The Whitewashing of International Women's Day

Written by Becca Williams, SBT Copywriter

As many of you know, March is Women’s History Month and tomorrow, March 8^th, is International Women’s Day (IWD).  I have spent much of my career in the gender equity field so this particular day carries a lot of meaning.  I’m currently questioning my Whiteness – a journey so many of us are on – especially as it relates to how I encountered gender equity work and how it encountered me. 

In the last few years, I have paid close attention to how IWD has become corporatized, another performative checkbox for companies to let us know that they care about gender equality. I’ve watched IWD rallies across the world and thought about how these are perceived through my White woman gaze, and how quick we are to ascribe some other status to women of color from developing countries, as victimized by their own context, subjugated, and lacking agency.  Other IWD celebrations seem to focus on a certain type of cisgender woman:  a corporate feminist, someone who leans in and despite the mansplaining, manterruptions, and the pay equity issues has somehow risen to the top of her field and is here to show the rest of us how it’s done. 

I know there’s a ton of nuance here. I’d like to clarify that my intention isn’t to eviscerate IWD and what it stands for. My point is that I didn’t go far enough to think about where my own Whiteness shows up in these musings.  After all these years of being a feminist, my White feminist analysis wasn’t critical enough and in fact, was problematic. I invite you all to join me in thinking about IWD a bit differently. 

IWD has its roots in the European Socialist movement of the early 1900s and was originally called “International Working Women’s Day”.  In 1910, German Socialist Clara Zetkin proposed that there should be a day every year where working women rally to vocalize their demands and the following year, over a million women across Europe did just that.  Russian women held a massive strike on February 23^rd, 1917 in response to the death of Russian soldiers in WW1; the strike lasted for four days, after which women were granted the provisional right to vote.  At that time, Russia followed a different calendar than most, meaning that February 23rd translated to March 8^th in our calendar year, and became the widely adopted International Women’s Day.

(Women marching in Russia, 1917.  From: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/history-behind-international-womens-day)

I haven’t come across much mention around this campaign’s original inclusion of women of color, trans women, immigrant women – and that discussion may be out there. Clara Zetkin did later campaign against Jim Crow laws in the American South.  As I’ll get into later, if there isn’t an explicit centering of the realities and lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, women of color, and the LGBQTIA+ community in these narratives, alongside critique of the patriarchal and racist systems and the White women who uphold them, then we can assume that White women’s experiences are dominating the narrative. 

The UN began observing IWD in 1975 and in 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued a Presidential Proclamation for Women’s History Week, writing “From the first settlers who came to our shores, from the first American Indian families who befriended them, men and women have worked together to build this nation.  Too often the women were unsung and sometimes their contributions went unnoticed.”  And the erasure and the whitewashing solidify – in what I believe was an attempt to both separate from the Communist and Socialist roots of IWD, and also to center the White dominant narrative around womanhood.  I mean, this proclamation is bad on so many levels.  Could you imagine the backlash if this was written today?  “Settlers”, “befriending” “unsung”, and not to mention the last five words.  This misrepresents a violent history, strips Indigenous folx of agency by relegating them to existing in a capacity of “befriending” White Supremacist colonizers, and completely ignores Blackness altogether, all under the guise of advancing some women’s rights. 

This is an overt nod to White feminism, which essentially functions in a very similar way – the hoarding of rights and citizenship at the direct expense of others having the same thing; the individual need to amass and not redistribute.  In 1977, the Black queer feminist Combahee River Collective published their statement, a powerful testament to the long-lasting struggle for survival, liberation, and deep change needed to center their identities and to dismantle the systems that keep them in the margins.  Carter’s statement and the Combahee River Collective’s statement could not be more different. There are many more feminist statements that I’m not naming here but I encourage you to start with this one and see where it sits in your body, where you find yourself turning away, becoming distracted, and needing to learn more. 

What’s happening with IWD now?  Yes, there are parades, marches, protests around the world for women’s human rights, as can be seen below. 

I get a saccharine, sunshiny, feel-good sense when I see these and feel proud of these women abroad who are taking to the streets to protest for their rights.  As someone who has traveled and met women in this struggle, I also see how this sense of solidarity sort of lives and dies on this one day.  As Black feminist author Mikki Kendall’s famous hashtag states, #solidarityisforwhitewomen. She writes about the hashtag, “I meant mainstream feminist calls for solidarity centered on not only concerns but the comfort of white middle-class women at the expense of other women” (from her book, Hood Feminism.)  This is exactly how I feel – in solidarity from a distance, in a way that still makes me comfortable and distracts me enough so that I don’t focus on the massive gendered and racialized inequities happening in the United States: housing discrimination, maternal mortality and morbidity, police violence, the stripping of reproductive healthcare (you’ve seen me list these things out before). 

Think about whose stories get told on this IWD, who our historical heroines are.  Who gets to be entirely deemed as almost superhuman, revolutionary, a badass?  It does tend to be predominantly White women, with a few [of the same] women of color sprinkled in.  Heroism blunts the sharper edges so they are more easily forgotten and covered up, allowing us to put aside the ideas that some of our historical heroines, like Susan B. Anthony and Margaret Sanger, held deeply racist and eugenicist values that propelled much of their “feminist” work.

