In 1908, women began to stage walkouts and strikes at various sewing factories, against the slave wages and harsh working conditions they endured. In spite of many arrests and heavy fines, brutal beatings by police and hired thugs, the women (many of them teenagers), continued to fight. Middle and upper class women who were inspired by the strikers came out to the picket line to give their support, and were also arrested.
After months of small shop actions the women, over the objection of the union leadership, escalated the struggle by calling for a trade wide general strike. The mass meeting of November 22, 1909 resounded with cheers of approval for the general strike resolution.
The strike lasted for months and ignited strikes in other areas. Though the strike itself was only partially successful in terms of changing working conditions, the women's struggle did challenge the thinking on what "uneducated" immigrant women could do and filled many women, workers and other oppressed people with a strong sense of pride and strength.
On March 8,1910, the anniversary of these demonstrations was declared International Women's Day by an international conference of revolutionaries and Communists.
The great leader of the Russian Bolsheviks and the October 1917 Revolution, V.I. Lenin, was among those who voted at this conference to celebrate the tradition of International Women's Day.
Despite the determined efforts of the imperialists and their running dogs to snuff out the red sparks of International Women's Day with picnics, dinner parties and the wet blanket of parliamentary cretinism -March 8 has been celebrated all over the world by class-conscious women and men as a day of struggle. It is a day when we commemorate the revolutionary legacy of the great proletarian feminist fighters such as Comrade Norah in Peru, a great Communist leader, who fell in combat in the midst of the People's War, and Chiang Ching, who struggled all her adult life to keep China on the revolutionary road.
In this International Women's Day we raise our voices in a rebel chorus: ENOUGH IS
ENOUGH!
Learn from our revolutionary sisters in Peru: Women's emancipation is only possible through the
abolition of class society. Our enemy is not so much this or that reactionary, or politician.
Parliaments simply administer the system with the backup of the ruling class's power. Refuse the
politics of bourgeois cruelty unleashed upon the people from the corridors of power in Canberra!
Prepare the ground for revolution in Australia, as part of our role and duty to advance the cause
of proletarian internationalism, and world revolution.
Committee for a Revolutionary Communist Party in Australia (CRCPA)