The UPA Government boasts of having achieved ‘8% growth rate’ which they claim symbolises ‘development’ and ‘progress’ for the country.
But can we really claim to be ‘developed’ when
· India is amongst the five countries in the world with the worst maternal mortality rates?
· More than half of India’s young women are malnourished and thousands of women die of anaemia?
· Thousands of girls in India are killed in the womb or as infants, leading to a situation where the number of women is far below that of men?
· Women in all walks of life are denied equal wages to men for equal work?
· Women all over the country are killed for the ‘crime’ of choosing their own life-partners, and are attacked for wearing clothes of their own choice?
· Women suffer discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape both inside and outside the home, and rarely get justice from courts?
The UPA Government claims to lack enough funds to ensure healthcare and nutrition for all women, yet allows super-rich corporations to loot the country of lakhs of crores in huge scams. Prices of food are soaring, and women are bearing the brunt of hunger and malnutrition.
Violence against women has been rising steeply every year, often under direct political patronage. Delhi, the national capital, has seen a spate of cases of rape and sexual violence in recent past. We have recently seen in UP, Bihar and Maharashtra how MLAs feel free to rape women from poor and oppressed communities, and enlist the police to harass and intimidate the victim rather than arrest the perpetrator. On the one hand, many such women have committed suicide in despair, while in Bihar, one such woman, who was denied justice in her complaint of rape against an MLA, was driven to take the desperate step of stabbing him to death. It is also a common knowledge how the saffron brigades of Ram Sene-Shiv Sena-ABVP-VHP routinely muzzle women’s freedom of expression. We have also seen how the Congress and VHP leaders alike stood in defence of retrograde Khap Panchayats.
What is responsible for the rising graph of crimes against women? Above all, it is the lack of will on part of the political establishment and police. More often than not, courts too have been all too insensitive and biased against women. In a shocking recent verdict, the Supreme Court pardoned three men who had been convicted of violent gang rape, on payment of a fine of Rs. 50,000 each! In another case, a court pardoned a convicted rapist because he cleared his IAS exams! With such verdicts, courts are sending a message that rape is not a very serious offence.
The Government too has shown the same lack of will towards justice for women. A Bill to amend the sexual assault laws in the country to ensure fast-track trials for such crimes and broaden the definition of rape to include marital rape and penetration by objects is yet to be tabled in Parliament. The Bill on Sexual Harassment at the Workplace mocks women by including a clause to punish women for “false complaints;” and also excludes domestic workers from its purview, in the name of the ‘sanctity of the home,’ in spite of the fact that domestic workers are especially vulnerable to sexual harassment. The Government has shown no willingness to pass any law against so-called ‘honour’ crimes.
On 8 March last year, the Government passed the law on 33% reservation for women with great fanfare in the Rajya Sabha – but since then, the Government has again succumbed to pressure from the patriarchal lobby and has put the Bill in cold storage yet again.
Women workers all over the country battle exploitative work conditions, denial of rights including equal wages, crèche facilities and the right to unionise, and if victimisation if they raise their voice.
In regions like Bastar, Odisha, Lalgarh, Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, where the Indian state is at war with people, women have been a deliberate target. We have seen how tribal women have been brutalised at Lalgarh and how women protesting corporate land grab were at Srikakulam, Singur and Nandigram have been subjected to violence and rape. At Khairlanji and Gujarat, we saw how rape was a weapon of caste and communal oppression.
8 March 2011 marks a 100 years of International Women’s Day. Let us remember that it was working women of the world who began celebrating International Women’s Day as a day to salute their struggle for their rights and women’s liberation.
On 8 March this year, let us march together to salute the legacy of 100 years of International Women’s Day – 100 years of working women’s struggles! Let us intensify our struggle against price rise and corruption, against violence on women, against state repression, for equality and dignity!
Let us march forward for rights, equality and women’s liberation!!
Women Workers Created International Women’s Day
Today, International Women’s Day is observed on 8 March in most countries of the world. Governments often choose this day to make various official pronouncements, and the United Nations too recognizes and celebrates this day. But how did International Women’s Day originate? Did it come into being by any official declaration by any Government or the UN?
As we turn the pages of history, we find that women workers of the world made the history of Women’s Day themselves – under the banner of socialist/communist parties. Like May Day, IWD too began to commemorate the struggles of the working class.
On 8 March 1857, women garment and textile workers in New York City held a mass protest against brutal working conditions, low wages, and a 12-hour working day and in March two years later the same women won the right to unionize.
On March 8, 1908, women workers under the banner of socialists organized a demonstration of 15,000 in New York, demanding pay raises, shorter hours, women’s right to vote, and an end to child labour.
In response to a call by the Socialist Party of America (a US communist group), the first National Woman’s Day (NWD) was observed across the United States on 28 February. The day was observed with huge demonstrations to demand labour laws (including the 8-hour working day) and the right to vote for women.
In 1909 women garment workers in the US staged a general strike. 20-30,000 shirtwaist makers struck work in the bitter winter cold for 13 weeks, demanding better pay and working conditions. The Women’s Trade Union League provided bail money for arrested strikers and large sums for strike funds.
