In 1911, the funeral procession turned into an ocean of grief as countless numbers of people joined in, while the dead bodies of Zarina, Majeda and Farida were sent in separate ambulances to their village, and the only people who joined in that final journey, besides their family members, were the police. We do not join in their funeral procession in the thousands, we do not take over the street to mourn the lives of these women

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, New York City, March 25, 1911
   Whoever saw the hellish fire at 33 Washington Place,
   A terrible tragedy, something quite new,
   Can never forget it, And everyone knows many lives were lost.
   They were incinerated, In a factory 10 stories high.
   There were horrible screams from the onlookers,
   Those who were burned alive
   And those who choked in the smoke.
   Yehuda Horvitz wrote and sung this song to the tune of a Jewish prayer to commemorate the deaths of Jewish women in the Triangle Fire
   
   IN MANY ways, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was just another sweatshop factory in the heart of Manhattan. It was located on the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building just at the end of Washington Square. All that characterises a sweatshop – low wages, excessively long hours, and unsanitary and dangerous working conditions – was part of its factory policy. Most of the several hundred Triangle employees were young women. Many among them were recently-arrived Italian or Jewish immigrants.
   On March 25, 1911, as the hours of the clock approached the closing time, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building. Flames leapt from discarded rags between the first and second rows of cutting tables. The fire spread everywhere, as several men continued to fling water at the fire. In the thickening smoke, a shipping clerk dragged a hose in the stairwell into the rapidly heating room, but nothing came out. Terrified and screaming girls tried to climb down the narrow fire escape. Some girls trapped on the ninth floor jumped through the window (Leon Stein, Out of the Sweat Shop, 1977). By the time the fire was over, 146 women garment worker had died. The next two days were marked with the horror and grief of families and comrades desperately trying to identify their dear ones from the bodies burned to bare bones.
   In 1909, when women garment workers started to organise and called for a strike demanding better pay, safe working environment, Triangle Shirtwaist was one of the factories which agreed to only a partial settlement. One of the demands that was not met in this settlement was the demand for adequate fire escapes (Meredith Tax, The Uprising Thirty Thousands, 1994). These deaths, horrifyingly cruel, agitated the members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Many thousands joined the funeral procession, they mourned the lives lost, and demanded the safety for workers.
   Two weeks after the fire, a grand jury indicted Triangle Shirtwaist owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck on charges of manslaughter. Three years after the fire, on March 11, 1914, twenty-three individual civil suits against the owner of the Asch Building were settled. The average recovery was $75 per life lost. Calls for justice continued to grow, thirty-six new laws reforming the state labour code were enacted between 1911 and 1914, those who survived the fire were left to live, and relive, those agonising moments.
   
   Garib and Garib Sweater Factory, Gazipur, February 25, 2010
   21 killed at Garib and Garib Factory, Gazipur, 2010
   62 killed at KTS Garments, Chittagong, 2006
   23 killed at Shan Knitting, Narayanganj, 2005
   23 killed at Chowdhury Knitwear, Narsingdi, 2004
   23 killed at Macro Sweater, Dhaka, 2000
   12 killed at Globe Knitting, Dhaka, 2000
   24 killed at Shanghai Apparels, Dhaka, 1997
   20 killed at Jahanara Fashion, Narayanganj, 1997
   22 killed at Lusaka Garments, Dhaka, 1996
   32 killed at Saraka Garments, Dhaka, 1990
   Source: The Daily Star, March 1, 2010
   
   It was a little after 9 o’clock at night, workers were finishing their shift. Some were still working, Abdul Mannan of the Garib and Garib factory’s sampling section was among them. He was working on the second floor when he first saw the flame and breathed smoke. It was coming from the first floor. A short-circuit had occurred near a large stock of flammable acrylic sweaters, which produced thick and extremely toxic smoke and quickly transformed the factory into a ‘gas chamber’ (Bdnews24.com, February 26). Zarina, Farida, Majeda, Sahara, Majida, Rahima, Shantana, Momtaz, Rasheda, Shahinur, Rawshan, Jahanar, Rina and Sufia were on the sixth floor as the monstrous fire swallowed the building. The main power was immediately turned off. In the pitch dark, workers, both men and women, ran up stairs to escape, but blazing fires and toxic smoke followed them.
