One hundred years ago, the women of the world were burdened with oppression. And one hundred years ago, they found the value of talking to each other, organizing themselves, and fighting for their rights. Then, a National Women’s Day was born in the United States, a first step towards women realizing their potential as powerful citizens of their nations and of the world. The day was February 28 1909. The now defunct Socialist Party of America was in celebration. The context, a time of turbulence and change, of ideological battles and injustice.

It would only take another year, at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, when Clara Zetkin, leader of the Women’s Office of the Socialist Democratic Party of Germany, proposed the idea of an International Women’s Day. Zetkin asserted the need for a day that could be commemorated worldwide when women can collectively insist on their needs and demands.

Over 100 women from 17 countries would unanimously agree to establish an International Women’s Day (IWD) for the rest of the world. Then, it would begin to be celebrated on the third Sunday of February every year, until it is moved to March 8 in 1913. The decision to celebrate an International Women’s Day was an obvious response to the growing inequality women were experiencing in politics and the workplace – in all of their lives – across the globe. It would also serve as a celebration of the women’s movements’ fight for suffrage.

This demand for the right to vote would be carried over to two years later on March 19 1911, when a historic one million men and women would go out to the streets of Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland to commemorate International Women’s Day. Here, they would also call for women’s rights to training and employment, to hold public office, and to end discrimination in the workplace.

More than this celebration though, a New York City tragedy would be a grim reminder of how the fight for women’s labor rights must continue, beyond the successes. On March 25 1911, less than a week after the historic IWD march in Europe, 140 women workers would die in what would be called the “Triangle Fire” in New York City. Most of these women were Italian and Jewish immigrants, and their death would signal the beginning of the more urgent struggle to pass labor laws as well as look into the working conditions of women workers.

This as well, was an indication of how the women’s struggle does not exist in a vacuum, and is not only a matter of legislation or rights. It is a matter of living in the world, and the current socio-political events within it.

This would be proven true in the year 1913. In Russia, World War I had fueled a peace movement, and Russian women joined in the struggle by celebrating their first International Women’s Day in February. In 1914, IWD celebrations were about protesting the war and pushing for women’s unity and solidarity, and in 1917, the women’s fight against World War I would come to a head. With two million Russian soldiers dead and many of those alive coming home, women launched a strike calling for Bread and Peace. The protest would be held in St. Petersburg, and the number of women in protest would be difficult to ignore. This would be part of the many movements that would spark the Russian Revolution. After four days of the strike, the Czar would be forced to step down.

This was a two-fold victory for the women of Russia and the world: first, they had proven their power in numbers and their commitment to bigger socio-political issues; second, they would be granted the right to vote by the installed provisional government.

In truth, its beginnings in the socialist movement allows for International Women’s Day to imagine a bigger world, where the woman is part of policy and decision making, and where she is in solidarity with women beyond her nation. Organizations like the United Nations would, in the 1940s, come to the realization of women’s power and IWD’s importance. In 1945, the UN Charter becomes the first signed agreement that acknowledges gender equality to be a basic human right.

For many years, the UN would organize conferences around the issues of equal rights, women empowerment, and women’s participation in economic, social and political processes. Here they would bring together different women’s organizations – and diverse women – bridging the geographical divide as well as intellectual and spiritual differences.

Across the world, the growing feminist movements would prove its power in the 1970s, when the commemoration of International Women’s Day became more and more symbolic for the struggles that women continued to face. It is by no accident therefore, that the UN would declare International Women’s Year to be 1975: the feminist movements and women’s organizations of that era almost demanded this distinction. It is also no surprise that it would be two years later, in 1977, when the March 8 celebrations of IWD would be declared by the UN General Assembly as the United Nations Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace.

The UN would also provide the women’s movement with strategies, standards, programs and goals, internationally agreed upon and are for the advancement of women’s status across the globe.

But diversity cannot be helped. As there are a number of different women in the world, so are there a great number of celebrations. In countries like China, March 8 is a holiday, when women workers get half a day off. It is also an official holiday in countries like Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. In many of these countries, women – mothers, wives, girlfriends, female colleagues – are honored by men with gifts of flowers and small tokens. In some countries, it is almost like a version of Mother’s Day, with children giving their mothers gifts.

For many countries, IWD celebrations resonate with success: women are now in positions of power, after all. They are educated, some of them can become who they want to be – astronauts, presidents, prime ministers – and many others have become successful in various fields. That glass ceiling has been broken countless times by women, and it has become more and more true that women are holding up half of the world economy’s sky.

