March 8 between the legacy of working women’s struggles and socialist feminism

Libcom note: This article contains numerous historical errors, and so is reproduced for reference only. For an accurate history of International Women's Day addressing some common myths repeated here, See this article by Temma Kaplan: https://libcom.org/article/socialist-origins-international-womens-day-temma-kaplan 

The beginnings: when working women paved the way for us today

On March 8, we do not recall a passing memory; we recall a history of fire, struggle, and confrontation against the conditions that weighed heavily on working women. This day was shaped by the hands of women workers in factories and raised by the voices of women militants in the streets until it became an international day to renew the commitment to justice, equality, and a classless socialist system. It is a day that does not live by emotional speeches alone; it lives by returning to the historical contexts that produced it and by recognizing the central role played by the socialist feminist movement in documenting it and advocating its adoption as an international occasion uniting women’s voices across borders.
March 8 was not born from a vacuum. Its roots go back to the protests of textile workers in New York in 1857, when thousands of women marched against meager wages and working hours that extended to sixteen hours a day, under conditions that were not very different from disguised slavery. Although the police suppressed that movement, it planted the seeds of women’s trade union organization and instilled among working women the idea that silence was not an option and that the street was a legitimate arena for demanding rights.
More than half a century later, on March 8, 1908, the streets of New York were again filled with the footsteps of fifteen thousand women carrying the slogan “Bread and Roses”: bread as a symbol of economic security and dignity of life, and roses as a sign of their right to a humane life that does not reduce women to machines of production. They demanded shorter working hours, the prohibition of child labor, and the right to vote, which at that time was treated as a privilege rather than a natural right. That moment was exceptional because it united in one image the economic demand and the political demand, declaring that the women’s cause is indivisible.
In 1909, the American Socialist Party declared the first National Woman’s Day in honor of the struggles of textile workers. The idea then spread beyond the United States and found resonance within labor and socialist movements in Europe. In 1910, during the Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen, a proposal was introduced to designate an international women’s day. Among the most prominent advocates was the German socialist militant Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), who devoted her life to linking the women’s cause with class liberation and played a central role in establishing this day as a mobilizing struggle rather than a ceremonial celebration. The conference unanimously approved the proposal, indicating that the idea expressed a genuine need felt by militant women everywhere.
In the following year, hundreds of thousands of women in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Denmark took to the streets to mark the day for the first time. But the moment that cemented its revolutionary symbolism came in 1917, when Russian women workers in Petrograd went on strike demanding “bread and peace” amid a devastating war that was draining the lives of the people and the food of families. That strike, which erupted on February 23 according to the Russian calendar, corresponding to March 8 according to the Gregorian calendar, was the first spark of the Russian Revolution that overthrew Tsarism. Thus the day transformed from a moment of demands into an event that changed the course of history and gave March 8 a revolutionary dimension that it has not lost to this day.
March 8 remained present in socialist countries for many decades, retaining its militant and class character, until the United Nations officially recognized it as International Women’s Day in 1977. Thus the day brings together the endurance of working women in America, the courage of women in Russia, and the awareness of socialist militants in Europe, remaining a renewed promise that rights are not granted but won through organized struggle, and that the march toward equality is still ongoing, carried by generations indebted to those who came before them and determined to continue the path to its end.