   Within half an hour, ambulances and fire-fighters had circled the building, they started their rescue mission but came across dead bodies only: Kashem, Badal, Alamgir, Mainul and Pradeep, bodies which lay haphazardly in the stairway, there were many others. The events that followed were rather routine. After hours of effort, the fire-fighters tamed the unruly fire. The Fire Brigade authorities, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association and the government formed three different probe committees to investigate the cause of fire (The Daily Star, February 27). In a ‘sympathetic’ gesture, the authorities bore the cost of the burials and kept the factory closed for four days to mourn the deceased workers. The BGMEA ‘expressed sorrow at the death of the workers and announced Tk 2 lakh as compensation for each worker’ (New Age, February 26). Labour organisations and left-alliances protested, demanding better compensation, and immediate punishment of those responsible. They continue to protest, to hold meetings in Muktangan, in Shaheed Minar, in Gazipur too, protests which barely manage to prevent us from forgetting about them. Perhaps through taming the fire, the fire-fighters had also tamed the sparks of our anger, anger at the deaths, anger at exploitative and unjust practices in the garments industry.
   Collectively resisting our amnesia
   THE hundred years which separates these two tragedies in the history of the garments industry, incidents that are strikingly similar, also coincides with the international women’s movement which has turned a hundred year’s old. By placing these two stories side by side, I don’t intend to undermine the struggles and achievements of our movement, to argue that ‘nothing has changed.’ My interest lies in the differences in our response to the two tragedies.
   People gathered in thousands to cordon the dead bodies of Triangle factory workers, to hold the hands of hysterically grieving relatives and friends. The ILGWU proposed an official day of mourning. The grief-stricken city gathered in churches, synagogues, and finally, in the streets. In 1911, the funeral procession turned into an ocean of grief as countless numbers of people joined in, while the dead bodies of Zarina, Majeda and Farida were sent in separate ambulances to their village, and the only people who joined in that final journey, besides their family members, were the police. We do not join in their funeral procession in the thousands, we do not take over the street to mourn the lives of these women who had slaved their youth away for the much celebrated, and steady increase in the nation’s GDP. As I read Yehuda Horvitz songs written to commemorate the lives of the women killed in the Triangle fire, I look for songs sung celebrating the lives lost here. What I find is a statistical rhyme, an incomprehensive list of the numbers of workers killed in garments factory fires in the last decade. The thought of garments factories being ‘gas chambers’ horrifies us as long as the news remains fresh, and soon enough, we manage to find ways of returning to the national narrative, working in the garments sector is a stepping stone to women’s empowerment. Images of blazing fires rapidly disappear, stories of Rasheda, Shahinur, Rawshan choking to death are conveniently forgotten. In 1911, many women in the funeral procession in New York City had carried placards which said ‘we mourn our loss; we demand real progress in workers protection.’ In 2010, we do not mourn our loss. We read of our loss in the newspapers.
   There has been much talk of corporate greed and sweatshops, many editorials have been written protesting against the criminal indifference of factory owners. Locally and globally, every year thousands of pages are written analysing the sweatshop economy and the feminisation of the global labour force. Perhaps, it’s time to analyse our deadly indifference. On international women’s day, a true tribute to Rahima, Shantana, Momtaz and many other sisters whose names will soon be lost in the statistical crowd, can be offered by resisting our own collective amnesia.
   Saydia Gulrukh is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA

THIS essay traces – in a somewhat schematic form – some of the historical and contemporary processes that have transformed the veil/borkha into a profoundly symbolic and deeply emotive object of contestation, not just of Muslim women’s identity, but also of a society’s secular credentials or lack thereof. Homa Hoodfar noted many years ago that the veil, which since the nineteenth century has symbolised for the West the inferiority of Muslim cultures, remains a powerful symbol both for the West and for Muslim societies (Homa Hoodfar, ‘The Veil in Their Minds and On Our Heads: The Persistence of Colonial Images of Muslim Women’ in Resources for Feminist Research, Volume 22, Number ¾, 1989. pp 5-17. p 5, emphasis added). Why is it that the veil has come to acquire such ‘excess’ or ‘surplus’ of meaning today, for Muslims and others, for secularists and Islamists? What are the authorising discourses and structures of power that constantly fix our attention on Muslim women’s attire and that simultaneously fix the possible meanings of such attire? Who loses, who gains, and most important, which conversations are silenced in the relentless focus on the borkha/veil?
   
   Orientalist entrapments
   ‘THE archival dignity, institutional authority and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with considerable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated, not only as scholarship but also as partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms’ (Edward W Said, ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’ in Critical Inquiry. Volume 15:2, 2002. pp 205-225. p 211, emphasis added).
