CSTO States celebrate International Women’s Day

Today is March 8!
International Women’s Day is celebrated on March 8 by every Member State of the Collective Security Treaty Organization without exception.
As you may recall, the first to celebrate Women’s Day were socialist women in the United States. On February 28, 1909, at the initiative of the Socialist Party of America, all states celebrated Women’s Day. Then until 1913 it was celebrated on the last Sunday of February.
The idea to celebrate Women’s Day internationally belongs to the renowned representative of the international labour movement, Clara Zetkin.
In August 1910, she spoke at the Second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, proposing to establish a day of international protest against political powerlessness of women workers and to celebrate it every year on the same day. Clara Zetkin’s initiative was supported at the time, but the exact date was not set.
The first Women’s Solidarity Day for Equal Rights was held on March 19, 1911: there were mass rallies in Austria-Hungary, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland.
On March 2, 1913, for the first time it was held in Russia, in St Petersburg.
There was no rally on that day, but a thousand women of St Petersburg gathered in the building of the Kalashnikov grain exchange and read a statement on the need to provide women with political and social rights.
The date of March 8 was established after women in Austria-Hungary, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Russia, the United States and other countries rallied on this day in 1914. It is believed that the date was chosen to commemorate the strikes of women workers in textile factories in Chicago on March 8, 1857.
In Soviet Russia this day was celebrated since 1919. In the early years of Soviet state, it was called the International Women Workers’ Day, and in the late 1920s it became International Women’s Day.
Today, International Women’s Day is celebrated on March 8 in all CSTO States.
Having largely lost its former fervour, it is considered a celebration of spring, feminine beauty, tenderness, spiritual wisdom and attention to women, regardless of their status or age.