It is easy to imagine that we are now equal to men.

But the feminist roots of IWD as celebrated today, would also allow for the more complex reading of current situations: patriarchy is not easy to beat, nor is it simple. Gender equality in all spheres of living is not going to be given us on a silver platter. A crucial point was agreed upon in the 1995 UN Women’s Conference in Beijing: that gender inequalities affected the well-being of both women and men.

As such, there is a need to acknowledge this as well: that social, economic and political problems of the world cannot be solved without the full empowerment and participation of women. Equality is non-negotiable.

But it does remain to be far in coming. IWD celebrations year-in year-out have zeroed in on past successes, but more importantly, on the continued need for change. Women continue to struggle through many fields of employment, they continue to be victims of violence, and their fundamental rights remain as a battlefield. Unequal pay is still the rule instead of the exception, and the trafficking of women’s bodies – be it legally as migrant workers, or illegally when they are victimized into white slavery – has become the most normal occurrence. Women’s ownership of their bodies through reproductive health is still a primary issue for the women’s movement, as across the world many women remain ignorant of their bodies and laws have yet to be put in place to protect them. For many spaces across the globe, women remain as second class citizens to men, and suffer for having fewer rights.

It is clear that women have much work to do, because the struggle for women’s rights is uneven in its development.

As with a country like Liberia which celebrated Women’s Day as a high-profile event for the first time since the 1970s, and in the aftermath of the country’s 1989-2003 Civil War. This brought US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the country, and allowed for Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to celebrate and focus on the future of the women of his country, and the world.

And how can we forget the women of Gaza Strip? Palestinian women continue to suffer and be killed in the hands of Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). According to statistics, 8.3% of the total number of Palestinians killed by the IOF, were women. That’s 120 Palestinian women killed in the Gaza offensive. The number of injured and maimed women has climbed up to 735 in number.

In the Gaza Strip, no woman is safe. She is injured and killed in her own home, in her school, and even in shelters that are supposed to protect her. If she survives the violence, then she is doomed to spiritual and emotional distress, having witnessed the murder of her own husband and children. Her human rights are violated in the demolition of her home and source of income. In the West Bank, Palestinian women live with restricted freedom of movement, house raids and demolitions, willful killings, inter-alia extrajudicial executions, and collective punishment.

The saddest fact for Palestinian women is this: over and above the violence they suffer in the hands of Israeli soldiers, they are also oppressed and repressed in the hands of their own society. They have suffered through systemic discrimination and violence against their persons all this time, even before the IOF landed on their shores.

While not literally at war, the women from the Third World remain in battle. Here, it is poverty and corruption that are their long-standing enemies. It is what has kept them oppressed, uneducated and ill-informed about their rights. Here, women do not have the benefit of social services and reproductive health bills. The third world woman is victimized by her mere existence as a mother who needs to feed her children, as a wife who needs to care for her husband, as a worker who can only expect measly pay or employment in the underground economy that’s unregulated and unsafe.

Here, countless women are forced into sex work, even more of them into becoming labored bodies crossing borders and swinging across the pendulum of sadness and longing, for home and family. If they are lucky, they come home to start over, but more often than not, they remain poor given the unstable economies of their third world countries, and they cannot imagine a life that is not about working elsewhere.

At worst, these women come home in coffins. With no justice in sight.

It is for the women of Liberia, the women of the Third World, and more urgently the women of Palestine that we must imagine International Women’s Day as more than just a celebration. March 8 must be more than an acknowledgment of the women’s movement’s successes, more than women rallying in the streets, making their voices heard. In the past years, International Women’s Day has been about being reminded of the successes of women’s struggle towards equality.

But today, 100 years after the first Women’s Day was celebrated, we are being reminded of how far we truly are from success. And of how the struggle must continue for all women of the world.

Yes, despite business and non-government organizations, governments and policy-makers, joining in the celebrations. Despite our successes in the areas of employment and education, of women’s issues being talked about, of women’s visibility in the higher offices of government and law. Despite all of these, we must be reminded, that while women hold up half the sky, she can only truly do so, when all women are liberated from the chains of oppression. When each and every woman can really and truly say that, they have ceased to look at that sky and dream of a better life, because they hold half of it up as well. **

The author is a faculty member of the University of Makati where she teaches courses in English and Literature. An award-winning literary writer and critic, her scholarly essays on women, popular culture and progressive politics are published in both local and international journals. She is the National Treasurer of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers Partylist and a member of the Congress of Teachers/Educators for Nationalism and Democracy.