   In the passage above, Edward Said urges scholars to trace connections between a purportedly ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ zone of knowledge production and the more mundane and self-interested domain of politics, in this case imperialist policies and goals in the Middle East. Said did not espouse a narrowly instrumentalist theory of knowledge and power. Rather, he called for excavating and mapping the relationship between entrenched structures of knowledge and everyday political considerations. Although he wrote on the US and the Middle East, Said’s work resonates more widely, not least among feminists and others involved in writing about Muslim women today. Without an interrogation of the ‘archival dignity, institutional authority and patriarchal longevity’ of contemporary forms of Orientalism, or without unpacking the cumulative effect of ‘those traits that construct a worldview [in this case a particular understanding of the essence of Muslim women’s lives] with considerable political force,’ a discussion of, for instance, the borkha in the global feminist imagination, would be incomplete. This is particularly pertinent in the post-September 11 world. Suffice it to say, the hegemonic worldview in question – in which veiling signifies the patriarchal oppression and cultural inferiority of Islam – boasts an impressive genealogy. It is echoed in, elaborated on and reconstituted in contemporary western scholarship, media and popular culture. The cumulative effects of these representations, their political force, tend to be naturalised or taken for granted.
   At the same time, and this is important to note, the veil as symbol is now equally important for many Muslims themselves. Some Muslim men and women embrace the veil as a symbol of cultural identity, others as religious purity, duty and authenticity. Alternately, many Muslims see the continued appeal of the veil as a sign of cultural inferiority and of the non-secular nature of society. That is, for some groups the veil indexes anti-secular, non-modern religio-cultural sensibilities, while for others, it can signal religiosity, cultural identity and even freedom (from the commodified world of western capitalism). And of course, stories of forced veiling or unveiling – by states, monarchs, and political parties anxious to establish either secular or Islamist credentials – litter the history of Muslim majority societies in the last two centuries.
   Yet, whether the veil is defended or condemned, the highly polarised terms of debate remain constant; they are predetermined by a dichotomous framework that constructs Islam either in opposition to modernity, secularism and progress or, reactively, argues that Islam is fully compatible with a specific version of modernity and secularism. This dichotomy informs the kinds of questions that are asked and those that are suppressed or elided. Within this binary, there is little scope to ask why these questions, and not others, emerge as significant for understanding Muslim women’s subjectivities or lives. What is at stake and for whom in asking these and not other questions?
   It is equally important to interrogate the understandings of women underlying such contexts. For only by assuming a shared understanding of what it means to be a woman, of a homogenous female subjectivity and experience, can unilateral actions to ‘save’ women or stamp out ‘barbaric’ cultural practices be undertaken. By assuming there is a ‘natural’ female subjectivity is it possible to uncritically equate all veiling with restrictions or oppression. In other words, if the natural or essential woman is unveiled, it follows that veiling is a violation of that natural subjectivity. The need for critical conversations and analyses never arises.
   
   Veiled histories
   VEILING is neither static nor unitary as cultural practice or as prescription, varying widely historically and geographically. There are many forms of covering – the chador, the nikab, the borkha – that go under the name of the veil. Each has specific local meaning(s) in its context of use, through space and time. There are even examples of societies, like the Tuareg in the Sudan, where elite men, not women cover their faces as a sign of privilege. Moreover, ideologies of veiling and parda have never been exclusive to Muslim societies. Historically, veiling and seclusion were signs of status practised by the elite in the ancient Greco-Roman, pre-Islamic Iranian and Byzantine empires. In fact, the earliest known reference to veiling, an Assyrian legal text dating from the thirteenth century BC, restricted the practice to ‘respectable’ women and forbade prostitutes from veiling. It was not until the Saffavid (1501-1722), the Ottoman (1357-1924) and the Mughal (1556-1857) empires that the veil appears to have emerged as a widespread symbol of status among Muslim ruling classes and the urban elite in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Indeed, until the nineteenth century, the veil was deployed primarily as a marker of class rather than of religious identity, as attested by its prevalence amongst Rajput and Persian women in the Mughal courts. That is, veiling was an elite cultural practice that did not derive legitimacy primarily from religious prescriptions. Likewise, clothing has been a significant marker of class and community boundaries in many societies. In Kerala, for instance, lower caste women were prohibited by custom from wearing breast cloths, which was reserved exclusively as an upper caste practice. As opportunities for social mobility opened up in the nineteenth century, this customary prohibition was increasingly challenged.
