Indeed, neither Spurina’s mother nor her grandmother associated the day with women’s emancipation or knew its origins. Her grandmother remembered the day as causing additional work, as she was tasked with arranging gifts and flowers for the hundreds of women at the factory where she worked. In the post-socialist period, in both Albania and Latvia, IWD has often been used by younger generations to protest gender-based violence against women and girls. Vrzgula notes that in Slovakia it is associated with the previous regime and either ignored or marked (especially by the political left) in ways that look like a “populist marketing ploy”.
Kim Groop (Åbo Akademi University, Turku) noted that, in Finland, IWD has also been typically associated with the workers’ movement and the political left. In a quite different context, Clara Sarmento (Polytechnic of Porto) presented an image of IWD in Portugal in 1975, a year after the April 1974 revolution that established democracy in the country. The image shows men and women marching side-by-side in a celebration of antifascist and working women.
Greek indifference and divided movements
Vicky Karaiskou (Open University of Cyprus) notes that demonstrations around IWD in Greece are also politicized and mobilized by the left, but overall “people do not care very much”. In contrast, the Greek Church tends to promote a much more traditional image of women with the Virgin Mary as a role model.
For others, the day appears to have retained meaning as an important moment to come together to celebrate women’s emancipation and fight for change. Layla Zibar (KU Leuven) pointed us towards the works of a young generation of Kurdish artists and activists. Disillusioned by party politics and political organizations, they place women at the centre of their art and address traditional gender roles, body politics, and suffering in brave new ways.
Johanna Vollmeyer (University Complutense de Madrid) describes attending demonstrations for the first time in Madrid where there were thousands of people on the streets. She laments that the feminist movement in Spain has recently been divided by debates around transgender and prostitution laws and she has not felt able to participate. Hanna Teichler (Goethe University Frankfurt) also sees IWD as a day for action, but one that makes her feel exhausted. “I can‘t believe that women are still paid less, appointed less, and have to campaign for their basic rights again and again,” she says.
‘Slow commemoration’ of a slippery event
Seen transnationally, the 8 March is a date of contradiction. It is about presenting flowers and reproducing traditional gender roles, but also about raising awareness of social injustice and strengthening women's solidarity. It is in a dialogue with other commemorative dates, such as Mother’s Day and the Red Army Day. It has been helpful for top-down political ideologies and bottom-up social activism.
We are calling this ‘slow commemoration’. Slow commemoration refers to dates in our calendar that appear to commemorate or celebrate something specific yet whose meaning is slippery. Slow commemorations attach themselves to multiple histories and multiple meanings: they can be filled with content to persuade you to fight for something, vote for something, or simply buy something.