who gave the idea to celebrate international women's day
International Women's Day In August 1910, an International Socialist Women's Conference was organized to precede the general meeting of the Socialist Second International in Copenhagen, Denmark.[11] Inspired in part by the American socialists, German Socialist Luise Zietz proposed the establishment of an annual Women's Day and was seconded by fellow socialist and later communist leader Clara Zetkin, supported by Käte Duncker, although no date was specified at that conference.[12][13] Delegates (100 women from 17 countries) agreed with the idea as a strategy to promote equal rights including suffrage for women.[14] The following year on March 19, 1911, IWD was marked for the first time, by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.[6] In the Austro-Hungarian Empire alone, there were 300 demonstrations.[12] In Vienna, women paraded on the Ringstrasse and carried banners honouring the martyrs of the Paris Commune.[12] Women demanded that they be given the right to vote and to hold public office. They also protested against employment sex discrimination.[3] The Americans continued to celebrate National Women's Day on the last Sunday in February.[12]
International Workers' Day In South Africa, Workers' Day has been celebrated as a national public holiday on 1 May each year since 1994. It has its origins within the historical struggles of workers and their trade unions internationally for solidarity between working people in their struggles to win fair employment standards and more importantly, to establish a culture of human and worker rights and to ensure that these are enshrined in international law and the national law of those countries aligned to the International Labour Organization. In pre-1994 South Africa, the demand for the annual observance of the day as a public holiday became a rallying point for workers and their trade unions and was one of a number of annually significant days to symbolize and mobilize resistance to the Apartheid government and its racial policies.