CWPUSA Central Committee Statement on International Working Women's Day 2025

Today, March 8 marks International Working Women’s Day. This historic holiday began with the Socialist Party of America in 1909. Solidified as “Working Women’s Day” by Clara Zetkin and a number of other women revolutionaries at the 1910 International Socialist Women's Conference, this day signifies the central role women play in the struggle for a world free of exploitation and oppression of all forms.

In 1922, the Communist International selected March 8 as International Working Women’s Day, to be celebrated by the workers’ movement worldwide. This date was chosen to commemorate the inciting role women played in the Russian Revolution of 1917. On 8 March 1917 in Petrograd, the scarcity and economic ruin brought about by the imperialists in WW1 led to women workers organizing a demonstration that ballooned into a challenge against the tsarist state. This led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the February Revolution, and beginning the series of events that would culminate in the working class seizure of power later that same year in October.

The oppression of women is rooted in class society itself, marking the earliest division of labor. Only with the end of class society can women be fully emancipated from the oppression imposed on them for thousands of years. Women have been at the forefront of the revolutionary workers’ movement from the beginning, with monumental figures like Eleanor Marx, Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxembourg, and many more named and unnamed fighters of the working class.

Today, working women continue to bear brutal costs under capitalist rule around the world and in the United States. Draconian abortion restrictions, minimal or nonexistent paid family leave, unaffordable child care, femicides, and many other daily horrors reveal the complete antagonism of the capitalist system to the lives of working women.

Women make up half of the working class. Only the workers’ revolution—in which working women must necessarily play a decisive, leading role—can bring an end to the misery and exploitation the capitalists subject our entire class to.

International Working Women’s Day must serve as a profound reminder of our need to continue our daily fights for the new socialist world, united as working men and women, for one common cause.

Central Committee of the Communist Workers’ Platform USA