International Women’s Day: The Legacy of Theresa Serber Malkiel

Just as a philosopher or scientist should occasionally engage in manual labor, so too should working women have the opportunity for intellectual stimulation—to relieve themselves, even briefly, from the exhaustion of physical toil.

Returning home each day with nothing on our minds but the drudgery that awaits us tomorrow leaves us with one escape: to seek oblivion in sleep.

“Toilers live the lives of animals,” Theresa Serber Malkiel wrote in The Socialist Woman in July 1908. “That is work, and sleep, with short intervals for food. Now let us put our heads together and see if this is right; if things ought to, and will, go on forever in this way.”

Yet, for decades, the name Theresa Serber Malkiel—the woman who helped spark International Women’s Day—was nearly erased from history.

A Life of Struggle and Activism

Born in 1874 in what is now western Ukraine, Theresa Serber Malkiel came from a middle-class Jewish family that ensured she received a well-rounded education. But the antisemitic persecution of the Russian Empire forced her family to flee to the United States in 1891. She was just 17.

Like thousands of other immigrant women, she found herself in the brutal conditions of a garment factory—working 18-hour shifts under grueling conditions, earning half of what male workers made, barely scraping by to afford a shared tenement or boarding house.

But Malkiel, did not passively accept her fate. She joined the labor movement and soon after founded a union for women working in cloak-making.

At 26, she married attorney Leon Malkiel, a fellow socialist. Though marriage freed her from factory work, she remained deeply involved in activism, providing aid to immigrant women and rising to leadership positions in the Socialist Party of America. Alongside her husband, she co-founded the socialist newspaper New York Call.

A Pioneer for Women’s Rights

Malkiel was a staunch advocate for gender equality and women’s suffrage, but she remained wary of the upper-class women who often led suffrage movements without addressing the struggles of working-class and immigrant women. She firmly believed that true equality—for women, African Americans, immigrants, and child laborers—could only be achieved through socialism.

It was within this framework that, in 1909, she proposed the first National Woman’s Day. According to Rutgers historian Temma Kaplan, rallies took place across New York, drawing thousands of people demanding women’s right to vote.

The Myth of the 1857 Strike

Many accounts have long associated the origins of International Women’s Day with a supposed March 8, 1857, textile workers’ strike in New York. Some even claim that Malkiel intended to honor that event.

However, research by prominent French feminist scholars Liliane Kandel and Françoise Picq found no historical evidence of a major strike on that date. Newspapers of the time, which extensively covered labor strikes led by women, make no mention of such an event.

Instead, the real catalyst came in 1910, when Malkiel and other activists supported the massive “Uprising of 20,000“—a strike of garment workers, predominantly young immigrant women, demanding better wages and shorter hours.

These women endured a brutal winter on the picket lines but ultimately secured higher pay and reduced hours, though factory owners refused to improve workplace safety.

Tragically, just one year later, that refusal led to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where 146 workers—mostly young women and girls—died, locked inside by factory owners.

The Role of Clara Zetkin and the International Women’s Day We Know Today

It was another fierce advocate, German socialist Clara Zetkin, who internationalized the movement. In 1911, inspired by Malkiel’s National Woman’s Day, Zetkin proposed a global observance, with over a million people participating in protests across Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland.

In 1913, Russian women followed suit, marking their own Women’s Day—a protest that, four years later, would help ignite the Russian Revolution.

Meanwhile, in the United States, activists continued celebrating National Woman’s Day on the last Sunday of February.

It wasn’t until 1975, under the United Nations, that International Women’s Day became a globally recognized day of action.

A Legacy Reclaimed

For too long, the story of Theresa Serber Malkiel—a Jewish immigrant woman who fought for labor rights, suffrage, and socialism—was pushed into the shadows.

But International Women’s Day did not begin in 1857 with a strike that never happened.

It began with real, flesh-and-blood women, risking their livelihoods—and, sometimes, their lives—for the fight for equality.

It began with women like Theresa Serber Malkiel.