International Women's Day has been celebrated annually since 1908 with a focus on advancing women’s rights in the workforce, politics, and society. In many countries, March 8 in a national holiday where women’s struggle for equality, justice, peace and development are reviewed, honored and celebrated.
International Women's Day is the story of ordinary women as makers of history; its roots are documented as far back as ancient Greece when women initiated a sexual strike against men to end war. During the French Revolution, Parisian women calling for "liberty, equality, fraternity" marched on Versailles to demand women's suffrage.
The idea of an International Women's Day first arose at the turn of the century, which in the industrialized world was a period of expansion and turbulence, booming population growth and radical ideologies. Throughout the years women have fought for such basics as the right to vote, the right to hold public office, the right to work, and equal pay for equal work.
The Charter of the United Nations, signed in San Francisco in 1945, was the first international agreement to proclaim gender equality as a fundamental human right. Today a central organizing principle of the work of the United Nations is that no enduring solution to society's most threatening social, economic and political problems can be found without the full participation, and the full empowerment, of the world's women.
Come celebrate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month. Our library has a large collection documenting not only women’s struggle for equality, but also the women who have been and are leaders in their fields and in the world.
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