Morning Star, March 11, 2006, Saturday

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Morning Star

March 11, 2006 Saturday

HEADLINE: Feature - Wired;
James Eagle celebrates International Women's Day

BYLINE: James Eagle

BODY:
Women on the Web
This week saw the 95th celebration of International Women's Day, an event which, far from being a cosy festival of womanhood, has frequently been marked by blood and revolt.
The first Women's Day was held in the US in 1909 at the behest of the Socialist Party of America, but it wasn't until two years later that the Socialist International organised the first international event.
That came as a result of two International Conferences of Socialist Women, in 1907 and 1910, Alexandra Kollontai's accounts of which can be found at Marxists.org (www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/works/isconf.htm).
The story of the woman who proposed it, Clara Zetkin, is available from the People's Weekly World (www.pww.org/archives98/98-03-07-3.html)
Less than a week after the first International Women's Day, the appalling conditions faced by working-class women were thrown into shocking relief by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, in which 146 garment workers in sweatshop conditions burned or jumped to their deaths.
Cornell University (www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire) has an in-depth account of events, including historical context, details of modern-day US sweatshops and an array of horrific photographs and eyewitness testimonies.
In a report that brings September 11 to mind, a United Press reporter on the scene wrote: "Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking, flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire."
The fire eventually led to huge advances in workplace rights and safety, but, just a few years later, a mass mobilisation of women against war would turn the world upside down, providing one of the flashpoints for the Russian Revolution (www.marxist.com/women/women_emancipation_russia_pt1.html" >www.marxist.com/women/women_emancipation_russia_pt1.html).
And today? The UN, which has found itself under fire for "paying lip service to gender equality," has proceedings from its commission on the status of women at www.un.org/events/women/iwd/2006.
Amnesty International exposes the scandal of domestic violence worldwide (web.amnesty.org/actforwomen/dvexposed-080306-editorial-eng), while CounterCurrents (www.countercurrents.org/gender.htm) has an excellent roundup of some of the key issues facing women across the globe, from female foeticide in India to the West's booming porn industry.
Wired Favourites
The Empire that was Russia
www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire
Lone genius Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii travelled Tsarist Russia with a remarkable camera of his own invention - one which could, years ahead of its time, take colour photographs. The results are a stunning vision of a world on the brink of disappearing.
Snowshow Films
www.snowshowfilms.com
A collection of documentaries "for social and economic justice," ranging from Palestine to the School of the Americas.