   Only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century did the veil emerge as a significant symbol of Muslim community identity or as an object of European curiosity/obsession. According to some scholars, this shift corresponds to shifts in forms of European imperial domination, with the consolidation of colonial power and the collapse of local, especially Ottoman, resistance. As is well known by now, European imperial plunder and conquest were frequently represented in the guise of a civilising mission, a storyline in which women played a critical role. Feminist historians and anthropologists have documented quite persuasively the ways in the rhetoric of ‘saving native women’ was an alibi or excuse for colonial interventions and policies at critical moments. A common justification for British and French rule in the Indian subcontinent, North Africa and elsewhere was that native women, Hindu and Muslim, needed to be saved from patriarchal customs and rituals such as child marriage, veiling and sati. Region and caste-specific customs such as widow immolation were generalised and taken out of context, made to stand for the barbarism of the whole community and the religion. The colonial narrative of rescue, in which ‘white men save brown women from brown men’ as Gayatri Spivak so memorably put it many years ago, was a highly selective undertaking. Legal interventions were also typified by double standards. In North Africa, for instance there was much ado about de-veiling but very little on women’s education or employment. British representatives in Egypt championed Egyptian women’s right to not be veiled but vigorously opposed giving women the right to vote in Britain.
   A number of factors, including the emergence of Victorian ideologies of femininity and morality in Europe, converged to make women – in both colonised and colonising societies – ‘authentic’ symbols of cultural identity in the nineteenth century. By extension, women’s place in society and their bodies became metaphorical signs of civility and modernity. In the hierarchy of Empire, the status of women came to mark a nation or culture’s place as civilised or barbaric. White European women were at the top of the rankings, not surprisingly. Most nationalists and ‘native’ orthodox groups also subscribed to such notions, even if they did not necessarily concur with the actual ranking. In the process, women and the cultural formations with which they were associated came to chart or represent a series of dichotomies:
   East : West
   Tradition : Modernity
   Barbarism : Civility
   Superstitious : Scientific
   Religious : Secular
   Hegemonic interpretations of the veil as quintessentially Islamic and oppressive also emerge during this period. Homa Hoodfar notes that the representation of the Muslim Orient by the West went through a fundamental change as the Ottoman Empire’s power diminished. She writes that by the nineteenth century the focus of representation had changed from the male barbarian to the uncivilised ignorant male whose masculinity relied on the mistreatment of women. Certainly, contemporary depictions of Muslim ‘fundamentalist’ men as eager to control women and their bodies echo these earlier images. This new imagery of the Orient, with the oppressed Muslim woman and oppressive Muslim man as centrepiece, was intrinsically tied to the hegemony of western imperialism, as Edward Said and others have shown. Western fascination with and Orientalist interpretations of the veil and the harem (as places where Muslim men imprisoned their wives) flowered in full force at this time. The woman behind the veil (often behind the harem) was represented as a passive victim, a prisoner of her culture/religion. Images of secluded and ‘unfree’ Egyptian women contrasted with and reinforced the image of the publicly visible and ‘free’ European woman. The association between the veil and unfreedom became increasingly reinforced through the seemingly natural dichotomies of:
   Muslim/Veiled/Hidden/Unfree: European/Unveiled/Visible/Free
   European women had every reason to collude in the production of such images. As Antoinette Burton notes in the case of India, middle-class Victorian feminists viewed ‘native’ women both as passive subjects and as examples against which to gauge their own progress and superiority (Antoinette Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden’ in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Stroebel, eds, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992.) In a similar vein, Mervat Hatem argues that by thinking of themselves as all powerful and free vis-à-vis Egyptian women, European women could avoid confronting their own powerlessness and gender oppression at home.
   Periodic attempts by Muslim leaders in the early 20th century to ban veiling attest to the enduring power of a worldview in which the veil signified Muslim inferiority, backwardness and ‘non-modern’ status. The desire to step out of this putatively regressive cultural space into the time of modernity was certainly a major factor propelling institutionalised interventions in female deportment and dress codes. The production of appropriate female subjects – unveiled and visible, therefore free and modern – was to function as a visual declaration of entry into the (secularised) space of modernity. Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey provides the best-known example of attempts to ‘modernise’ a Muslim society by authorising a particular dress code for men and for women. In 1936, Reza Shah of Iran passed legislation making it illegal for women to be in the street wearing the veil or any other kind of head covering except a European hat. The impact of the ban on women’s lives varied by class and social standing. Women from the urban elite benefited enormously. Poor women who tended not to veil and who lived in rural areas, where the state’s hold was weak, were not especially affected one way or the other. Lower middle class urban women, those who supported families and observed some form of veiling, were the ones who suffered the most. Many gave up their much-needed livelihoods rather than go out ‘naked’. A decade earlier, as part of his agenda to emancipate women, the Afghan king Amanullah launched an all-out effort in 1928 against the institution of parda that ‘hid half the Afghan nation’. Needless to say, during this period many others argued with equal force that the veil was a fundamental feature of Muslim women’s identity and religious obligation.
