It’s international Women’s Day- for 8 March 2016

By SJ Otto

It is international Women’s Day. For a brief history of the day, I repeat an article from February 27, 2011, posted originally on Wichita Peace and Freedom Party Examiner:

InternationalWomen’s Day was declared following the decision agreed at Copenhagen in 1911. International Women's Day (IWD) was honoured the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, March 19. More than one million women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women's rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination. However less than a week later on 25 March, the tragic 'Triangle Fire' in New York City took the lives of more than 140 working women. This event drew significant attention to working conditions and labour legislation in the United States that became a focus of subsequent International Women's Day events.
Since that year Women’s Day is now celebrated all over the world, on or near March 8. It is celebrated in many countries, including China.

Some important Women of history:

Hillary Clinton This year we will probably see the first woman in US history to be a candidate for the presidency of the US. If she wins the general election she will be the first woman US president in history.  

Emma Goldman Was a famous anarchist writer and political activists. She was portrayed in the movie Reds, 1981.

Margaret Mead From Time magazine: “Of her life's work, cultural anthropologist, museum curator and feminist scholar Margaret Mead once said, "I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples — faraway peoples — so that Americans might better understand themselves."

Today she is a major figure of controversy from the religious right groups, who hate her studies of human sexuality.

Grace Slick was a ground breaking singer for the Jefferson Airplane. She also sang for the Jefferson Starship at times and she had her own solo career for a while. When Slick started singing acid rock music there were few other women playing that role. Today many women sing for hard rock bands. Slick was perhaps the first of them.