Socialist feminism: when liberation became a matter of daily struggle
Socialist feminism, which took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, formed one of the most solid theoretical foundations for explaining women’s oppression and defining the conditions of their liberation. It was associated with the names of prominent militants and thinkers, from Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Alexandra Kollontai to Flora Tristan, Clara Lemlich, and Sylvia Pankhurst, and later developed with generations of theorists and activists in the twentieth century.
These currents did not view women’s oppression as a phenomenon independent from the prevailing social system; rather, they considered it an integral part of the very mechanism of capitalist exploitation, nourished by it and reproducing it at the same time. In this perspective, the working woman is subjected to a double exploitation that cannot be understood separately: she is exploited as a worker through wages lower than those of men in the labor market, and she is exploited within the family through unpaid domestic labor that ensures the reproduction of labor power without costing capital a single penny.
From this deep understanding, socialist feminism criticized what was known as “bourgeois feminism,” the movement that focused its efforts on political and legal rights such as the right to vote, access to education, and participation in public life. While acknowledging the importance and necessity of these demands, socialist feminists argued that they did not touch the core of the problem for working-class women, because legal equality alone does not end economic dependency or break the chains of material exploitation. A woman who has the right to vote but lives in extreme poverty and depends economically on a man because the labor market does not offer her work or a fair wage remains effectively unfree, regardless of the rights she formally possesses on paper.
Therefore, these currents emphasized that women’s struggle must not be separated from the broader class struggle, since it is in essence part of a wider movement aimed at transforming the very relations of production. They did not see an inherent conflict between men and women within the working class; rather, they believed such a view served the interests of a system that seeks to fragment the working class and divert it into internal conflicts instead of confronting the side that accumulates profit at the expense of labor. From this standpoint, the organizational activity of the socialist feminist movement was closely linked to the broader labor movement, organizing working women within a revolutionary political framework that unites rather than divides.
These currents also advanced a comprehensive vision for reorganizing society so that women could achieve economic independence through full integration into social production, alongside the provision of broad public services such as childcare centers, care institutions, and collective kitchens. Such measures would ease the immense burden of domestic labor placed on women and break their structural dependency within the traditional family. Women’s liberation, in this perspective, was not merely a moral, cultural, or rhetorical issue; it was a matter of economic infrastructure requiring a radical transformation of relations of production, ownership, and power.
In this radical sense, socialist feminism viewed socialism not as an optional political addition that could be attached to the women’s cause from the outside, but as the fundamental condition for achieving real and lasting liberation. Through this profound and coherent connection between feminism and class struggle, these currents helped shape a robust theoretical vision that continues to resonate strongly in contemporary debates about the dialectical relationship between the women’s question and the struggle over the economic structure of society.

The industrial context: capitalism and the birth of working women’s consciousness
In the late nineteenth century, Europe experienced enormous industrial expansion that transformed the continent and reshaped the map of its social relations. Factories multiplied, and cities swelled with human waves arriving from the countryside. Yet the immense wealth that accumulated was not shared by those who created it with their hands and labor. Women, alongside men and children, worked long exhausting hours under harsh conditions lacking even the most basic standards of health and safety, for wages far lower and without genuine legal protection against arbitrary dismissal or workplace injury.
In this specific context, women’s oppression was not merely a cultural issue related to customs and traditions; it was an inseparable part of a capitalist economic structure that directly benefited from cheap female labor and from the fragility of women’s social position and their lack of legal or organizational leverage.
Within this charged climate, the socialist movement emerged as a political expression of the interests and aspirations of the working class in a more just world. Women militants joined its ranks with a firm intellectual conviction formed through years of observation, study, and direct struggle: women’s oppression is a direct and deliberate result of a system whose essence lies in exploiting labor and maximizing profit at the expense of human lives and rights.
Socialist feminism clearly distinguished between the cause of working women and that of bourgeois women, emphasizing that merging them under a single label obscures real contradictions and serves the interests of the dominant class. While liberal currents focused on obtaining the right to vote within the existing system without challenging its economic structure, socialist feminists argued that this approach addressed visible symptoms without approaching the deep roots. The uncompromising question remained: what kind of liberation grants a wealthy woman the right to vote while the working woman remains trapped in the mud of poverty and daily exploitation? And what kind of equality is built upon a fractured foundation of economic injustice?
Through the writings and militant platforms established by socialist feminism, the organic relationship between capitalism and the oppression of women was analyzed with rare depth. Capitalist economy did not exploit women despite its awareness of the dual nature of their position; it exploited them precisely because of it, benefiting from every step they took between factory and home.
These currents did not call for a struggle between women and men that divides what should be united. At their core they called for a clear struggle between capital owners and the working class, linking women’s liberation to a comprehensive transformation that changes the very conditions of production and dismantles the system that makes the exploitation of women a structural component of capitalist economy.

