With the increase in reactionary ideologies, both secular and religious, women and girls, as well as LGBTQ+, are facing attacks all over the world. Violence has increased and far right organisations have unleashed an onslaught of propaganda online, with sites such as the ‘manosphere’. The message is clear: women need to get back in the home where they belong and breed.
This is the leaflet we have been giving out.
March 8th is International Women’s Day. Every year, capitalist institutions, media, and politicians show their support, forgetting the Day’s working class and anti-capitalist origins.
This date actually commemorates March 8th 1909, when 129 women employees of a cotton textile factory in New York were killed when the factory boss set fire to the factory while all of them were inside making a protest demanding labour rights.
It was the German social democrat Clara Zetkin who proposed the idea of an International Women’s Day in 1910 at the International Congress of the Second International in Copenhagen. She wanted to unite women together behind the German Social Democratic Party to counter the suffragists who were concentrated only on the vote for women. Zetkin was inspired by the American initiative in response to the fire of 1909.
March 8th is therefore a celebration of resistance and commemoration of working class women’s continued oppression and exploitation. It is not a day to celebrate all the women bosses, politicians and millionaires. It is a day of struggle that it is there to recall all the inequalities, all the violence, all the oppressions of the patriarchal system which is embedded within capitalism and to make visible the struggles of women. It is especially significant at a time when rights of women and LGBT+ are under attack from right-wing groups, both religious and secular.
Statistics from all over the world show how far we are from ending exploitation and oppression.
- Women in the UK do 37% more unpaid work (housework, caring for children and others) than men.
- In a 2024 survey by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, 59% of psychiatrists reported that violence and abuse are contributing to mental illness in their female patients.
- UK mothers earned £4.44 less an hour than fathers and mothers’ monthly earnings drop by 42% within five years of their first child.
- According to the International Labour Organisation as of March 2025, only 46.4% of working-age women were employed globally, compared to 69.5% of men. At the current pace, achieving equality in employment rates would take almost two centuries.
- In 2024, 1 in 5 people suffered violence from a partner, and among married couples, that rate is 1 in 4 for spousal abuse.
- In the USA, 70 women are shot and killed every month by a partner.
- Worldwide, more than 650 million women and girls alive today were married as children. This continues as every year 12 million girls are married before they reach the age of 18.
- On average, a woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK. Around 62% are killed by a current or former partner.
- Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimisation, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault, according to a study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.
- In 2023, Eurostat recorded nearly 244,000 sexual violence offences in the EU, including over 91,000 rapes – an almost 80% increase since 2013.
- The World Health Organisation and Unicef estimate that over 230 million girls and women worldwide have been affected by female genital mutilation (FGM). An additional 4 million are at risk of FGM every year.
- According to UNESCO, in 2024, 466 million adult women worldwide cannot read and write — nearly two-thirds of the 739 million illiterate adults globally.
And yet, year after year, more and more women are saying no and fighting against patriarchy in all its forms, at work, at home, in the street. This fight needs to be against all forms of oppression and explicitly anti-capitalist. Capitalism, born from commercial expansion by force of arms during colonisation then structured around large-scale industry, developed after patriarchy, which is based on the subjection of women and which is thousands of years old. These systems of domination must be abolished. Any feminist position which does not combat capitalist exploitation amounts to maintaining in place a system which exploits women and men, which benefits from the free or underpaid work of women. Feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist struggles cannot be separated. That common struggle must be reaffirmed.
No revolution without women’s liberation. No women’s liberation without revolution.
Leaflet produced by the London Group of the Anarchist Communist Group