One month before International Women’s Day on March 8, an official state holiday widely celebrated in Ukraine, a public discussion broke out on whether Ukraine should reshape the popular holiday or even drop it altogether.
It all began when the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory published a bill, drafted by its experts, that proposes to reorganize state holidays in Ukraine. In particular, the draft law eliminates a couple of holidays: International Workers’ Day (celebrated on May 1-2), and International Women’s Day (March 8).
“These international days were declared holidays in Ukraine during the first years of the Bolshevik regime, and they were introduced to support the then-current social and political movements,” the draft law reads.
However, some came to the defense of the International Women’s Day. A group of female activists sent an open letter to Volodymyr Viatrovych, who heads the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. They pointed out that the International Day of Women’s Rights goes back to 1910, when more than 100 women from 17 countries at a congress in Copenhagen supported a proposal by German activist Clara Zetkin to found the holiday.
“As soon as in 1911, more than 1 million of women from all over Europe rallied on March 8, demanding equal political and civic rights,” the letter says.
The letter was published on the website of the anti-sexist initiative Povaha (Respect) on Feb. 7. More than 800 people have signed it online as of Feb. 10.
“For we who signed the letter, March 8 is not just Women’s Day, but the Day of Women’s Rights, when every woman – regardless of her age, family status, nationality, religion, residence, health, income or profession – has the opportunity to remind people out-loud that she is an equal person with full rights,” the letter says. “By canceling the celebration of the International Day of Women’s Rights, Ukraine demonstrates that it does not recognize discrimination of women as a serious problem.”
One of those who signed the letter was Iryna Zemlyana, a project manager at the Institute of Mass Information, a Ukrainian non-governmental organization.
“In this case with Viatrovych, we again have a situation in which a man makes a decision regarding the day of women’s fighting for their rights,” she told the Kyiv Post.
She said the Communists had debased the holiday, and it needed to be given new meaning, but it should not be canceled.
Viatrovych, on the other hand, said March 8 would indeed acquire a new meaning – if it no longer was a state holiday.
“As a historian, I think that it was the holiday format that deprived this day of its human rights meaning and turned it into a holiday of cakes and flowers,” he told the Kyiv Post.
Viatrovych said that the public discussion of the draft law would continue until March 1. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory will consider the comments and remarks it receives, and revise the document accordingly. After that, the draft will be given to the government for evaluation.
Viatrovych’s stance on the March 8 issue seems firm though, and he does not plan to reconsider it. And he said he believed the bill had every chance of being passed by the Ukrainian parliament.
However, Iryna Suslova, a Ukrainian lawmaker with the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko faction and head of the parliamentary subcommittee for gender equality and non-discrimination, told the Kyiv Post that this was not the time to discuss issues like state holidays.
“In a time when there is a war in the country, economic problems, social problems… I won’t support this debate,” she said.