The Global South: when the factories still keep their name
If the struggle launched by the textile workers of New York in 1857 began in textile factories, those same factories still exist today. Yet they have moved to places where labor is cheaper, laws are weaker, and oversight is more fragile. They have moved to Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Morocco, and other countries of the Global South that have become cheap back workshops of global capitalism, producing what the North wears and consumes while their workers remain outside any real protection.
In Bangladesh alone, more than four million women work in the ready-made garment sector, producing goods exported to markets in Europe and the United States for wages that in the best cases do not exceed 95 dollars a month. When the Rana Plaza building collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1100 workers beneath its ruins, that collapse exposed a single scandalous truth: the thread linking a dress sold in Paris for two hundred euros and a woman dying under rubble in Dhaka is a capitalist thread stretching across borders. Reports by the International Labour Organization and several human rights organizations documented this catastrophe as one of the worst industrial disasters in the history of the garment industry.
Yet the Global South is not only the factory. In the Gulf countries, hundreds of thousands of domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka live under the kafala system, a system that ties the legal status of the worker to the employer in a way that turns any complaint of exploitation or violence into a risk of deportation rather than a path to justice. These women are not only absent from international debates; they are absent from the very laws that are supposed to protect them, because domestic work in many of these countries is excluded from labor law altogether.
In Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, women bear a double burden under austerity policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank over decades. When public services in education, health, and social care are reduced, these services do not truly disappear; their burdens move into the household sphere, where women compensate for the cuts in state budgets through additional unpaid labor and exhausted time. In this sense, austerity is not a neutral economic policy; it is a policy with clear social and gendered consequences whose cost is paid first and most heavily by women.
Here the theoretical legacy of socialist feminism acquires a new dimension beyond the Europe where it originated. When these currents linked women’s liberation with the liberation of the working class from capitalist exploitation, they laid the theoretical foundation that explains what happens today in the factories of the South, the homes of the Gulf, and the impoverished neighborhoods of Cape Town, Lima, and Karachi. Because the issue is essentially one: a system that requires cheap labor, fragile bodies, and porous laws, and it finds all of this most easily in a poor woman in the Global South.
Nor can the discussion of women’s realities in the world be complete without also considering those pushed to sell their bodies for survival in unjust economies where existence itself becomes dependent on the body and precarious work. As occurs in many places across the world, from poor tourist countries to large cities living on shadow economies, women’s bodies become the last available resource in the face of poverty and marginalization.
Therefore, March 8 cannot be a truly global day unless the factory worker in Dhaka, the domestic worker in Riyadh, the market vendor in Addis Ababa, and the woman struggling daily for survival in harsh informal economies are present at its center rather than its margins; not as victims invoked to stir emotion, but as actors in a struggle that has not stopped and will not stop until the structural conditions that make their exploitation possible, profitable, and continuous are transformed.

Crises reveal the truth: the fragility of gains under capitalism
This structural fragility experienced by women in the South does not concern them alone. Economic crises reveal that women in the North as well have achieved gains that remain suspended without deep roots in the structure of the system itself. Experiences in countries described as advanced in gender equality clearly show that these gains, despite their great importance, remain fragile and susceptible to erosion within a capitalist system whose basic structure has not changed. At every economic crisis, calls return urging women to withdraw from the labor market under arguments that appear social in form but economic in essence, such as reducing unemployment, lowering public spending, or returning to the “natural role” of women in the home and family.
Even in Scandinavian and European countries often presented as models of equality, women’s participation in top leadership positions remains relatively limited. In many sectors it does not exceed 25 to 35 percent of senior management roles and falls to around 10 to 15 percent in the highest executive positions, while wage gaps persist at an average of 10 to 13 percent. Shelters for victims of domestic violence also receive hundreds of women each year, demonstrating clearly that legal equality engraved in constitutions and legislation does not necessarily mean the end of real oppression experienced daily.
This fragility is not confined to the South alone. The same economic system that pressures the wages of women workers in the factories of Dhaka also drives austerity and privatization policies affecting the lives of women workers in hospitals, schools, and care institutions in Europe. Thus the fragility of gains becomes a shared phenomenon taking different forms between North and South but arising from the same root.
These painful realities confirm that rights gained through struggle and sacrifice can gradually erode unless the deep economic structures that sustain relations of exploitation and discrimination are transformed. A right granted within a system that does not truly believe in equality remains a suspended right, one that can be withdrawn whenever the interests of that system require it.

