International
Women’s Day had its origins in great social
unrest, turbulence and critical debate among
women in Western countries regarding their
oppressive working conditions in factories and
their lack of voting rights. Marching through
New York City in 1908, 15,000 women demanded
shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. In
1910 Clara Zetkin, a German socialist, held a
conference of women from 17 countries
representing unions, socialist parties and
working women’s unions and proposed an annual
event to assert their demands for equality and
justice in the workplace and their right to
vote. Russian women observed their first
International Women's Day on the eve of World
War I campaigning for peace, which they
sustained through the last Sunday of February
1917, when they began a strike for "Bread and
Peace" over the death of more than 2 million
Russian soldiers.
The Women’s
International League for
Peace
and Freedom,
now a global
movement
for women’s equality and
peace,
first met in The Hague in 1915.
The
1,136 suffragists from 12 countries
on
all sides of the war met to protest
“the
madness and the horror of war,”
causing
the “reckless sacrifice of human
life
and the destruction” of so much that
humanity
had labored to build through
centuries.
They, like all other women’s
equality
groups of their day, demanded
that
women be granted the right to vote
so
their opposition to war could have
impact.
More
than a century later women can vote, hold office
and have equal rights in
theory,
but that has not changed the reality that men
claim almost total political power. Women still
are paid less than men for comparable work – an
economic injustice that compounds our poverty in
old age; hundreds of millions of women and girls
suffer rape and violence at the hands of men –
an often-deadly assault on their being; and the
right to choose whether or not to bear a child
is denied to women and girls here and throughout
the world. Women have minimal influence on the
life and death of our planet home Earth despite
our global activism.
However,
where women have found a foothold, the results
have been astounding. Recent research tells us
that we can and do create resilient and lasting
peace when we are given the power. Political
scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan
have studied movements to overthrow
dictatorships, expel foreign occupations or
achieve self-determination from 1900 through
2006. They found that nonviolent resistance
campaigns were more than twice as successful as
violent insurrections with the same goals.
Elsewhere Chenoweth found that women in
leadership roles are “more likely to maintain
nonviolent discipline … in resistance campaigns
against repressive regimes.”
Another
team of researchers, comprising security studies
experts and statisticians has generated the
largest database on the status of women across
the globe.
Called WomenStats,
the database allows researchers to relate the
level of conflict within 175 countries to the
overall security of women within those
countries. Their findings are profoundly
illuminating for women’s security, global
security and world peace. The degree of equality
of women within a country predicts best – better than the degree of
democracy, better than level of wealth or
income inequality or ethno-religious identity
– how peaceful or conflict-ridden their
countries are. Moreover, the researchers found
that democracies with higher levels of
violence against women are less stable and
more likely to choose force over diplomacy to
resolve conflict. The world’s security, they
have found, is most
reliant on
women’s equality and security.
What
effect do women have on issues of power and
national security, given the chance? Nearly 200
women in politics surveyed in 65 countries
agreed that “women’s presence in politics increases the
amount of attention given to social welfare,
legal protection and transparency in government
and business.” Four-fifths believed that the
presence of women in governmental positions
restores citizens’ trust in government. The same
is true of citizens from 24 countries recently
surveyed: a majority agreed that “policies would
improve if more women, people from poor
backgrounds, and young adults were in office.”
(The Pew Charitable Trusts, Winter 2025, Vol.
27, No. 1)
At
the highest levels of governance, the glaring
absence of women in government as well as in
international bodies such as the United Nations
robs women of power and, consequently, robs the
world of the security that our presence at the
highest levels of decision-making would give.
Unless societies transform themselves with an
analysis of the status of women’s equality and
act decisively to empower women, they will
persist as repositories of male ambition, male
privilege and male power. This toxic mix dooms
the future of national and international
security. We will only continue the downward
trend reflected in the Doomsday clock.
The
words of the Ghanian statesman and former
Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi
Annan embody the core message of this: “There is
no policy more effective in promoting
development, health and education that the
empowerment of women and girls…and no policy is
more important in preventing conflict or in
achieving reconciliation after a conflict has
ended.”
What
women gaining power with men at every level of
our existence could yield for the well-being of
the world.
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