In 1910, at the Second International Conference of Working Women at Copenhagen, Clara Zetkin (a leader of the German Social Democratic Party – as the communist party was called in those days) proposed the idea of an International Women’s Day, on the lines of the Women’s Day observed in 1909 in the US. She proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day - a Women’s Day - to press for rights for working women, including labour laws for women, the right to vote, and peace. The conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist and communist parties, working women’s clubs, and including the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, agreed to Zetkin’s suggestion and that is how International Women’s Day came into being.
The date chosen for International Women’s Day was 19 March – to commemorate the day of the 1848 revolution in Prussia when a powerful people’s uprising forced the Prussian king to promise the right to vote for women – a promise that he betrayed later.
Following the decision agreed at Copenhagen in 1911, International Women’s Day (IWD) was honoured the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on 19 March. More than one million women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, to hold public office and end discrimination.
This is how Russian communist leader Alexandra Kollontai described the first International Women’s Day:
“The first International Women’s Day took place in 1911. Its success succeeded all expectation. Germany and Austria on Working Women’s Day was one seething, trembling sea of women. Meetings were organized everywhere – in the small towns and even in the villages halls were packed so full that they had to ask male workers to give up their places for the women.… Men stayed at home with their children for a change, and their wives, the captive housewives, went to meetings. During the largest street demonstrations, in which 30,000 were taking part, the police decided to remove the demonstrators’ banners: the women workers made a stand. In the scuffle that followed, bloodshed was averted only with the help of the socialist deputies in Parliament.”
Less than a week after that first IWD celebration, on 25 March, the terrible tragedy of the ‘Triangle Fire’ took place at a garment factory in New York City, which highlighted the miserable condition of working women. The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory claimed the lives of 146 workers, most of them women. Locked exits and poor safety measures were responsible for the deaths. This incident became an international scandal, and led to a new wave of labour protests. These protests led to the formation of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, one of the first primarily female unions, which became one of the largest unions in the US.
On the eve of World War I campaigning for peace, Russian women observed their first International Women’s Day. In 1913 following discussions, International Women’s Day was transferred to 8 March – which has ever since been the global date for International Women’s Day. On 8 March 1914, women across Europe held rallies to campaign against the war.
This is how Alexandra Kollontai described IWD actions in Russia of 1913-1914:
“This was a time of reaction when Tsarism held the workers and peasants in its vice-like grip. There could be no thought of celebrating “Working Women’s Day” by open demonstrations. But the organized working women were able to mark their international day. …In those bleak years meetings were forbidden. But in Petrograd, at the Kalashaikovsky Exchange, those women workers who belonged to the Party organized a public forum on “The Woman Question.” This was an illegal meeting but the hall was absolutely packed. Members of the Party spoke. But this animated “closed” meeting had hardly finished when the police, alarmed at such proceedings, intervened and arrested many of the speakers.
In 1914, “Women Workers Day” in Russia was better organized. …Because of police intervention, they didn’t manage to organize a demonstration. Those involved in the planning of “Women Workers Day” found themselves in the Tsarist prisons, and many were later sent to the cold north. For the slogan “for the working women’s vote” had naturally become in Russia an open call for the overthrow of Tsarist autocracy.”
On 8 March 1917, Russian women began a strike for “Bread and Peace”, protesting against the war that had claimed the death over 2 million Russian soldiers and against severe food shortage. Women textile workers in Petersburg began the strike, and called on other factories to support them. Four days of the strike forced the Tsar to abdicate. The Russian monarchy was overthrown and the provisional Government then formed granted women the right to vote.
What does ‘Women’s Day’ mean?
The ads tell us it’s a day when husbands are supposed to buy women washing machines and kitchen gadgets, when boyfriends are supposed to buy them flowers. Is Women’s Day just another ‘Day’ demarcated by corporates, to consume more and more? Or is it a day when we look back at women whose struggles are the basis of this celebration of women’s rights? Is it a day to stop and take stock of the gains made by these struggles that in reality make our lives just a little easier, just a little more ‘equal’ than these women ever experienced? Is it not the day to account for their struggles and define an agenda for women’s future and for half the sky and half the earth and all in between?
Who were these women on whose shoulders we stand to look into the future and who made it possible to claim 8th March as International Women’s Day all over the world as a site for songs of rights and hope? They were of all kinds –suffragists, industrial workers fighting for equal wages, women who fought to learn to read and write, and women who stepped out of the home to work and to beat back the oppression they saw through history. And they were from all over the world, quiet and not so quiet toilers for the common cause. Let us look back and tell some stories …
Voices for Social and Political Equality
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883): A freed slave from America, and an activist who struggled against racism, and for women’s right to vote. Hear the speech she delivered at a Women’s Convention in Ohio in 1851, and see how she questions class and gender stereotypes.
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
Mary Wollstonecraft: In 1790, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Man - a passionate defence of the French Revolution, which was under ideological attack in her native Britain from the likes of Edmund Burke. In this treatise, she also attacked the slave trade and commented on the treatment of the poor. Later, spurred by the failure of the French revolution to extend the sphere of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ to include the rights of women, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. Mary Wollstonecraft dreamt of an egalitarian world and demanded an equal share for women in the human liberties promised by liberal humanism.
Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai: It was, however, socialist revolutionaries like Clara Zetkin of Germany. Alexandra Kollontai of Russia and countless other Bolshevik and Communist activists who pointed out that the individual rights and equality that Mary Wollstonecraft dreamt of could not become a reality without a collective struggle – of women and men – to revolutionise the exploitative basis of contemporary society. It was Clara Zetkin who proposed that Women’s Day be celebrated in every country to commemorate the thousands of working women who fought for the economic and political rights of women. 8 March was eventually chosen as International Women’s Day, in memory of the massive strike by the women workers of Chicago in 1909-10.
Rakhmabai: Rakhmabai was the daughter of Dr Sakharam Arjun, a leading surgeon and reformer in Bombay. She was married at the age of 11. Around the time she would have been around 20 years old, she refused to go to live with her husband, arguing that she had given no personal consent to her marriage, and that she wanted to be free to study. Emboldened a by a law dated 1882, according to which a woman who refused to cohabit with husband could be jailed, her husband filed a case in 1884.
Imagine what it like for a 20-year-old women to challenge the most powerful voices of her society, who told her she was betraying a Hindu woman’s sacred duty! The nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak, for whom Swaraj was a birthright, denied that woman had any birthright to education or freedom. In an editorial in Kesari, he wrote:
‘We admit the need for the progress of our women. But we would like to tell the reformers that this cannot happen through half-baked women like Rakhmabai. Today, when so many men are living happily with their child-wives, isn’t it strange that a woman singed by the flame of knowledge should ask for a divorce because she no longer finds her husband suitable?’
But Rakhmabai’s ‘flame of knowledge’ could not be quenched. Challenging such venerable figures, Rakhmabai herself wrote several powerful letters in the Times of India asserting the right of a woman to aspire to freedom and education:
“Because you cannot enter our feelings do not think we are satisfied with the life of drudgery that we live, and that we have no taste for, and aspiration after, a higher life…”
Rakhmabai lost the case, and was ordered to go and live in her husband’s house or face imprisonment. Rakhmabai refused to buckle even in the face of such a virulent backlash from powerful and respected figures. She declared publicly that she would never accept a ‘kacchi umar ka rishta’ (tie of tender years) as ‘pakka’ (binding) - even when she lost her case in Court, she declared she would rather go to jail than join her husband. She went on to become one of India’s first women doctors.
Savitribai Phule: When this poet, pioneer of women’s education and social reformer in late 19th century Maharashtra defended couples who had married across caste, defended the right of widows to study and remarry and started a school of girls, she faced an angry society which pelted her with stones and cow-dung. If she hadn’t braved such attacks, women today might never have been able to even dream of school and University. As it is, even today, Savitribai’s struggle is alive in the battles that women fight against violence when they dare to marry out of community, or when they choose to study.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain (1880 – 1932) : This courageous feminist writer and activist worked all her life to remove what she called “the purdah of ignorance”. Her elder sister had secretly taught herself to read and write Bengali; when her family found out, she was hurriedly married off. Rokeya, however, with her brother’s support, secretly learnt English and Bengali at night after everyone was asleep! Her bold writings later challenged patriarchal shackles and passionately argued for women’s liberation.
Rassundari Debi (1810-?): This ordinary housewife taught herself to read and write in secret by scratching letters of the alphabet onto a corner of the blackened kitchen wall. In her autobiography Amar Jiban, she asks, “Just because I am a woman does it necessarily mean that trying to educate myself is a crime?” She asserts that her identity is more than just that of a mother; and she criticises the way she is treated after her widowhood. Her story is a clear indictment of the way Indian society in her time treated women like her.
Comrades in Arms – More than just ‘Bhabhis’
We’ve heard of Bhagat Singh and Bismil, but we hardly know much about their woman comrades. For example, we know that ‘Durga Bhabhi’ helped Bhagat Singh to escape in disguise; how many of us now that she had carried bombs all the way from Peshawar hidden in her clothes?
In the 1920s and 30s, during the freedom struggle, Preetilata Wadedar and Kalpana Dutt joined revolutionary nationalist groups in college. Later, they joined the Chittagong revolutionaries who raided the Armory. The hostel in which Kamala Dasgupta stayed was a centre of revolutionary activity. Kamala kept bombs in the storeroom, while Suhasini Devi, a student who managed the hostel, sheltered revolutionaries hiding after the Chittagong Armory raid. It was Kamala Das who collected funds from girls to buy a gun that Bina Das would use to attempt to shoot the Governor of Bengal during a Convocation at Calcutta University.
Bina Das was arrested and was sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for nine years. Kamala was jailed for six years. Preetilata was injured during a raid on the Pahartali Club, and took cyanide rather than be arrested. She left behind a note stating that the raid was an act of war against British colonialism.
Official history may have forgotten these women, but their legacy lives on – in the revolutionary women who wielded guns in the Telengana peasant movement, in the Naxalbari movement and in their daily battles that continue today against caste-patriarchal violence, displacement and state repression. 
