Article by Pia Locatelli, SIW Honorary President

I was elected President of the Socialist International Women, SIW, in October 2003 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Latin America; I was confirmed for a second term at the next Congress in June 2008 in Athens, Europe; I then passed the baton to my successor, Ouafa Haji, in August 2012 in Cape Town, Africa.

Three Congresses in three different continents give an idea of how the Socialist International Women, the oldest and largest women’s political organisation is a global one: more than a hundred women’s organisations active in all continents, involving thousands of women in different countries, all of us speaking the same language for gender equality, for women’s empowerment, for political representation, for fighting all forms of discrimination, for eradicating violence against women….

Being president of SIW has been the most interesting, involving, passionate experience in my long political career. I was proud of holding this position and I strongly felt the responsibility of leading such an extensive network of women’s political organisations to which the women worldwide owe a lot.

The socialist presence has marked all the important stages and steps of the long march, a marathon I’d say, for the progress of women, and, to use an expression that has fallen out of fashion, for the liberation of women.

The international solidarity has characterised our mission since our foundation which dates back to 1907: at the founding conference of the SIW in Stuttgart in 1907 the fifty-eight delegates, adopted a resolution on women’s suffrage that was the starting point for an untiring struggle for women’s political rights which we carried out also in alliance with women not belonging to the socialist family.

The watchword of Socialist International Women has always been respect for women’s rights as human rights: when we have worked to eradicate poverty or to combat violence against women and girls; when we have campaigned for better education for girls or for the sexual and reproductive rights of women. We did not need to wait for the 1993 Vienna Conference on human rights to proclaim that women’s rights are human rights!

All these are reasons for me to be proud of belonging to and having served in the political family of SIW, but there is one that I consider truly special: March 8, International Women’s Day, comes from us, from Socialist International Women. It was in Copenhagen in August 1910, during our second Conference, that a resolution was adopted to set one day in the year aside, the first Sunday in March, as International Women’s Day. This happened in Europe, the so-called old world. In the new world, in the United States of America, on March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, New York: an estimated 146 workers, many of them women and girls, immigrants from Italy or the shtetls of Eastern Europe lost their lives. By a tragic intersection of ideas and events, International Women’s Day had been celebrated for the first time only a few days before the fire. The two have thus become indelibly linked in manifestations that take place worldwide every year on March 8, International Women’s Day. How can we not be proud of this socialist origin of March 8?

Pia Locatelli
SIW Honorary President