Contents
=> “The Weird World of International Women’s Day” - text
=> “What is Suffrage” - writing and debate topic
=> In the Next Issues

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The Weird World of International Women’s Day
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Pre-reading. Ask students to answer in writing the following questions:
(1) What does International Women’s Day celebrate? Be as specific as possible.
(2) What do you like/dislike about International Woman’s Day?
(3) Where do you think Woman’s Day originated?
(4) Do men enjoy Woman’s Day? How do they spend it?

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One weird holiday is March 8th, International Women’s Day. Or is it Days? In Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia, good luck getting something done at an office or university after 12:00 noon on March 7th, or on the morning of the 9th. We’re talking big Holiday.

Whereas, in the USA, nobody notices. Sure, a radio host may make an announcement on the morning of the 8th; he or she is just reminding the public that the day exists.

The USA, though, is where the day originated. Working women in New York organized strikes on March 8th in 1857 and again on the same day in 1908. In the Russia of 1917, a sea of St. Petersburg women marched for “bread and peace,” and this was the beginning of the February Revolution, leading to Czar Nicholas II’s abdication. Lenin later made the holiday official to honor “the heroic woman worker.”

Today there’s nothing very proletarian about IWD. It’s flowers and candy and congratulations in the former USSR. But at least one Eastern European country actually has distaste for Women’s Day. In Czechoslovakia prior to 1989, Woman’s Day was party propaganda, with working women being honored by the gift of a bar or soap or some small thing from their employers, while many men spent the day honoring alcohol. Thus, today’s Czech Republic has abandoned the holiday.

So just how international is International Women’s Day? The web site Media Day examines newspapers from around the world and reports on their contents. On March 8th of 2003, they found no mention of Woman’s Day in the papers from Japan, Australia, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The only mention in an American paper concerned Russian soldiers putting on a beauty pageant in celebration of IWD. South and Central American countries, however, devoted quite a few articles to Woman’s Day.

Sources
http://www.jmk.su.se/global03/project/mediaday/womensday.html (Media Day: Reporting about International Woman’s Day)
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/womensday1.html (Women’s History Month)
http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-holidays-by-country
http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/dates/iwd/questions_e.html (Commorative Dates in Canada)

Follow-up Writing
Write a 200-word essay on how women in your country and women in American think about themselves differently. How do their ideas on what a woman should be and do differ?

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What is Suffrage? - text and debate idea
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Questions for Class:
What is women’s suffrage?
What were the first countries to grant women’s suffrage?

It sounds like a type of suffering, but it’s not. Suffrage is the right to vote. The first place to grant women suffrage was the British Colony of Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific. Pitcairn was settled by mutineers from the ship Bounty and Tahitian girls. Those Tahitians must have been something!

The first country to grant full suffrage for women was New Zealand, in 1893. In Europe it was Finland, in 1906. Australia and the Scandinavian countries followed suit, before the outbreak of World War I. German and British women received the vote in 1918, the USA in 1920. In Russia, after Nicholas II abdicated in March of 1917, the Provisional Government granted women voting rights. Most of the Soviet Republics followed in the next 10 years: e.g., Ukraine and Belarus (1919), Kazakhstan and Tajikistan (1924), and Turkmenistan (1927).

The USA granted full voting rights to women in 1920, although in 1916 Jeannette Rankin of Montana had already been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (that’s Congress).

Some surprises: Swiss women did not gain the vote until 1971. Kuwaiti women were granted suffrage in 2005.

These dates are not perfectly clear-cut. Sometimes suffrage granted is only partial. Sometimes there are restrictions. Sometimes suffrage is revoked. Today there are some countries where women do not vote.

For a fuller timeline see
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/suffrage/a/int_timeline.htm
or
http://ipu.org?wmn-e/suffrage.htm

Debate Idea (or writing topic)
Here’s the question: Should children be granted suffrage. At what age?

Funny? But it’s not really a joke. Do some research. Check the Internet. There are many organizations and associations in support of children’s suffrage. Don’t children have the right to represent their interests? Are adults better at representing childrens interests?

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‘American’ Profile Series
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In the near future, we’ll be starting our ‘American’ Profiles series. The ‘American’ is in quotations, because America has roots in so many other cultures and countries, and our profiles will explore that aspect. So profiles will feature folks like Sandra Dee (super popular American actress of the 1950s with Ukrainian roots), Maria Sharapova (who is Russian but lives in the USA), Queen Liliuokalani (the last Queen of Hawaii), and Guillermo, the Mexican guy who makes my cappucinos every day, having risen from bus boy to owner of the cafe.

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In the Next Issues
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So much stuff I can’t even keep up. A text on cheating. Famous lines from films. And the first of the ‘Profile’ Series.

Copyright 2006 by Kevin McCaughey & I.M. Poosheesty