A STEP Last Saturday over 200 delegates from more than a dozen trade unions, trades councus, cavour rares, student unions women's groups, socialist organisations etc. crammed into Friends Meeting House for the London conference on Women and the Cuts". The first initiative of its kind, the conference showed the increasing need for the labour movement to bea to contaise me nent aramst curs In social expenditure and unemployment, and the importance of taking up the needs of women within that fight.
Women have always done badly out of the health service. As health workers, they have been used as a supply of cheap labour. As panents, alone with the old and the "mentally ill!", they have been regarded as a low priority, since they are economically unproductive and often socially isolated. Celia Pugh proposes main resolution ent initiatives against cuts and make sure the needs of women are adequately represented within them. The call made ov une conterence rora natonal women and the Cuts conference should be taken up by trade union, Labour and women's organisations throughout the the struggle for socialism. In 1910 the Second International Conference for Working Women called for an annual day - "International Working Women's Day' - to be set aside under the slogan, 'Votes for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism. When this day came round the following year, Kollontai recalls that Austria and Germany were a 'seething trembling sea of women - in every town and village women put out pamphlets and held meetings as men stayed home with the kids.
In 1917 Russian women in Petrograd chose this day to demonstrate for the return of men from the war and a supply of bread - and in doing so sparked off the events which led to the overthrow of the Czar and the eventual seizure of power by the workers.
This is the tradition in which we continue to celebrate International = Women's Day on 8 March. In Britain, the fight for women's rights is rising daily in the face of the attacks carried out by the Labour Government. The living struggles of women - notably those for free abortion on demand, for equal pay, and against all cuts in the welfare state - should be in the forefront of any celebrations this year.
The International Women's Year called for 1975 by the United Nations has proved to be a farce - we must now continue in the past tradition of International Women's Day and see these struggles as an integral part of NAC Steering Committee members (I to r) Berry Beaumont, Angela Phillips, Leonora Lloyd and Sabena Roberts at Monday's press conference 10p socialist woman INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY by Alexandra Kollontai Available again, 10p (plus 8p p&p) from Socialist Woman, 97 Caledonian Rd, N1.