And about the non-extraordinary women?  The women who are unremarkable?  As this podcast mentions there’s tension between wanting to name historical Black women figures and wanting to acknowledge all of the unnamed Black women throughout history.  I encourage you to pay extra attention to where and how these stories show up in your conversations and social media feeds particularly as this IWD arrives amidst a European war where we may pay attention to Ukrainian women who have joined the civilian resistance or who have fled to neighboring countries with their children, or Russian women who are protesting.  It’s not wrong to do that, but also remember the added layers of the racism and violence that Black and brown refugees from Ukraine are facing at the border, the difficulties faced in other conflicts because they did not look similar to those whose country they were seeking refuge in, and the racist and patriarchal systems that are upholding the justifications for this war in the first place.

We also see this awkward corporatization and performativity of IWD both here and abroad. Women getting flowers, cards, and cupcakes at work, being paraded around to show that their company does in fact care about gender equality. We may see male CEOs of large companies tweeting about the need to hire more female CEOs, and we’ll likely hear the commonplace pay equity math of women making “75 cents on the dollar”.   There are ample critiques of this, that IWD has become a day for companies and for society to throw a nod in the direction of cisgender women before returning to their regular subjugation. 

(Tweet from Burger King on IWD 2021.  There was significant backlash, the tweet has since been deleted, and an apology was issued.)

There’s a certain Whiteness in the critique of IWD itself.  There are a lot of White women talking about how exhausting it is to have the emotional labor of explaining womanhood demanded of them during this month, especially this day. Take Vicki Saunders, a White woman founder of SheEO, who wrote that this year’s IWD “will be about rest so we can replenish”, coining the hashtag #IWD4me.  I can understand that.  It is tiring.  I believe, though, that the exhaustion mostly comes from upholding White Supremacy, from maintaining White women’s strong grip on the center of the narrative.  Rest up, sure, but let’s get rested so we can be an active agent in the fight to de-center ourselves. Or, let’s talk about how we can engage in direct action, activism, and discussions with White family and friends about dismantling the role that White women play in upholding White Supremacy, and also take care of ourselves in the process. One day of White women resting and refusing to participate in the corporatization of IWD isn’t going to achieve gender justice or equity for all, it’s really only going to make White women feel better – and this goes back to what I said earlier about the need to amass for ourselves rather than to redistribute. 

(A now-famous picture taken at the 2017 Women's March.  Angela Peoples, the woman holding the sign, writes, "I wanted to highlight that on a national level, white women are not unified in opposition to Trumpism and can’t be counted on to fight it. Instead, it’s the identity, experience and leadership of black women that we must look to."  The signaling of the pink pussy hats at the Women's March has been written about time and time again, I encourage you to take a look!)

The line about “75 cents on the dollar” is a great representation of this.  That is what a cisgender, able-bodied White woman makes to the equivalent White man’s dollar.  This is once again how Whiteness gets centered in the IWD narrative.  When critiquing the performativity that companies engage in on March 8^th, we often point to how they ignore structural issues like pay equity and the patriarchy in general. In this critique, the experiences of women of color are amalgamated, diluted, and added as a side note to remind us that their experiences are much worse. We’ve all seen sentences like “Black women, Indigenous women, LQBTQ+ folx, and others with nondominant identities experience (insert negative experience here, ie: violence, pay inequity, etc) at a much higher rate”.  I myself have said these sentences many times.  This reinforces the idea that White women are the rule, with everyone else being the exception.  This also denies any broader conversation around the structures that enable these differences, or the ways in which White women’s own comfort in being the dominating definition of womanhood upholds White Supremacy. 

I know that in general, women experience harm in this system. I do think it’s good that we have a month to acknowledge this, because it gives us space to grow.  And I also know that if we center the experiences of Black and Indigenous femmes in this narrative while also interrogating and dismantling the system that keeps Whiteness in the middle, then we will uplift everyone. 

I ask you to spend some time this week reflecting on your commitment to sustained action, and trying to understand what parts of you need to step back and learn more, and what parts of you are ready to become active – and know that those two can happen in tandem so long as you’re willing to embrace mistakes.  This is exactly what A.B.L.E is for.

Additional Resources: 

Jessie Daniels’ book Nice White Ladies is an excellent resource if you’re interested in learning more about this.  There’s an entire chapter dedicated to White feminism.

Here is a wonderful resource highlighting eight online feminist, intersectional, and inclusive magazines that go beyond the straight, cisgender White feminism typically on display. 

I placed this link above, and I really encourage you to you take a look.  A lot of what I’m talking about is this concept of intersectionality, which Kimberlé Crenshaw outlines really succinctly in this video. Her theory explores the ways in which Black womanhood sits at the intersection of race and gender.  It has since been utilized, out of its original context, to talk about the ways in which all of the aspects of our identity shape our experience with feminism (race, gender identity, class, being differently abled, sexual orientation, citizenship, immigration status, etc). 

Here is a fantastic interview with author Rafia Zakaria, about her book Against White Feminism:  Notes on Disruption.  This interview speaks about White feminism from a more global perspective.