Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – International Women’s Day (now March 8) had its origins in great social unrest, turbulence and critical debate among women in Western countries regarding their oppressive working conditions in factories and their lack of voting rights. Marching through New York City in 1908, 15,000 women demanded shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. In 1910 Clara Zetkin, a German socialist, held a conference of women from 17 countries representing unions, socialist parties and working women’s unions and proposed an annual event to assert their demands for equality and justice in the workplace and their right to vote. Russian women observed their first International Women’s Day on the eve of World War I campaigning for peace, which they sustained through the last Sunday of February 1917, when they began a strike for “Bread and Peace” over the death of more than 2 million Russian soldiers.
The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, now a global movement for women’s equality and peace, first met in The Hague in 1915. The 1,136 suffragists from 12 countries on all sides of the war met to protest “the madness and the horror of war,” causing the “reckless sacrifice of human life and the destruction” of so much that humanity had labored to build through centuries. They, like all other women’s equality groups of their day, demanded that women be granted the right to vote so their opposition to war could have impact.
More than a century later women can vote, hold office and have equal rights in theory, but that has not changed the reality that men claim almost total political power. Women still are paid less than men for comparable work – an economic injustice that compounds our poverty in old age; hundreds of millions of women and girls suffer rape and violence at the hands of men – an often-deadly assault on their being; and the right to choose whether or not to bear a child is denied to women and girls here and throughout the world. Women have minimal influence on the life and death of our planet home Earth despite our global activism.
However, where women have found a foothold, the results have been astounding. Recent research tells us that we can and do create resilient and lasting peace when we are given the power. Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan have studied movements to overthrow dictatorships, expel foreign occupations or achieve self-determination from 1900 through 2006. They found that nonviolent resistance campaigns were more than twice as successful as violent insurrections with the same goals. Elsewhere Chenoweth found that women in leadership roles are “more likely to maintain nonviolent discipline … in resistance campaigns against repressive regimes.”
Another team of researchers, comprising security studies experts and statisticians has generated the largest database on the status of women across the globe. Called WomenStats, the database allows researchers to relate the level of conflict within 175 countries to the overall security of women within those countries. Their findings are profoundly illuminating for women’s security, global security and world peace. The degree of equality of women within a country predicts best – better than the degree of democracy, better than level of wealth or income inequality or ethno-religious identity – how peaceful or conflict-ridden their countries are. Moreover, the researchers found that democracies with higher levels of violence against women are less stable and more likely to choose force over diplomacy to resolve conflict. The world’s security, they have found, is most reliant on women’s equality and security.
What effect do women have on issues of power and national security, given the chance? Nearly 200 women in politics surveyed in 65 countries agreed that “women’s presence in politics increases the amount of attention given to social welfare, legal protection and transparency in government and business.” Four-fifths believed that the presence of women in governmental positions restores citizens’ trust in government. The same is true of citizens from 24 countries recently surveyed: a majority agreed that “policies would improve if more women, people from poor backgrounds, and young adults were in office.”(1)
At the highest levels of governance, the glaring absence of women in government as well as in international bodies such as the United Nations robs women of power and, consequently, robs the world of the security that our presence at the highest levels of decision-making would give. Unless societies transform themselves with an analysis of the status of women’s equality and act decisively to empower women, they will persist as repositories of male ambition, male privilege and male power. This toxic mix dooms the future of national and international security. We will only continue the downward trend reflected in the Doomsday clock.
The words of the Ghanian stateman and former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan embody the core message of this: “There is no policy more effective in promoting development, health and education that the empowerment of women and girls…and no policy is more important in preventing conflict or in achieving reconciliation after a conflict has ended.”
What women gaining power with men at every level of our existence could yield for the well-being of the world.
(1) The Pew Charitable Trusts, Winter 2025, Vol. 27, No.1
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