This year’s proud supporters of International Women’s Day (IWD) include such ghoulish merchants of slaughter as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. But while those profiteers of death help fuel war in Ukraine, devastating that country’s cities, killing children, and threatening the security and well-being of millions around the world, we’d prefer to revive IWD’s history as a day for radical antiwar protest.

After several years of militant labor protest and demands for suffrage — as well as “housewives’ uprisings” against high prices — by women in Russia, the United States, Austria, Germany, and France, German socialist feminist Clara Zetkin, in 1910, proposed International Working Women’s Day to honor — and build — women’s struggles for workplace justice and political equality. For several years afterward, the day was marked by labor protests, which in New York City were greatly intensified by the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, a fire in a Manhattan garment factory that killed 146 workers, mostly women and girls. In Russia, these protests were also fueled by demands to end the tsarist regime. Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kollontai later reflected that IWD served as “an excellent method of agitation among the less political of our proletarian sisters” because the framing was so inviting (“This is our day,” she imagines working women saying to themselves as they hurried to the rallies and meetings).

She also noted that IWD strengthened international solidarity. This aspect of IWD became particularly salient when, in 1914, as ruling classes around the world began mobilizing for World War I, Zetkin, along with revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, used International Working Women’s Day as a focal point for antiwar protest.