International Women's Day (IWD)

Hundreds of people marched for International Women's Day in Melbourne on March 8.

International Women’s Day (IWD) — originally called International Working Women’s Day — was first proposed in 1910 as an initiative of the socialist women’s movement. The following year, on March 19, 1911, IWD was marked for the first time, by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.

Here's this month's radical record round-up, with an emphasis on International Women's Day.

It is hard to distill what it is like to live in poverty into a few words, because poverty is so huge and complex, particularly for single mothers. On my own, it’s easy to feel powerless to do anything about it and as a woman the injustice of poverty makes me so angry. It makes me angry that in one of the most prosperous countries in the world, we have more than 600,000 children living in poverty. It makes me angry that right now there are women and children living in cars or in unsafe and insecure housing because rents have become impossible to manage.

About 400 people turned out to celebrate International Women's Day in Melbourne on March 8.

Another International Women’s Day passes. It’s been 157 years since working women first took to the streets. Back then, thousands of women textile workers marched through the wealthy boroughs of New York, protesting their miserable working conditions.

This statement was released by Socialist Alliance on March 8. *** The demands of the first-ever International Women's Day rally in Australia, in 1928, were equal pay for equal work, an eight-hour day for shop assistants, the basic wage for the unemployed and annual holidays on full pay. A lot has been won through struggle since 1928, yet women in Australia today still have to struggle some of these issues: