Germany has spent a long time running away from its Soviet past, and for good reason. Between human rights abuses, surveillance, failed economy and heavy censorship of the German Democratic Republic, there was a lot to undo and bring to justice when the Wall fell between East and West Berlin 30 years ago. Some of the things that disappeared with Soviet Germany also happened to be things that benefitted women including, childcare, support for single mothers and state-mandated equal pay. But as a new generation, who post-dates the socialist regime, come of age, the country is starting to inspect some of the GDR products with admiration and respect. Case-in-point, Berlin is taking back International Women’s Day.
While the local parliament sought out an extra public holiday to keep up with the predominantly Catholic states which have official days off numbered well into the double digits, it’s still significant that Germany chose this particular holiday. For Kristen Ghodsee, Russian and East European studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the acclaimed book, Why Women have Better Sex Under Socialism, the move shows a new willingness to look to Soviet traditions that considered women as equals. “Just because there was something good about the GDR doesn’t mean it justifies the state apparatus they created to support that society,” Ghodsee tells SLEEK. “That is why it is so exciting that Berlin has readopted this holiday, because it means that it’s getting over this problem of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
We spoke to Ghodsee to learn a little more about the holiday’s complicated history and its path to mainstream feminism:
International Women’s Day was an American idea, but it was celebrated in Germany first
“International Women’s Day came from the Socialist Party of America in 1909. There were rallies that were held around New York, but it didn’t become part of the Socialist platform until 1910 when Clara Zentkin, the German Marxist theorist, introduced it at a women’s Marxist convention in Copenhagen. She convinced the delegates that there needs to be a special day for women and they decided to do it on 8 March. It was celebrated for the first time in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 1911, which continued until 1914. Then it became a pacifist holiday against WWI when women get together and opposed the war. IWD was a European Holiday in Western Europe before it was a holiday in the Soviet Union. It pre-dates the Soviet Union.”
It didn’t start out as a “feminist” holiday
“From the very beginning of IWD, socialist feminists and bourgeois feminists really separates themselves. Bourgeois feminists in the UK and women who were advocating for the vote really only wanted wealthy women to be able to vote and were advocating for married women’s property. They were advocating for bourgeois women to enter a profession. Socialist women’s platforms were much broader — they were always about elevating society for all citizens, including men. The reason they didn’t call themselves feminists is because they associated it with what we would think of as a “Lean In,” Sheryl Sandberg feminism, a type of corporate feminism – they were more grassroots activists.”
It kick-started the Russian Revolution
“We associate it with the Soviet Union because it is part of the February Revolution, which was actually on 8 March, which happened to be in February in the Russian calendar at the time. The Bolsheviks wanted to have a revolution on 1 May, the international day of labour, but on Women’s Day women started rallying for bread and against war. They called men to join them and started the revolution. Initially the Bolsheviks were pretty upset about this, but the February Revolution happens on IWD. When the Bolshevik Revolution happened later that year, Alexandra Kollontai, a very prominent activist in the Soviet Union, was promoted by Lenin as the first Commissar of Social Welfare and IWD is declared an official Soviet Holiday in 1917. From there, all nations who were slowly falling into the Soviet orbit decided to declare 8 March as IWD, including Cuba, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Indonesia and India, even countries within the nonaligned block.”
IWD is not just Soviet Mother’s Day
“It was a day to recognise that women have a special role in building socialism, because they are incorporated into socialist society both as mothers and as workers. For a long time, there was no IWD in the West, there was only Mother’s Day. Women were stuck very much in the domestic sphere, whereas in the Eastern bloc, women were incorporated into the labour force.”
It officially became an international holiday in 1975
“In 1975, the Soviet Bloc lobbied the United Nations to declare an International Year of Women and it passed in the general assembly. There was a huge congress, which was held in East Berlin. Because it was being held in East Berlin, a bunch of American feminists got nervous that the only international event marking the International Year of Women was in a communist country, so they went to the State Department and lobbied the government to give money to the UN for the first International Conference on Women, which was held in Mexico City in the summer of 1975. Because of the two conferences, the UN officially declared 8 March International Women’s Day.”
The Eastern Bloc tradition is a celebration and not a protest
“There was still a gender pay gap, a double burden and gender segregation of employment funneling women into different professions in Soviet countries. None of those issues went away and domestic patriarchy still was strong, but the rhetoric of society was that men and women were equal. This was particularly true in East Germany. You can look back at women’s magazines of the ‘50s – they were telling men that they needed to chip in around the home and women to go out to work. Most importantly, women were financially independent of men. They didn’t need to stay in unhappy, abusive or otherwise bad relationships. They could just leave if they wanted and there was no stigma to being a single mom in East Germany – in fact there was a lot of support for single mothers. They really were more equal.”
The US tried to make it a holiday in the ‘90s
“In the United States, Maxine Waters tried to make IWD an official US holiday in 1994, but the bill never even made it out of committee. People who self-identify as Democratic Socialists were always celebrating the holiday on some level, but it didn’t cross over to the mainstream until recently. In part that this is because we have finally gotten some distance from the Soviet Bloc. It is certainly becoming more prominent in the United States, with the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and all of these young women congressmen, who are bringing a lot more energy to feminist and socialist movements.”