March is National Women’s History Month, and people everywhere are celebrating the 2025 theme “Moving Forward Together”! But before there was a month, there was Women’s Day, a Socialist holiday meant to bring together advocates for women’s suffrage and labor rights like the 40-hour work week and a minimum wage. In fact, the first Women’s Day was held in New York City on February 28, 1909 and organized by the Socialist Party of America. 

The New York Times covered the 1910 event the following year in their article, “SOCIALISTS HAVE A WOMAN'S DAY: Speakers at Carnegie Hall All Women Except One, and He Denounces Man.” Within the article they expand, “Meta L. Stern presided at the meeting, and all the other speakers were women except Franklin H. Wentworth, a Socialist of Salem, Mass., who said more cruel things about the brain and heart of man than any of the women speakers.”

At that point in time, the main focus of the women’s movement (also called first-wave feminism by academics) was women’s suffrage, or voting rights for women. Many socialists and moderates at the time supported unity of the sexes in politics including voting a political leadership. Writer and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman said, “It is true that a woman’s duty is centered in her home and motherhood…[but] home should mean the whole country, and not be confined to three or four rooms or a city or a state.”