On 17 August 1907, fifty-eight delegates from Europe and elsewhere met at the first International Socialist Women's Conference in Stuttgart and decided to establish an international secretariat led by the German socialist Clara Zetkin. The second conference, which took place in Copenhagen in 1910, adopted a resolution to set one day a year aside as International Women's Day, a day on which women around the world were to agitate for universal women's suffrage and political emancipation.
The Party of European Socialists is hugely proud of this heritage, and so, as the leading voice for women's rights on the European stage, we marked International Women's Day 2009 by organising a European Day of Action, the first of five to be held in the run-up to the European election in June. Over the weekend of March 7th and 8th, PES member parties across Europe held events on the theme "Championing Gender Equality", stimulating cross-border debate on our election blog, and thus setting a new precedent by taking campaigning to a truly pan-European level.
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Events were held in twenty-four different EU states, as can be seen on the map above, and by the majority of our thirty-three member parties. On the morning of Saturday 7th, PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen and Socialist Prime Minister of Hungary Ferenc Gyurcsány joined PES Women President Zita Gurmai to address a demonstration entitled "A bouquet of flowers for peace" in Heroes' Square in Budapest. This was followed by an awards ceremony to pay tribute to outstanding achievements in the field of women's rights, where all three talked about the history of the struggle, making it clear that it is the Left that takes the triumphs and challenges of the gender equality movement seriously.
Meanwhile, 1.400 kilometers away in Tallinn, PES Secretary General Philip Cordery was speaking at the congress of the Estonian Social Democratic Party, drawing special attention to the gender equality chapter of the PES manifesto, whilst party activists and politicians visited 350 childcare centres across the country to deliver cookies and sweet bagels, meeting children, parents and staff to hear their views on childcare provision, an issue which is central to achieving gender equality. At the same time, in Paris PES activists and French Socialists were marching through the city centre to demonstrate against planned budget cuts for family planning services, distributing 2000 tracts quoting the PES manifesto to fellow protesters and members of the public.
The Catalan branch of the Spanish PSOE also organised an EDA event, holding a conference on women's rights in Barcelona where they discussed the significant achievements in the field of women's rights of five years of Socialist leadership, also stressing that there is still a long way to go. And the issue of equal political representation, an area where the Zapatero government has made major progress, was also being discussed at events in Lithuania, Portugal, Malta, Bulgaria, Italy and Essen in Germany, where SPD Presidential candidate Gesine Schwan addressed local activists in the town hall.
Further conferences, debates and campaign actions were held in cities, towns and villages in every corner of the EU, from Stockholm to Martinique and from Athens to Dublin. Live reports, photos and twitter feeds were published on the PES blog throughout the weekend, allowing followers to see what was happening across the continent at any one time and to take part in discussions of the issues raised. Thirty-eight reports and over 100 photos were submitted, and eleven events were reported live on Twitter, including two days of continuous coverage from PES Women in Hungary. A slideshow of images from the EDA can be seen below, and at the top of this page you can watch a full video of the day's events. Finally, a full list of events held can be found here.
In short, this historic first EDA was a real success, allowing the PES political family to add value to individual national campaigns and to demand gender equality in unison. The next EDA "New Social Europe: giving people a fairer deal" will be held on May 9 - and proves to offer Europe's socialist, social democrat and labour parties another opportunity to campaign together on the same for a common cause. The standard has been set; now it is up to Europe's conservatives and liberals to take up the gauntlet.
In fact, European conservatives (EPP) and Liberals (ELDR) did nothing to mark International Women's Day - although this is unsurprising, as neither of their manifestos so much as mention the issue of women's rights. In the words of Zita Gurmai, "The first European Day of Action has proven that the PES is true to the legacy of 90 years of socialist solidarity with the women's rights movement. It goes to show that the PES is the party of gender equality, and that we do our politics in a more inclusive, coordinated and democratic way too."
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