Activists celebrate International Working Women’s Day

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Activists gathered March 11 at Veterans park to celebrate International Working Women’s Day. Photo/Winter Trabex

MANCHESTER, NH – As cars lined up in front of one other for an event, and as police directed traffic on Elm Street, activists and members of the community gathered to celebrate International Working Women’s Day. The day had officially fallen on March 8, yet the day was celebrated on March 11, a Saturday, instead.

In attendance was a mix of all kinds of people. Many different ages, ethnicities, and minority groups were represented. Groups showed up to represent reproductive freedom, socialism, climate justice, and Occupy Seacoast. The event had been organized by the southern New Hampshire chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a group which regularly advocates for leftist causes.

Women’s Day was first brought forth by the Socialist Party of America in 1909, and was adopted in Soviet Russia as an official holiday following the February Revolution in 1917. Women had won the right to vote and had gained a national holiday for themselves by March 8 of that year. Advocates in the Soviet Union began a large textile strike which would lead to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, followed by the beginning of a Soviet government under Vladimir Lenin.

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A flag on display during a rally at Veterans Park on Saturday recognizing International Working Womens Day. Photo/Winter Trabex

It would take another 48 years before the Soviet government recognized it as a holiday from which people were exempt from work, and another 60 years before the United Nations adopted it as a global holiday in 1977. Pressure from second-wave feminists in the 1970s who advocated equal pay, equal economic opportunity, equal legal standing, subsidized child care, and prevention of violence against women had drawn attention to the issue of women’s rights until the day could no longer be ignored.

In recent years, Women’s Day has come to encompass rights for LGBTQ+ people, including trasngender people, and non-binary people. Women of all shapes, sizes, and ages were celebrated. No one was excluded, and all were welcome.

“We want to let people know that every issue is an issue that affects women and gender-oppressed people,” Mandy Lanford, an event organizer and member of PSL said. “That’s everything from mass incarceration, the fight for reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights. Being anti-war is good for women. Just the fight for higher wages, free child care, the issues that immigrant and migrant women are facing. We’re out here trying to make connections between different groups, get people involved, and see what we can build.”


Among the groups in attendance was 350 New Hampshire, a group which advocates for climate justice. Dominic Osmond, a climate organizer, manned a table where he distributed brochures and gave out information about the work he is currently doing.

“We are working in different communities across the state of New Hampshire,” Osmond said. “We’re working to achieve state and local legislative solutions to the climate crisis that we will continue to experience, especially when it comes to things like out-of-control utility prices that people simply can’t afford. We are working to address that on different levels. I’m currently working on a campaign organizing folks here in Manchester to lobby the Board of Mayor and Aldermen to establish what’s called a Citizen Energy Advisory Board. That’s a collective of volunteers, citizen members, who participate to make recommendations to the city to lower and reduce costs for energy, helping people increase energy efficiency weatherization- basically burn less carbon and spend less on the carbon they do burn.”

Speakers at the event involved a transgender woman who advocated for communism, an activist from the New Hampshire Reproductive Freedom Fund, and a woman of color who advocated for the rights of incarcerated women.

After enumerating various ways in which women and gender-oppressed people were made to struggle, Lanford said, “Our fight must unite these various struggles to meet the needs of all working-class women and LGBTQ people. A better world is possible.”


 

About this Author

Winter Trabex

Winter Trabex is a freelance writer from Manchester and regular contributor to Community Voices.