   Much later, in a changed political landscape, the Iranian Revolution powerfully foregrounded the accumulated paradoxes and context-specific meanings of the veil. In stark contrast to earlier and unsuccessful state-sponsored efforts to ban veiling, during anti-Shah agitations in the late 1970’s many Leftist secular women voluntarily donned the black chador as a sign of solidarity with their veiled sisters-in-revolution and, equally important, as a visible rejection of the Shah’s pro-rich, pro-western policies. Once Khomeini came to power, the demonstration of solidarity and rejection of all things ‘western’ became obligatory, with very nasty results for those who refused to comply. In a discussion of the significance of the chador for Khomeini’s regime, Minoo Moallem contends that it would be a mistake to read the regime’s encouragement [as opposed to legal coercion] of women to wear the chador either as a sign of passivity or of religiosity. Rather, it represented a gendered invitation to participate in political activity, and signified membership in a specific ethno-religious community (Minoo Moallem, ‘Transnationalism, Feminism and Fundamentalism’ in Caren Kaplan et al, eds, Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and the State. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Locally, the chador created a unified identity that transcended class, ethnic and other potential fault lines, in opposition to the identity of the westernised local elite. Globally, it invoked a trans-national Muslim femininity in opposition to the West. At the same time, ‘the veil signified an Islamic femininity that patrolled feminine bodily comportment and generated a restricted spatiality.’ In short, veiling did not simply hide from view or oppress; it was a highly political and ostentatious display of female piety and claim to community membership.
   
   Post cold-war politics
   IN THE post-Cold War order of things, culture and gender emerged as fundamental sites of global and local contestation. The asymmetrical effects of economic globalisation, resulting socio-economic disparities, the related rise of religious extremisms, and the ‘supremacy’ of the neo-liberal model of democracy converged to create situations in which political and economic conflicts are increasingly displaced on to cultural arenas. In addition, new forms of print and visual media circulating ever more rapidly through technologies of globalisation have opened up new ways of imagining selves and futures; migration, or its possibility, to more affluent locations has had similar effects.
   Among other things, the situation produced a ‘crisis’ of masculinity, femininity and community identities. Since gender and gender relations are fundamental to the formation of community and individual identity, cultural understandings of women’s place have come under increasing scrutiny and contestation. In South Asia, the battle lines appear to be unambiguous, at least on the surface. Right wing Hindu and Muslim extremists call for protecting women and ‘indigenous’ culture from the corrosive dangers of the ‘West’, from satellite television, beauty pageants or working in the public/male sphere, as the case may be. The standard response to such rhetoric is to affirm the superiority of ‘western’ models of secularism, democracy and feminism. In this environment, relatively fluid boundaries of gender, culture and religion have hardened into apparently intractable walls of difference. Consequently, battle lines between feminists and religious extremists such as the BJP and Shiv Sena in India and Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh are more visible and pronounced, and animated by the perception that feminism is a western imperialist import.
   The situation has produced what Moallem calls a war of representation between advocates of ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘feminist’ worldviews. As she notes, the increasingly polarised struggles that are played out in global and local sites construct new forms of global oppositions and reproduce older colonial divisions between a barbaric, oppressive and patriarchal Muslim world and a civilised, tolerant and liberated West. There is no obvious or preordained reason why such oppositions should turn on ‘Islamic culture and practices’, to the exclusion of other ‘dangers’. However, since the end of the Cold War and increasing fears of ‘Islamic fundamentalism,’ Islam and the veil have emerged as central objects in the war over women’s ‘proper’ place in culture and society. Who loses, who gains, and most important, which conversations are silenced in the relentless focus on the borkha/veil? These are urgent questions with which we must engage critically.
