By Manal Abdel Fattah
Armenia announced that public transportation will be free for women, and no fees will be imposed on them, for the first time in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, on International Women’s Day, which falls on March 8.
Also, about 15,000 women working in community structures will be given tickets to attend various cultural events, while the community of women who participated in the war and became disabled, as well as families forcibly displaced from Artsakh, will be given more than a thousand tickets to attend the “Jayaneh” ballet performance, which will be held at the National Academy. At the Opera and Ballet Theater.
March 8th of each year falls on “International Women’s Day,” and on this day, activities and events are organized around the world to honor women’s achievements and raise political and social awareness of their issues.
Marches, rallies and demonstrations take place in many cities, and the streets in some of these cities are filled with the purple color associated with women’s rights.
International Women’s Day emerged from a labor movement, and then became an annual event recognized by the United Nations. In 1908, 15,000 women marched in a protest march in the streets of New York City, to demand reduced working hours, improved wages, and the right to vote in elections.
The following year, the American Socialist Party declared the first National Women’s Day, and the communist and women’s rights activist Clara Zetkin proposed making this day an international day, and not just a national day. She presented her idea in 1910 at an international conference for working women held in the Danish city of Copenhagen. That conference brought together 100 women from 17 countries, and they all unanimously approved the proposal.
International Women’s Day was celebrated for the first time in 1911, in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. Its centenary came in 2011 – so this year we celebrate the 112th International Women’s Day.
It became official in 1975 when the United Nations began celebrating this day and choosing a different theme for it for each year; The first theme of the celebration adopted by the international organization in 1996 revolved around “celebrating the past and planning for the future.”
International Women’s Day has become a date for celebrating women’s achievements in society and in the political and economic fields, while its political roots are based on the idea of organized strikes and protests to spread awareness about the continuing inequality between men and women.
