Women’s Day in Russia is better than it is in the West

In a piece printed on the liberal leaning website Vox.com, International Women’s Day is defined as “a day to work toward gender parity.” In another piece printed at the same website, some really foul language is used to express feminist rage on this holiday. (We won’t link to that page because it has such foul language.)

The primary theme expressed in the Western nations where this day has been increasingly celebrated is more like “ladies revenge” than it is about parity. Since pictures speak a thousand words, we would like to show a few pictures related to International  Women’s Day in the West, first, and then we will show you Russia’s tradition.

As one might see, most of these are about power. And of course, there is some cause for this as in the West, it appears that women are still often discriminated against in real ways, despite the “equality” claims of some nations.

In that regard the Western images have prototypes from the original International Working Women’s Day posters and graphics from over 100 years ago when this holiday started. This one below was a big hit in the days right before the Communist Revolution. Note the almost tragic irony, though, as the woman marching with the flag offers the woman buried under Church furnishings including a baptismal font and an icon of the Mother of God, the chance at “freedom.” And what was that freedom? Look closely…

The great freedom was to go work in a factory building things for the State. And yes, you still had to raise your family and take care of them when you were not working. So in other words, the women got kind of put under more pressure…

However, one of the unexpected things that came out of this is probably something that cannot be credited to Communism, but rather to the depth of traditional values of the Russian people. Eventually the day became transformed into something that this Westerner finds to be quite noble and beautiful. So while the Western women are being ugly and loud and screaming and yelling about parity and how awful men are for being men, these are the usual expressions for Women’s Day in Russia – starting with an oldie:

It would seem that the Russian people have found a way to bring the best of themselves out – both men and women, and that women are honored, and so are the men – more than that, the men consider it an honor to be able to do this.

(And yes, there is a “Men’s” Day analogue in Russia, called Defenders of the Fatherland Day, which happened two weeks ago on February 23rd.)

Happy Women’s Day from Russia!