The proposal for a special day to celebrate the value, struggles and rights of women across the world was made by Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin in 1910. Inequality of pay, conditions and the status of women at work runs parallel to the sexual exploitation of women, especially through the media.
On an individual level, legal, social and political issues challenge us as women daily in our lives still.
My grandmother, who died in 1972, lived as a supporter of women’s rights. “I remember when people only had aeroplanes as a mad idea in their minds”, she told me one day when I was thinking of dropping History and she was talking me out of it.
“All these thin women these days look as though they’ve agreed to only be half alive,” she told me in the mid-sixties when Twiggy was hugely influential in moulding the thin body as the best shape for women. In 2012, fashions are still very much created for this thin ideal.
