Content area
Full Text
Josie Glausiusz
I discovered the existence of International Women's Day in 1990, while I was working at the Ministry of the Environment in Jerusalem. On March 8, the Ministry invited all the women to a "spa day" at the Hyatt Hotel on Mount Scopus. The facial scrub and a slap-up lunch were fun, but seemed off-the-point to me. The following year, 1991, International Women's Day arrived just after the end of the Gulf War. A little gathering was organized in place of the spa day, at which the Minister of the Environment (a man) and the Director-General (a man) addressed the women. I asked if I could say a few words, as an actual woman. "No longer than five minutes," I was told. I stood up and listed some statistics on the status of women in Israel. Thus my personal observance of International Women's Day was born.
Growing up in England, I had never heard of International Women's Day, but in Israel it is embraced, most likely originating with the country's socialist roots. International Women's Day was first celebrated in 1911, a year after it was first proposed at an international women's conference in Copenhagen by German Communist Clara Zetkin, a fervent campaigner for women's rights and universal suffrage. (She represented the German Communist Party in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933, and opened the 1932 parliamentary session with a 40-minute attack on Adolf Hitler.) In 1917, Russian women chose to strike for "Bread and Peace" on the last Sunday in February (March 8 in the Gregorian calendar). Four days later, the czar abdicated and women won the right to vote.
In the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist countries, though, the holiday "veered far from its radical roots," celebrated as a kitschy mishmash of Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, where bosses would give red roses to female employees and spas and boutiques now offer deals to women. A similar routine seems to have been adopted in Israel.
In Rosh HaAyin, a 2016 advertisement for International Women's Day (courtesy)
When I moved to the United States in 1992 to study journalism at New York University, it seemed to me as if few people had heard of or cared about...