Across the world, International Women’s Day has always been more than a celebration – it is a day of struggle. It was forged in the fight of New York City garment workers who took to the streets in 1908, to protest the super-exploitation they endured in sweatshops as they tried to support their families: dangerous working conditions, back-breaking hours, child labor and wage theft. They marched shoulder to shoulder with the suffragettes fighting for women’s right to vote. The revolutionary hero Clara Zetkin marked March 8th as a global day of action as a way to unite women worldwide in the fight for socialism and liberation.
Today, women in all sectors of society face renewed attacks from the forces of reaction, with Trump and his cabinet full of abusers and woman-haters leading the charge against our rights. But just as we fought before, we will fight again.
Women Are Under Attack– But We Are Not Going Back
Women in America today are fighting for their lives. Trump, the same man who brags about sexual assault, dares to call himself the “protector of women.” This is a bald-faced lie. The reality is that his policies threaten the lives and freedoms of millions of women.
From the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade to the hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills passed by state legislatures, the Trump administration and its bigoted allies are trying to roll back decades of progress. Trump’s latest executive orders bar trans women from sports, shelters and prisons, attack gender-affirming care, and strip protections in federal law for LGBTQ people.
Trump’s economic policies harm women, too. The rollback of workplace discrimination regulations and opposition to equal pay initiatives have made it harder for women to achieve wage equality. The burden on working mothers gets heavier, as we face a lack of affordable childcare and fewer jobs that pay enough to support our families. Trump’s agenda, laid out in the reactionary Project 2025, seeks to ban abortion nationwide, defund reproductive health services, and impose reactionary policies that lock women into a position of subjugation.
But we are not going back. The fight for women’s rights is a fight for consistent democracy, and the fight for democracy is part of the struggle for socialism.
Again and again, the ruling class underestimates the power of women’s militancy. Women have been at the forefront of the labor movement, leading some of the most militant strikes in the past period. Women in healthcare, hospitality and education have organized, walked out and won real gains.
Mothers whose children have been murdered by police are leading the charge against police terror, demanding justice and putting the system on trial. Women have led the fight for reproductive rights, pouring into the streets in millions to protest bans, and fighting to secure abortion access even in states that have banned it. Under Trump, immigrant women and families have faced relentless attacks, but cities have erupted in resistance, demanding stop the deportations, and standing with immigrant communities. And across the world, women are resisting imperialism. In Palestine, the Philippines, and beyond, women are on the frontlines of national liberation struggles.
International Women’s Day belongs to fighters. It belongs to those who refuse to be silenced, who take to the streets, who organize their workplaces, who defy the system that seeks to oppress them.
Build the Women’s Movement
As the communist leader Claudia Jones wrote, the struggle for socialism is inseparable from the everyday struggles of women. Historically and today, revolutionaries are on the front lines of this movement, and under socialism, women’s liberation is not just a slogan, it is a material reality. The 1917 October Revolution showed us that the Soviet Union, seeking to protect women’s health and autonomy, legalized abortion decades before any bourgeois democracies caught up.
We are not fighting for the watered-down, ‘seat at the table’ feminism of the ruling class – which upholds monopoly capitalism while giving us nothing but empty platitudes, and that makes women’s issues a personal problem instead of a problem of society. Trump’s offensive against our rights is writing on the wall: under capitalism, any rights we win can be snatched away by reaction. But what experience has also taught us is that we should never retreat when it’s time to fight back.
The attacks we face are meant to intimidate, confuse, disorganize and demoralize us. But instead, they light a fire. International Women’s Day is a chance to recommit ourselves to bringing new fighters into our revolutionary organization, and to bring this movement with us into the broader struggle to overthrow this rotten system.
This March 8, we take to the streets with our fists raised high, knowing that the struggle for women’s liberation is part and parcel of the struggle for a new world.
On International Women’s Day: Stand Up, Fight Back!
Defend Women’s and Reproductive Rights!
Defend LGBTQ and Trans Rights!
Stand with the Women of Palestine!
Stop the Deportations, Keep Families Together!
