Women took to the streets of cities across North America, Europe, Africa, South America, and elsewhere to mark International Women’s Day with demands for ending inequality and gender-based violence.
In the United States, there were over 300 actions around the country, in large cities, small towns, and locales in between. Many of the demonstrations were organized by the Women’s March network, which called for marches and rallies to become a focal point of resistance to the new Trump administration.
Since returning to office seven weeks ago, Trump has signed a string of executive actions targeting women. Only hours after his inauguration, Trump initiated federal crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The next day, he reversed a decades-old order banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.
Large rallies were seen in urban hubs like Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles, but even smaller cities like New Haven, Conn., saw turnouts of 1,000 or more.
Around the world, the women’s movements of various countries highlighted a wide variety of demands and campaigns.
In Canada’s largest cities—Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Quebec City, and Ottawa—demonstrations took on a dual focus, highlighting right-wing attacks on women at home and the Trump danger from south of the border.
At a Toronto event, one speaker expressed Canadian women’s support for their sisters in the U.S. and also slammed the Trump administration’s threats to Canadian sovereignty:
“The solidarity between the women and people of the United States and the people of Canada continues and will continue with working class people, and we will march in solidarity against the attacks on them and make sure that it doesn’t come anywhere over that very real border.”
On the Asian side of Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city, a rally in Kadikoy saw members of dozens of women’s groups listen to speeches, dance, and sing in the spring sunshine. The colorful protest was overseen by a large police presence, including officers in riot gear and a water cannon truck.
Protesters pushed back against the idea of women’s role being confined to marriage and motherhood, carrying banners reading “Family will not bind us to life” and “We will not be sacrificed to the family.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2021 withdrew Turkey from a European treaty, dubbed the Istanbul Convention, that protects women from domestic violence. The Turkish rights group We Will Stop Femicides Platform says that 394 women were killed by men in the country in 2024.
“There is bullying at work, pressure from husbands and fathers at home, and pressure from patriarchal society. We demand that this pressure be reduced even further,” Yaz Gulgun said.
In Poland, activists opened a center across from the parliament building in Warsaw where women can go to have abortions with pills, either alone or with other women.
Opening the center on International Women’s Day across from the legislature was a symbolic challenge to authorities in the traditionally Roman Catholic nation, which has one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws.
From Athens to Madrid, Paris to Munich, Zurich to Belgrade, and in many more cities across the continent, women marched to demand an end to treatment as second-class citizens in society, politics, family, and at work.
In Madrid, protesters held up big hand-drawn pictures depicting Gisele Pelicot, the woman who was drugged by her now ex-husband in France over the course of a decade so that she could be raped by dozens of men while unconscious. Pelicot has become a symbol for women all over Europe in the fight against sexual violence.
Thousands of women marched in the capital Skopje and several other cities in North Macedonia to raise their voices for economic, political, and social equality for women.
Organizers said only about 28% of women in the country own property, and in rural areas only 5%, mostly widows, have property in their name.
Only 18 out of 100 women surveyed in rural areas responded that their parents divided family property equally between the brother and sister. “The rest were gender discriminated against within their family,” they said.
In Russia, the women’s day celebrations had a more official tone, with honor guard soldiers presenting yellow tulips to girls and women during a celebration in St. Petersburg.
In Berlin, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for stronger efforts to achieve equality and warned against tendencies to roll back progress already made. “Globally, we are seeing populist parties trying to create the impression that equality is something like a fixed idea of progressive forces,” he said.
He gave an example of “large tech companies that have long prided themselves on their modernity and are now, at the behest of a new American administration, scuttling diversity programs and raving about a new ‘masculine energy’ in companies and society.”
In Nigeria’s capital, Lagos, thousands of women gathered at the Mobolaji Johnson Stadium, dancing and singing and celebrating their womanhood. Many were dressed in purple, the traditional color of the women’s liberation movement.
In South America, some of the marches were organized by groups protesting the killings of women known as femicide. Hundreds of women in Ecuador marched through the streets of Quito to steady drumbeats and held signs that opposed violence and the patriarchal system.
“Justice for our daughters!” some demonstrators yelled in support of women slain in recent years.
In Bolivia, thousands of women began marching late on Friday, with some scrawling graffiti on the walls of courthouses demanding that their rights be respected and denouncing impunity in femicides, with less than half of those cases reaching a sentencing.
This article features reporting from the Associated Press, People’s World, and other sources.
International Women’s Day was founded at the beginning of the last century to both highlight and celebrate the struggle of working women against their oppression and double exploitation. The motivation for IWD came from two sources—the struggle of working-class women to form trade unions and the fight for women’s right to vote.
These two issues united European women with their sisters in the U.S. In 1908, hundreds of women workers in the New York needle trades demonstrated in Rutgers Square on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to form their own union and to demand the right to vote.
This historic demonstration took place on March 8. It led, in the following year to the “uprising” of 30,000 women shirtwaist makers, which resulted in the first permanent trade unions for women workers in the U.S. In 1910, German socialist leader Clara Zetkin proposed that “the Socialist women of all countries hold each year a Women’s Day.”
In 1917 in Russia, International Women’s Day acquired great significance—it was the flashpoint for the Russian Revolution. On March 8, (Western calendar) female workers in Petrograd held a mass strike and demonstration demanding peace and bread. The strike movement spread from factory to factory and effectively became an insurrection.
The Bolshevik paper Pravda reported that the action of women led to revolution, resulting in the downfall of the tsar, a precursor to the Bolshevik revolution. “The first day of the revolution was Women’s Day… the women… decided the destiny of the troops; they went to the barracks, spoke to the soldiers, and the latter joined the revolution… Women, we salute you.”
In 1922, in honor of the women’s role on IWD in 1917, V.I. Lenin declared that March 8 should be designated officially as Women’s Day. It became a holiday in the Soviet Union and later in other socialist countries. IWD became even more prominent on an international level in 1977 following a declaration by the United Nations.
CONTRIBUTOR