When female advancement does not mean a feminist victory
The presence of a woman in a leadership position does not necessarily represent a victory for women’s causes. This is not merely a theoretical paradox; history provides concrete examples. One of the most striking examples is the experience of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), the first woman to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who ruled between 1979 and 1990. Her rise to the highest level of power was symbolically significant in a society where political life had long been dominated by men. Yet this rise did not translate into policies that strengthened social equality or protected the working class from exploitation.
On the contrary, her era was closely associated with extensive privatization policies and systematic economic austerity that weakened trade unions, struck hard at workers, and deepened social inequality. Women, especially working and poor women, paid a disproportionate and painful price for these policies.
It is not enough for women to reach positions of power if working conditions remain unjust. It is not enough for the discourse of “empowerment” and “breaking the glass ceiling” to circulate while domestic and care work remain socially unrecognized and excluded from the calculations of the formal economy. This experience reminds us that women’s liberation is not measured by the gender of the person sitting in the seat of power but by the nature of the policies implemented and their real alignment with the interests of the oppressed majority.
Women’s presence in leadership and decision-making positions is an important and necessary step toward equality, as it breaks the historical monopoly of power and grants women a long-awaited political and institutional presence. Yet the true measure of social progress is not the number of seats occupied by women in corporate boards or parliamentary halls, but the tangible improvement in the lives of the most marginalized women: low-paid workers, women trapped in inherited poverty, refugees fleeing wars and oppression, and victims of austerity policies who pay the price for crises they did not create. From this radical perspective, March 8 remains a day of deep questioning of the existing system, its policies, and its structure, rather than an occasion to accommodate or flatter it.

March 8: how we struggle, not how we celebrate
At the end of this long historical path stretching from New York to Petrograd and from Copenhagen to every city where women have taken to the streets demanding their rights, remembering March 8 is not a sentimental return to the past. It is a conscious recovery of its original meaning, which many forces attempt to beautify and empty of its class and militant content. Reclaiming this day does not mean denying the reformist struggles that achieved gains that cannot be underestimated; it means reconnecting those gains to their social and class roots in order to protect them from regression and retreat.
Despite all the rights won through decades of struggle, blood, and sacrifice, the deep structures that reproduce discrimination daily in every factory, office, and home have not disappeared. The exploitation of women continues in a labor market built upon systematic wage gaps, unpaid work absent from official statistics, and inherited economic vulnerability passed from generation to generation. The system that women workers resisted in textile factories remains alive, changing its forms and mechanisms yet preserving its core based on domination and systematic exploitation.
The legacy left by socialist feminism was not a call for an annual celebration where banners are hung, roses distributed, and conferences held before everyone returns to their lives unchanged. It was an urgent call for organization and struggle across borders, cultures, and languages, linking equality with a critique of the capitalist class system and linking the liberation of women with the liberation of society as a whole from the logic of exploitation.
Yet the most pressing question remains: how do we struggle? What forms of organization are needed today? Is it a traditional socialist political party, decentralized social networks, or transnational feminist organizations? How can a garment worker in Bangladesh be connected with a consumer in Europe in a way that creates shared awareness of global chains of exploitation rather than hiding them? How can austerity policies imposed by international financial institutions, whose consequences fall most heavily on working and poor women, be confronted?
The answers cannot be reduced to a single organizational formula valid everywhere. Political and social conditions differ from one context to another. However, contemporary experiences point to several clear directions, including strengthening independent feminist organization and building cross-border networks of feminist and labor solidarity. Some leftist parties and progressive forces have also played roles by supporting gender equality and the demands of the feminist movement, whether through parliamentary work or alliances with social movements.
In this context, it becomes important to connect feminist struggle with broader social struggle against austerity and privatization policies and to develop new forms of organization combining political action, social mobilization, and trade union pressure. Capitalist globalization has linked the economies of the world together; it has not only produced shared challenges but also created new conditions for transcontinental solidarity that can transform women’s struggles from isolated local battles into a global social movement more conscious of itself and its goals.
Therefore, on March 8 and every day that follows, the central question is not how we celebrate this occasion. The real question is how we struggle, organize, and build. Rights won yesterday require renewed awareness and sustained organization to protect them today, and they require a revolutionary left feminist will that does not tire of expanding them day after day until full equality is achieved—an equality that accepts neither halves nor crumbs.