International Working Women’s Day 2026

Sunday, 8 March marks International Working Women’s Day. Originating with the Socialist Party in New York City in 1908, the day was established by women workers consciously as members of the overall working class. Thousands of women workers rallied for better working conditions and in 1910, “Women’s Day” was declared at a meeting of the Second International with the participation of the great communists Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai, and Inessa Armand. From its inception, Working Women’s Day has been part and parcel of the class struggle of workers against the capitalist system.

Today, women the world over are subject to the same fundamental injustices and exploitative relations they were a century ago and for thousands of years prior. Despite the “progressive” facade capitalism has adopted in many countries, the issues facing working women cannot be fundamentally addressed within the limits of this system. Job insecurity, cost of living, workplace exploitation and beyond are all too often most acutely experienced by working women.

The United States is no exception. Women in the US earn roughly 84% of the already low wages paid to working men. We are disproportionately affected by flexible and part-time work, with nearly 60% of part-time workers being women. Elderly women receive significantly less in pension and Social Security income. Social rights such as maternal and child care are virtually nonexistent. Working women are crushed by the high costs of childcare, the lack of guaranteed maternity leave, the burden of domestic labor, and the overwhelming individual responsibility placed on them for child rearing.

In the so-called "land of the free," millions of women face violent and dangerous conditions. Hundreds of women die each year in the US from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, with working women of color disproportionately affected. Violence against women is widespread: 41% of women in the US experience sexual or physical violence in their lifetime. The murder and disappearance of indigenous women remains an ongoing crisis, with cases persisting across the country. Altogether, the US accounts for 70% of femicides in developed capitalist countries, with three women killed every day. Migrant women face some of the most severe circumstances: surveillance, detention, persecution by ICE, family separation, medical neglect, and concentration in some of the most exploitative and low-wage sectors: caregiving, hospitality, and agriculture.

The conditions faced by working women are not an anomaly. It is the barbarity of capitalism where profits precede life, where bombs are dropped on schools in Iran, killing 160 girls, where the peoples of Cuba, Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, and beyond are condemned to hunger, misery, and death.

The path is clear: this system must change. Working women can place no hope in the parties of capital, Democrats and Republicans. Our lives will not change under the parties of profit, under the policies of the Democrats and Republicans. The wars they both wage, with advancing killing machines, will continue to displace and maim our working sisters across the world.

Our emancipation is necessary, and it is our organization that will lead us there: to the abolition of private property and the complete integration of women into social life free of exploitation.

Working women are on the front lines of the crises generated by the capitalist system, and the emancipation of women is a fundamental precondition for the realization of communism. Working women are an essential force in the struggle for socialism-communism. Our emancipation is inseparable from this victory.

Communist Workers’ Platform