International Women’s Day 2023 is unrecognizable from the event launched by the Socialist Women’s Conference of the Second International in 1910. Its roots in that movement have been buried under an avalanche of advertising aimed at convincing women that capitalism provides the key to their personal happiness.

Indeed, its bourgeois version is determined to deny its historical antecedents in the communist and socialist movement — and its legacy as a day when working-class women came onto the streets of towns and cities around the world to call for the overthrow of capitalism. If we are to reclaim and build on that history, then we first need to familiarize ourselves with it. In their book The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920–22: Proceedings, Resolutions, and Reports, Michael Taber and Daria Dyakonova give us an unprecedented opportunity to do just that, as they bring to life the history of a remarkable movement.

This is in fact the ninth book in a series documenting the early Communist International (Comintern), initiated by John Riddell in 1983 when he set out, in Taber’s words, to “chronicle the development of this dynamic revolutionary undertaking in its own words and to show it as a living movement.” Taber and Dyakonova renew this commitment with an ambitious project detailing the early years of the Communist Women’s Movement (CWM), one of the most significant organizations established by the Comintern. They have brought together the entire set of proceedings, reports, and resolutions of the 1920 and 1921 conferences of the CWM in Moscow. This is paired with similar documents from the conference of the women of the Near East in Tiflis (today’s Tbilisi, Georgia) in December 1921, and reports from the conferences of women’s correspondents and the constituent parts of the CWM.