   Dr Dina M Siddiqi is visiting professor at the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and HIV/AIDS, James P Grant School of Public Health, Brac University

THE world over millions of people will be commemorating today as the centenary of the declaration of International Women’s Day. Though some confusion exists as to the actual history of the date itself, which I will explain a little later, what is absolutely without any doubt is the fact that in 1910, at the second International Socialist Women’s Conference, in Copenhagen, Denmark, German socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin proposed the creation of an annual International Women’s Day. This was following the example of the North American socialist women, who since 1908, had been organising a national annual Women’s Day, demanding economic and political equality for women, denouncing exploitation of women workers, along with the right to vote. Zetkin’s demand was accepted and from 1911 onwards International Women’s Day was celebrated, though on different dates in different countries. The reason I mention this here is that next year, that is 2011 will mark the actual centenary of the celebrations itself, which is not to undermine in any way that 100 years ago the demand for the need for a separate day was iterated and thus this year is of special significance. It was in 1921, as per the documents of the Communist Women’s International Conference, that March 8 was proposed as the official date for celebrating International Women’s Day and from 1922 onwards, International Women’s Day was officially celebrated on the 8th of March.
   There are two other issues that need to be mentioned. One, why did women, particularly from socialist and communist ideologies feel the need for a separate day for women? After all, the revolution, or the establishment of a society that would do away with all forms of injustices and exploitation would also automatically mean that women’s subordination and exploitation would automatically cease. Or would it? This article is not the right place, nor would New Age be able to give me the space required in this article, to discuss this with the seriousness and intent required. A debate could follow at another time or place, but obviously the fact that the demand for a special day for demanding justice and equal rights for women was accepted and commemorated by socialist organisations all over the world does lead one to conclude that the continuing debate that class struggle would not automatically remove patriarchy and which continues till today was not completely ignored at that time and that this need was recognised is an important factor not to be undermined. After all, I was meant to write on women and democracy, though this is not unrelated.
   The other issue, one that I had mentioned at the start of this article is of the date itself. Since the United Nations in 1975 first declared the year as the Year of Women and subsequently the decade for women, March 8 was officially declared by the UN as International Women’s Day. The history given for this day began with the women working in the textile and clothing factories in New York City, staging a protest against inhuman working conditions and low wages on March 8, 1857, resulting in violent attack by the police. Again on March 8, this time 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding better working conditions and end to child labour. The Socialist Party of America then designated the last Sunday in February as National Women’s Day. But the main reference to March 8 is the general strike triggered by Russian women workers against hunger, war and czarism on February 23, 1917 according to the Russian calendar, corresponding to March 8 of the Gregorian calendar. On that day, defying party orders, women took to the streets, precipitating the beginning of revolutionary actions that brought victory to the Russian Revolution. The rest is history. Four days later the czar was forced to abdicate. As stated at the beginning of this piece, as per the 1921 documents of the Communist Women’s International Conference, March 8 was designated officially as International Women’s Day in remembrance of the Russian women’s initiative which also coincided with the strikes of the women workers in New York, USA.
   The history for the demand for an International Women’s day is a long struggle, it has a long history. A history for justice, for rights, for working conditions, for the ability to feed oneself, against hunger, against war, against patriarchy within the home as well as outside, the right to vote, to speak, act and take responsibility as a citizen. That is DEMOCRACY. It is not just a celebration of women gathering together and stating their demands or taking cognisance of their achievements. It is all of that, but much, much more. It is not only a day for women, but all citizens irrespective of gender, it is for all peoples united together in a struggle for peace, justice, freedom from want and hunger, from exploitation. It is a day where we as women should reiterate our commitment to humanity and protection of our natural resources. Our resources that tend to get plundered and ravaged due to greed, all in the name of development. There is absolutely no need to repeat, that in the family it is in most cases, and acknowledged to be the norm, that women look after, feed and nourish their families. For this the vast majority of women in the world depend on nature and its resources for their needs. Yet their voices, the voices of the billions of women who keep this world and its populations alive, are ignored. Their voices do not matter, as they do not speak the language of development. At most, they may be considered as vehicles to ride on, or the tools through which development maybe reached. A definition of development, that is controlled and promoted by corporate interests. Not the collective interests of the women in villages in Gaibandha, Noakhali or Kushtia or elsewhere in the world. For example, the conduit for micro-credit loans and distribution of exotic variety of seeds, chicken, fish fingerlings, all leading to a market-led, market-dominated, market-controlled system of production. This is not and cannot be considered as being democratic. As we sit down today to commemorate 100 years of the declaration for an International Women’s Day, let us remember what went to the making of this day and what does this day really mean, if anything at all, to the billions of women who are yet to free themselves from the oppression of patriarchy, poverty and powerlessness. When we speak out against corporate global interests controlling the world’s resources and politics, we need to learn lessons from March 8 to remember and rediscover internationalism and people’s rights. That is democracy.
   Khushi Kabir is coordinator, Nijera Kori