It’s a Long Road from Seneca Falls

Posted by: Jason Gilpin, USAID

When I moved to Ukraine in 2007, I was pleasantly surprised that Women’s Day is a national holiday. Given all the inequality and injustice that women all over the world have faced and continue to face, I wondered why we in the United States hadn’t thought to celebrate a day outside Mother’s Day to honor the more than half of the world who get less than a quarter of the credit.

The origin of women’s rights in the United States is the Declaration of Independence of 1776, which declared that “all men are created equal.” As the English Dictionary, Merriam Webster points out, a definition of “man” is “the human race: mankind.” Unfortunately, it took my countrymen about a century and a half after 1776 to establish that “men” in the Declaration of Independence didn’t refer to the “male human,” it meant “the human race: mankind.” American women were denied the right to vote until 1920, but even at the time of America’s founding, the nation’s strength was dependent on the wisdom, prudence and perseverance of its women.

Even though women in revolutionary America were prohibited from voting, serving on juries, or even signing contracts, I wonder today how the

Martha Washington (June 2, 1731 – May 22, 1802)

young USA could have succeeded without the wisdom, foresight, and courage of its founding mothers, such as Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Margaret Catharine Moore Barry, and Dolley Madison (that’s not a typo – she spelled her name Dolley, although most people think it’s Dolly!).

Martha Washington is honored for having set the standard for intelligence, sensibility, and indefatigable patriotism in American women. She also continually encouraged her husband onward in the Revolution, despite the threat that she might very well lose everything she had, which was not at all insignificant, considering the fact that George Washington owed most of his wealth and economic status to her inheritance.

 

The Secret History of Women’s Day: Or, How an American Strike Became a Soviet Tradition

Posted by: Eric A. Johnson, Public Affairs Officer

As March 8 approaches, Ukrainian women often ask me what Americans do to celebrate International Women’s Day. My short answer is: nothing. But before anyone can get offended, I rush to explain that we honor the important women in our lives on two other days. On St. Valentine’s Day (February 14), every right-minded American man celebrates the main woman in his life (be she wife, lover, girlfriend) by taking her out to dinner (or cooking it for her) in addition to buying a card, chocolates (often in the shape of hearts), and flowers (usually red roses to signify true love). And then on Mother’s Day (the second Sunday in May), Americans honor their mothers by taking them out to lunch or dinner – or, better yet, cooking it for them. But given that so many men can’t cook, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day tend to be the two days of the year when it’s almost impossible to find a free table in a good restaurant.

Starting in New York City in 1857, women workers made a tradition of labor actions and protests on March 8. In 1910, the first International Women's Day was celebrated on the same day. This photo shows an early Women's Day protest.

All holidays begin somewhere. Mother’s Day is the relatively recent invention of American Anne Jarvis who suggested a holiday honoring mothers after the death of her own activist mother in 1905. Jarvis – who never had any children of her own – first proposed the holiday in 1912 and by 1914 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had turned it into a nationally recognized day. By the 1920s, Mother’s Day was celebrated across the country.

St. Valentine’s Day has much older roots dating back to pagan celebrations in Greece and Rome which revolved around Hera (Juno), fertility, and her marriage to Zeus (Jupiter). With the death of the Christian martyr Valentine of Rome (killed AD 269 and buried on February 14), the holiday evolved into a Christian feast day. However, it wasn’t until English poet Geoffrey Chaucer was inspired by the Italian Renaissance to write his Parliament of Birds (1382) that St. Valentine’s Day became associated with romantic love – and love letters – in the popular imagination. The holiday, however, did not come to resemble something that we might recognize today until 1847 when another American woman – Esther Howland – began producing St. Valentine’s Day cards for her father’s store in Worcester, Massachusetts. The rest, as we say, is history.