This is how a strike sparked International Women’s Day – and why we're planning to do it all again

Society relies on women’s hard work and emotional labour – but what would happen if we laid down our tools?

In 1908, Theresa Malkiel, a young Jewish refugee who fled antisemitic violence in Russia, was working in a New York factory making shirtwaists, an early 20th-century must-have for “fashionable ladies”. The conditions that the workers – almost entirely female immigrants – endured then are replicated today in the factories of the global south, and also in many workplaces in the global north.

To ensure profit levels are maintained, conditions in factories both in 1908 and 2019 are hugely unsafe. There are often industrial accidents, days are long and neither wages nor breaks are adequate.

Malkiel, a fantastic organiser and orator, brought together the workers around her and together they went on strike. As part of her activism, Malkiel organised the first International Women’s Day, where in February of 1909, 2,000 women and men gathered on 34th Street in New York to listen to socialist feminist speakers discuss the importance of universal suffrage.

Malkiel’s Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, a fictionalised account of the strike, dedicated to “the nameless heroines of the Shirtwaist Makers Strike” has been unfairly dismissed as propaganda. Yet it helped reform North American labour laws, especially after an industrial disaster in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911, where 146 workers died in a fire.

It is also worth re-reading because it reveals the way that these women, often providing the only wage for their family, also faced the burden of the “second shift” i.e. they returned from the shirtwaist factory only to enter what the Wages for Housework collective called “the social factory”, that is, the family.

Here they shouldered the responsibility for nearly all the reproductive labour. Many of them were mothers who looked after themselves and their partners, making sure they were fit to go back to work again the next day, or to continue in their search for work, through making meals, cleaning up, having sex, caring for kids, elders and siblings.

This was work in 1910 and a century later, it is still work done for free within the nuclear family, largely by women. It is unpaid because it is considered an inherent expression of what it means to be a woman. We are supposed to enjoy this labour so much that we don’t even see it as work.

There are many ways that this unpaid, gendered “reproductive” work intersects with paid work. For instance, women are over-represented in “caring professions” such as teaching, nursing and working with children. Richer women employ poorer women, often women of colour to clean their houses. Women are expected to do unpaid “emotional labour at work”, a term made popular by Arlie Hochschild’s account of flight attendants being unable to do their job without engaging in emotional labour.

Women servers, waiters, baristas and hostesses are often disciplined for not smiling, while people describe their hairdressing appointments as “therapy”. Even if you aren’t in a heterosexual nuclear family, the expectation on women to do emotional labour for men, male colleagues, friends, family members and strangers is enormous. As the Wages for Housework lesbian collective wrote, “we too have learnt to kiss ass”. The other glaringly obvious aspect of all this is that reproductive work done by women in a paid capacity, such as teaching, cleaning, or caring for elders, is underpaid because it resembles work done for free in the family.

Why should mums strike in 2019?

We have organised My Mum Is on Strike because as mothers and carers we wanted to take action on 8 March in a less isolated way with our kids and friends. We are on strike because the idea of motherhood operates as a collective projection. It is an imaginary order that shapes our perspective of the kind of people mothers, carers and women ought to be. The mother is supposed to be endlessly devoted to her tasks and be paid for it alongside the “unbridled happiness” that motherhood brings.

But what happens when happiness and love are not enough? What happens when mothers have material demands, psychological needs and desires outside of what the nuclear family currently offers? What would it mean to go on strike to get these demands met?

Just as Theresa Malkiel and her comrades went on strike for real material reasons in 1910, so too are we striking today. Childcare fees have risen three times faster than wages in the last decade and 31 per cent of low-income working parents are forced into debt to pay for childcare.

At the same time nursery staff – who are predominantly women, very often women of colour – are extremely overworked and underpaid. It’s 2019 and women are still doing 60 per cent more unpaid domestic work than men. On 8 March we are going to strike to make our work visible and to reclaim the radical history of International Women’s Day.