It’s International Women’s Day a.k.a. the most fabulous, fiercest, kick ass day of the year! International Women’s Day is a worldwide event (because we’re awesome like that) that celebrates women’s achievements spanning from political to social while calling for gender equality as well as other issues women continue to face presently. Since the early 1900s women have been coming together on March 8th to shout out and recognize all the bad-ass women who’ve fought hard for gender equality.
It’s not totally clear when International Women’s Day began, but some records show that it started in 1908 when 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding voting rights, better pay and shorter working hours.
Just one year later, the very first official National Women’s Day was observed on February 28th. With the success of National Women’s Day in 1910, a woman by the name of Clara Zetkin (who was also the leader of the women’s office for the Social Democratic Party in Germany), brought up the idea of an International Women’s Day. The idea was to have every country celebrates women on one day out of the year and to push for their demands.
In a conference of more than 100 women from over 17 different countries, International Women’s Day was formed and from that point on celebrated around the world.
In 1913, just two years after International Women’s Day was declared, it was decided that it would be celebrated annually on March 8. In 1975 it was also agreed that each year would focus on a theme or cause to coincide with the women’s movement. This year’s theme is #PressforProgress which is a call-to-action to press forward and progress gender parity as well as motivate and unite friends, colleagues and whole communities to all think, act and be gender inclusive.
In 2011, former U.S. President Barack Obama proclaimed the entire month of March to be ‘Women’s History Month’ where women can devote 31 days to celebrating women all over the world and push forward with our initiative for gender equality.
No matter how you celebrate International Women’s Day, take a look at these memes that show women are not only fabulous but equally funny and fierce.
