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I forbindelse med Den internasjonale kvinnedagen 8. mars, er det på plass å nevne at dagen ble etablert av den tyske marxisten og kvinnepionéren Clara Zetkin, som også sto i spissen for den første 8. marsdemonstrasjonen i 1911.
For å markere 8. mars 2015 velger jeg å hente fram denne artikkelen om de revolusjonære kvinnene i Finland og deres kamp, som førte til at Finland ble det landet i verden som først innførte allmenn stemmerett for kvinner i 1906. Eric Blanc skriver:
In 1906, Finland became the world’s first nation to grant full female suffrage. This watershed achievement for women was won by Finnish socialists during the revolutionary upheaval that swept the Czarist empire to which Finland belonged.
Yet this important history has been overlooked by both academics and activists. Abraham Ascher’s standard work on the 1905 revolution in Czarist Russia, for instance, completely omits any mention of Finnish suffrage and argues that “the efforts of women to achieve equality bore few concrete results during the revolution.” In the few non-Finnish books that address the 1906 victory, the role of the socialist movement is generally marginalized: David Kirby writes that suffrage “was conceded virtually without a struggle” and Barbara Evans Clements portrays mainstream feminists like Alexandra Gripenberg as the suffrage battle’s main protagonists.
Og han konkluderer den interessante artikkelen slik:
On this International Women’s Day we would do well to recognize that it was socialists who won full female suffrage for the first time in history. The erasure of this experience from our collective memory ultimately represents an ideological conquest for the Gripenbergs of the world. Reclaiming the roots of women’s suffrage is in this sense a political act in continuity with a battle begun over a century ago, a battle that will continue until capitalism is finally overthrown.
(Alexandra Freifrau Gripenberg var en finsk konservativ feminist av adelig familie.)
