International Women's Day was born in the socialist and working-class women's movement, not in corporate boardrooms. In 1909, the Socialist Party of America held a National Woman's Day in New York, following years of strikes by women garment workers. In 1910, at the International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen, the German Marxist Clara Zetkin proposed that working women around the world mark a common day of struggle each year. The first International Women's Day was held in 1911, when more than a million people rallied across Europe for women's right to vote, to work, and to organize. Days later, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York killed 146 garment workers, most of them young immigrant women, and the day became bound up with the fight for workers' safety and dignity.

On March 8, 1917, women textile workers in Petrograd walked off their jobs and marched for bread and peace, calling on men in other factories to join them. Their strike spread across the city within days and grew into the February Revolution, which brought down the Russian tsar. The revolutionary government that followed made March 8 an official holiday. Socialist and liberated nations from China and Vietnam to Cuba, Mozambique, and Burkina Faso later embraced the day as part of their commitment to women's emancipation.

Today International Women's Day is often reduced to marketing campaigns and celebrations of individual success. Its true legacy belongs to working women, peasant women, and the women of colonized and oppressed nations who have fought on the front lines of every liberation struggle. They are the garment workers and the textile strikers, the guerrilla fighters of Vietnam, Algeria, and Guinea-Bissau, the domestic workers and nurses of today. To honor that legacy is to recommit to the struggle against patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism together, because none of them can be defeated alone.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*