International Women’s Day: “We are Fighting for Our Lives - Build Our Resistance”

International Women’s Day has been celebrated in Toronto since 1978 with a rally and march highlighting the key struggles that are being fought. This year with the rise of the right globally, the cost of living crisis, attacks on health care, education, the increase in racism and the deportation of migrant workers, there is a tremendous urgency to bring people into the streets. As we see in Trump’s America, women, trans people and migrants are a particular target.

 

International Women’s Day has its roots in the battles of immigrant women garment workers in New York City for better pay and working conditions against vicious bosses interested only in profit. They fought and they won.

 

In 1910 socialist women gathering in Copenhagen called for International Women’s Day to be held every year commemorating the successful struggles of those working women. A few years later in the textile mills of Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts, thousands of women workers struck against the robber barons who were exploiting and oppressing them. They spoke twenty two different languages but forged the unity necessary to use their collective strength to beat back the bosses.

 

There was broad community support with families in surrounding towns taking their children so they could devote all their energy to the strike. These women were highly organized. They developed the “flying picket line”, and other strategies to keep the owners and the police at bay. They won, and the song “Bread and Roses” was written to celebrate their victory! They were a model for workers everywhere.

 

Today we have seen huge demonstrations around the world in South Korea, Greece, Argentina, the UK and other countries on many issues — taking on the far right, and putting forward demands against governments and corporations.

 

This International Women’s Day we are joining them in the struggle for justice and dignity for all. Governments are trying to strip away our hard-won rights and services.

 

Scapegoating is rampant. The far right is using the crisis to provide false promises, trying to divide us one from another. It is preaching a message of despair. It is a very real threat that can’t be ignored. We have to fight back making it clear that we have the capacity to win, as did the women in the early 1900s.

 

This year there will be activists who work on abortion rights, rent strikers, migrants, Indigenous women, workers, queer and trans fighters. We will also be linking with struggles internationally in Sudan, as well as anti Trump activists from the US. There will be thousands in the streets making clear our opposition to the attacks by governments, corporations and the far right.

 

International Women’s Day was born out of struggle and in Toronto we strongly believe that “none of us are free, until all of us are free”. This is the message we will be bringing into the streets. “We are fighting for our lives! Build the resistance!”