Happy International Women's Day!

International Women's Day has never been much of a "thing" in Canada or the United States. I only started taking note of it maybe a decade ago, when my company started making a bit of a fuss about it.  IWD was more of a "thing" in our international locations, initially -- and I suspect the powers that be seized on it as and expanded our activities as a way to shore up their credentials as an "employer of choice" for women. There would be stories in the staff newsmagazine and internal online communications, perhaps a special guest speaker for the women's network group (which was, unhappily, only open to those at the management level & above -- meaning I never got to go), and donations to charities that benefited women & girls.

I never thought or wondered much about why IWD wasn't celebrated as much in North America vs the rest of the world -- or why Mother's Day is so feted here, but not quite as big a deal elsewhere -- until I read this article from today's New York Times. (In short, the reason is political.)  Eye-opening, to say the least. They had me at the subheading: 

Forget Mother’s Day. Today we celebrate women as friends, sisters, workers and comrades, too.

And this paragraph: 

For my part, I despise that Mother’s Day values women only as mothers. It reinforces the idea that this is our most important role: giving birth and sacrificing enormous amounts of unpaid labor toward raising the next generation of citizens. We are more than our wombs.

Some have tried to tell me that Mother's Day celebrates ALL women who nurture & encourage the next generation. Hmmmm, nice try, but I don't entirely buy it.  (Maybe it SHOULD be that way, but it doesn't always work out that way.) 

But IWD is (or should be) about ALL women, and all that we are -- not just our roles as mothers & caretakers.

(I wrote an IWD post last year along these lines.)