’ is a hashtag and the purchasing of ‘fempowerment’ merchandise. bell hooks wrote that she dreamed of seeing feminism proudly displayed on T-shirts or bumper stickers, but I don’t think she could have envisioned the hollow corporate nightmare that dream would become. Or indeed have imagined those T-shirts being made by underpaid women and girls in unsafe factories enduring terrible working conditions.
In recent times, this soulless charade has worked hard but failed to completely eclipse the good work that women’s charities and organisations try to showcase on IWD. In amongst the tsunami of hypocrisy and box-ticking, if I’ve looked hard enough, I’ve always managed to find a shimmer of hope. Each year I look on in awe at grassroots groups creating real change, the young women organising themselves, the schoolgirls demanding to know more about their herstory.
Yet today that feels harder to do than ever. Even if we can see past the legacy of ‘Lean In’, the controversial 2013 ‘feminist manifesto’ by Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, and TV and magazine writer, Nell Scovell, and try to focus on the positives, this year, a day of webinars and tweets is teetering on the absurd. It’s like offering a child’s watering can to extinguish a forest fire.