Yes, it is bread we fight for – but we fight for roses, too!
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the woman means the rising of the race
No more the drudge and the idler – ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!
An excerpt from ‘Bread and Roses’ by James Oppenheim
In their book, ‘Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto’, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser differentiate between two types of feminisms: one which they call ‘the handmaiden of capitalism’, and another that, according to them, espouses for an end to capitalism. The book, by calling for an anticapitalistic and antisystemic feminism, undercuts the advances of corporate feminism; it upholds and envisions a militant feminism that is rooted in and committed to the demand of both bread and roses. Condemning liberal feminism for its “market-centered view of equality”, the manifesto offers a powerful critique of it.
In the context of the limitations of liberal feminism and the need for a more militant, anticapitalistic feminism, it becomes important to historicize International Women’s Day and its significance, thereby countering the repeated attempts at appropriating the working class women’s history and efforts into the fold of the capitalist logic through means of corporate feminism. Today, women’s day is marked by capitalist narratives with their bogus claims of ‘women’s empowerment’ when, in reality, they strip feminism of all its diversity and intersectionality, reducing women to a homogenous, ahistorical, essential identity that needs to be celebrated but only within and through the logic of buying and selling.
The flash sales that clothing and cosmetics brands stage around women’s day every year, the advertisements and campaigns, such as Kalyan Jewellers’ #IamMoreThanEnough campaign and Biba’s #ManyShadesOneMe that claim to celebrate the identity of a woman and McDonalds promotional stunt of flipping its ‘M’ icon into a ‘W’ on women’s day testify to how brands and companies continue to appropriate women’s day and its significance for their own profits by weaving grand images of themselves as “liberal” and “feminist”.
It is to counter such profit-orineted narratives that women’s day should be understood historically and politically by looking at the context in which Women’s day emerged initially. Anuradha Ghandy, an Indian communist, leader, and writer, in her essay ‘Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement’ traces the trajectory of women’s day and the political context in which it emerged. She writes,
“Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the working class women’s movement developed rapidly. The high point of this was the strike of almost 40,000 women garment workers in 1909. The socialist women were very active in Europe and leading communists like Eleanor Marx, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollantai, and Vera Zasulich were in the forefront of the struggle to organize working women […] It was at the Second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen that Clara Zetkin, the German communist and famous leader of the international women’s movement, inspired by the struggle of American women workers, moved the resolution to commemorate 8 March as ‘Women’s Day’ at the international level”.
In the words of Alexandra Kollontai, a Russian revolutionary and Marxist,
“The day of working women’s militancy helps increase the consciousness and organization of proletarian women. And this means that its contribution is essential to the success of those fighting for a better future for the working class”.
But, in contemporary times where capitalism and capitalist logic has seeped into every aspect of our lives and reified the individual and collective consciousness, women’s day has been seized by false consciousness and has come to be marked by the empty rhetoric of women empowerment that promises no substantial change in the position of the working class women; it only offers opportunities for gaining profit and increasing sales while ensuring that the scope for a collective consciousness raising is undercut by the individualist rhetoric of capitalism.
As Arruzza et al write in their manifesto,
“In general, then, liberal feminism supplies the perfect alibi for neoliberalism. Cloaking regressive policies in an aura of emancipation, it enables the forces supporting global capital to portray themselves as “progressive”.
This remark highlights the way in which the significance of women’s day has been co-opted within the neoliberal agenda and thereby diluted of its history and its proletarian roots.
There is, therefore, a need to reclaim women’s day from the ideological forces of capitalism and revisiting its history and its political context. One of the ways to counter the dehistoricization and the capitalisation of its narrative by capitalist ventures for purposes of profit and image building is by being equipped with an awareness of the present socio-political contexts.
To go back to Alexandra Kollontai and her essay ‘International Women’s Day’, it will be worthwhile to revisit the slogans that she uses towards the end of her essay to describe what the women’s day or rather what she also calls “The Working Woman’s Day” actually signifies and embodies,
Down with the world of Property and the Power of Capital!
Away with Inequality, Lack of Rights and the Oppression of Women – The Legacy of the
Bourgeois World!
Forward To the International Unity of Working Women and Male
Workers in the Struggle for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
– The Proletariat of Both Sexes
Hence, it will be apt to state that women’s day, women’s movements and the identity of women are neither ahistorical nor homogenous and therefore should not be treated as such with an essential fixity. Furthermore, though it is significant to recognize women as individuals in their own right, one must be wary of the capitalist narrative of individualism for it seeks less to celebrate the individual than to sideline the collective for its own material and ideological benefits. Lastly, it is in the demand of both bread and roses that we need to recontextualise the narrative of women’s day for it is both in the struggle for equality and dignity of working class women that the true significance of women’s struggle as well as women’s day lies.
Hunardeep Kaur is a third year student of English Literature at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. She is interested in looking at the world through the lens of art, literature and culture. She finds solace in poetry and sunsets.
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