International Women’s Day began as a day of protest. In 1911, more than 1 million men and women attended rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on March 19 campaigning for women’s right to vote, hold public office and work, and to put an end to gender inequality. In 2024, almost half a century after the United Nations formally marked the day for the first time, this commemoration of women has departed from its origins beyond recognition.
Now, IWD has become a powerful tool of virtue signalling for the very same institutions it was created to fight against. Its identity is currently tied to capitalism, with every corporate executive now annually racing to fill their all-white panel and find an underpaid, undervalued female employee to order or bake, serve and clean up the tray of sprinkled and frosted pink cupcakes.
The current landscape of IWD is the sanitisation of women’s issues, focusing on increasing the privileges of white women at the expense of all minority people. This superficial culture of LinkedIn posts and template emails from your chief executive (who really wants to let you know he has daughters) only serves to distract us from true exploitation and inequality.
In Gaza, pregnant women are reportedly having caesareans performed without anaesthesia and undergoing hysterectomies without pain relief due to post-birth complications. In late 2023, a United Nations agency reported that of the 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, 15% would likely experience complications either during pregnancy or birth. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war between Israel and Gaza, two-thirds of which are estimated to be women and children, according to the health ministry in the Gaza Strip.
The failures of white, corporate feminism to speak on Israel’s mass killings is as horrific as it is unsurprising.
Yesterday I read reports that a 15-year-old girl in Gaza was rescued three days after being trapped in the rubble of a building that was bulldozed by Israeli forces. I heard the story of Rania Abu Anza, who spent a decade and attempted three rounds of IVF to become pregnant with a twin boy and girl, only to see them killed at five months old after an Israeli strike hit the home of her extended family in Rafah last Saturday evening.
Your International Women’s Day is not International Women’s Day if it does not speak to these atrocities. These ticketed breakfasts with catchy phrases and vague themes will make every attempt to silence conversation that goes beyond “championing” female employees with a mimosa on the way into the room. Intersectional feminism compels us to speak about the plights of those less privileged than ourselves and our feminism is not intersectional if it fails to humanise Palestinian people.
IWD can and still should be seen as a day to love and recognise the women in our lives, to celebrate our achievements and demand our governments do more for progressing gender equality. But do not be fooled by the mission statements containing buzz words of “empowerment”, “support” and “celebration”. They are worse than silence; they operate as a distraction from the issues that should hold our central focus.
IWD should not be cancelled, it should be fixed. It is an opportunity to see beyond a breakfast and an Instagram story. Today, ask yourself: beyond this breakfast, beyond these pink cupcakes, beyond my experience of individual struggle under patriarchy, what can I do to make my feminism more intersectional? IWD must be reclaimed, clawed from the superficiality of corporations and returned back to the power of protest and advocacy.
True feminism is predicated on the belief in and the fight for the equality of all people, not white women in leadership locking the door behind them. We cannot be perfect in our feminism, but on days like today we have another chance to try, by disrupting the status quo and starting a conversation about women and children in Gaza. International Women’s Day is a call for change, not a cupcake.
Yeh! Thank you, Hannah for such a meaningful, relevant article. I have just finished watching Series 3 Episode 6 of Total Control (ABC iView) – this is my “celebration” of IWD.
The lack of comment, especially from Australian leaders on the plight those in Gaza is a slight on all of us. What are they so afraid of?
This!
The status quo capture of IWD is similar to the capture by the status quo of the Mardi Gras as signalled by the presence of the police for the last decade or so. It was good that they uninvited the police this year. IWD should go back to the streets and refuse to accept sponsorship from government or corporates.
Exactly. Hannah needs to get on to those boards!
The same applies to every feel-good corporate theft-of-credit for hard won rights. At one point as a 19 year old I was attending rallies and pickets at fiery anti-apartheid rallies in the UK with the Socialist Workers Party, pushing and shoving with police on picket lines, doing my bit, and next thing the British establishment is lining up to publicly claim credit for the ending of apartheid, as if they did it instead of opposing it for 60 years, supporting the South African Government, and sending government goons to assault protestors.
Shift forward another generation, and the Guardian, that paragon of sanctimonious virtue on women and just about everything else, leads the charge accusing Jeremy Corbyn of antisemitism, of being racist. The same Jeremy Cobyn who spent his life opposing apartheid.
Sort of like the way Trump and his pudgy pallid suburban Blackshirts have stolen the idea of fake news and the deep state. These were ideas invented by the left, lived by the left, now warped and repeated by Fox.
There is no end to this kind of malarkey and it should be called out just as Hannah did.
Can’t wait until Facebook wipes out the corporate media…