"To be a Woman is to Work": A Speech for International Women's Day 2026
Published 3.11.26
Speech originally given on 3.8.26 at Rittenhouse Square
Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Anna. I'm a woman, a worker, a feminist, and a marxist-leninist. I'm here speaking for Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a national organization of revolutionaries fighting for socialism in the United States. I've been fighting for women's liberation since I was 14 years old, that's half of my life. Throughout my experiences in the women's movement, I've seen both the pitfalls and the virtues of different feminist varieties. For much of my life, I longed for a feminism that was militant and unyielding, that was not exclusionary, and that provided a path forward for true freedom for women and other oppressed and marginalized gender identities, not just equality of misery. I have found that feminism within the fight for socialism.
Today, International Women's Day is recognized globally as a holiday to celebrate women's economic, social, and political achievements as well as their contributions to life itself. IWD has its origins as a socialist holiday. On March 8th, 1908, 15,000 women garment workers in New York City, most of them immigrants, held a protest. The following winter, they went on strike for 13 weeks demanding improved working conditions, which they won. Inspired by their struggle, Clara Zetkin, a German socialist leader, proposed at the International Socialist Women's Conference of 1910 that March 8th be celebrated as International Women's Day.
This year, the many groups who collaborated on this march and rally have united under the name International Working Women's Day, a name that has been used for this day both in the past and currently by some countries. We've done so to highlight the working class nature of the holiday, something that capitalists and their sympathizers have tried to obscure.
I am a woman and a worker. To many of the misogynistic men who would like to reverse the progress of women's rights, some of whom run this country, this is a contradiction of terms.
Women have been doing work "outside the home" since there's been a concept of a home, yet when women are a part of the workforce, patriarchy insists they have no right to be there and that they should thank their lucky stars for the privilege of earning a wage, no matter how meagre. Since industrialization, women's ideal place has been identified as in the home, not in the workforce. Though strides have been made against this since the start of feminism's second wave in the 1960's, we're starting to see regression culturally around these issues. Even so-called progressive women are advocating for "the soft life", being a stay at home girlfriend, trad living, finding a provider, the list goes on. But if women aren't working when they're in the home then what are they doing? Resting? Certainly not.
Patriarchy makes many demands of women: bearing and raising children, cooking, cleaning, providing comfort and emotional support, sex, etc. Within marxist theory, these tasks are identified as reproductive labor: the (typically unpaid) labor that it takes to create and sustain human life and the workforce. Make no mistake, these are specifically capitalist constructions of gender. In 1884, Friedrich Engles, a revolutionary socialist theorist, identified the creation of these roles as "open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife" upon which the modern individual family, often called the "nuclear family" is founded. This familial structure, he explains, did not exist before the advent of capitalism.
Today, much has changed and yet much is still the same. Decades ago a woman was meant to get married and then submit to her husband because of his supposed superiority and be his servant. Today, a woman is meant to do all of her live-in boyfriend's chores for free because you… love him? Unclear.
It goes without saying that many of the demands made of women are undesirable or even impossible for many women to meet, but to a capitalist informed patriarchy that marks a failing on the woman's part because to them a woman is a means to an end.
Here we see the contradiction in the capitalist construction of women's proscribed gender roles. It is not within a woman's role to work and yet labor is baked into every aspect of women's day to day lives.
Truthfully and honestly I love being a woman. I know that womanhood is an expansive identity that connects people with vastly different experiences, conditions, goals, and desires. The definition of woman that our patriarchal, capitalist society has is narrow and reductive, but nevertheless, it's very clear. Whether the labor is emotional, sexual, reproductive, productive, paid or not, to the powers that be, to be a woman is to work.
They create this separation between what women are expected to do and "real work" in an attempt to divide the women's movement from the worker's movement. The bourgeois feminism we are often sold validates this division. Famous CIA asset Gloria Steinem identified left leaning movements as "where the boys are" as recently as 2016.
With this separation, bourgeois forces aim to co-opt the women's movement. If we want true liberation we cannot allow this to happen.
Bourgeois feminism ignores class and labor analysis, so it fails to correctly identify reproductive labor, its expectations for women, and what true liberation from these expectations could look like. They mistakenly classify women's disproportionate responsibility for domestic work and childrearing as a visibility issue instead of a deliberate cage created to hinder women's agency. Its only material offer for these issues is the promise that if you reach a class status high enough, you can pass off your so-called womanly duties to a woman that is further away from wealth and whiteness than you are. Furthermore, they have little to say about women who are not white, especially those outside of the United States and Europe. To a bourgeois feminist movement, those women are disposable. At best they are pawns to manufacture consent for war, like we've seen recently in Palestine and Iran, but mostly they are expendable lives to exploit for the gains of the west, though everyday people see very little of those gains. Capitalist patriarchy promises suffering for all women. Bourgeois feminism promises suffering only for most women. The best thing, they say, women's lib can achieve is equal access to the exploitative labor system that men experience, but in their eyes the majority of women around the world don't even deserve that.
Suffice to say, a capitalist system will never liberate women. It is not designed to do so.
We need a feminism that stands up for all women, informed by a philosophy that stands up for the most vulnerable. Only a socialist informed feminism can liberate women from domestic servitude. Socialists have been critiquing gender roles since 1884, something that the capitalist feminist movement wouldn't have the nerve to do until over half a century later. Furthermore, a socialist informed feminism is the only feminism that stands up against imperialism, the only feminism that believes that no woman anywhere in the world deserves to be raped, abused, brutalized or bombed, not just white women in the west.
At the same time, the road to socialism cannot be walked without women. Reproductive labor cannot be ignored. Claudia Jones, a communist, feminist, and black nationalist identified women in the modern family, even outside of the working class, as taking on a proletarian role, while the men assume the role of the bourgeoisie within the family. Class analysis that favors productive labor and neglects the reproductive is incomplete. The liberation of workers and of women are inextricably linked. One cannot succeed without the other.
Mao Zedong said "women hold up half the sky". If we're speaking in terms of population, that's roughly correct, around 50%. If we're looking at labor contributions, however, it's looking closer to 70.
I want to wish everyone a happy women's day. There is much to be done but the future is bright because we make it so. If we work together then one day we can all be free.
Thank you everyone.