PrintBread and Roses: UNA marks International Women’s Day today
Today is International Women’s Day, a day for celebrating women’s achievement but also for raising awareness about discrimination in Canada and around the world and taking action to achieve gender equality.
“As members of a profession in which women predominate, nurses are particularly conscious of the need to continue the effort everywhere in the world to secure the justice and equality for girls and women symbolized by International Women’s Day,” said Heather Smith, president of United Nurses of Alberta.
International Women’s Day has its roots in women’s activism for better working conditions and the vote in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. An international women’s day was first marked in 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.
The anthem of International Women’s Day is Bread & Roses, associated with the strike in 1912 by more than 20,000 textile workers, women and immigrants, in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
It is now marked around the world on March 8 and the need remains great, and is again growing, to continue this struggle.
In 2023, Smith noted, it is important to remember that the impact of COVID-19 on women and women workers, including nurses, continues to be felt. Most jobs lost during the pandemic were in sectors of the economy where women are employed in large numbers – including nurses and other health care workers.
Long COVID continues to keep many women out of the workforce and the need for government services to support these workers is strong and growing. A digital gender gap isolated many women throughout the pandemic, even in wealthy countries like Canada.
Looking to the future, the impact of climate change will also be severe for women and girls and in many countries will create additional barriers to their basic human rights, including gender rights.
Even in the wealthy nations of the West, we see new barriers being created to restrict the rights of women and girls, including the right to reproductive freedom in the United States and some regions of Canada.
“Today, while we celebrate, we must also continue to empower women and girls around the world to transform their lives, their families, and their communities,” Smith said.
