Post Time: 2026-03-16

Why international womens day Feels Different Now Than It Did Back Then

The morning my granddaughter asked me what I was doing for international womens day, I was elbow-deep in bread dough, making the same loaf my mother taught me to bake forty years ago. I stopped, flour on my forearms, and really looked at her—sixteen years old, phone in hand, already planning something with her friends. At my age, you learn that the questions kids ask often reveal more about the world they're navigating than any answer you could give them.

Here's what gets me: international womens day has become this massive thing now. There's marketing, campaigns, corporations suddenly caring about women's empowerment for about fifteen minutes in March. I've seen trends come and go, and I know a performative gesture when I see one. But also—and here's where it gets complicated—I remember when March 8th meant nothing in this country. When my own mother worked double shifts at the hospital and never once got a thank-you card from HR. So yeah, something has shifted. I'm just not sure all of it is shift worth celebrating.

My grandmother always said that actions speak louder than any holiday ever could. She raised four kids during the Depression, kept a victory garden during the war, and never once asked for recognition. But she also knew the power of showing up for other women—when her neighbor needed help with childcare, she was there. When a young woman in the neighborhood needed a reference for a job, she wrote one. That's what community looked like back then, not hashtags.

Now I'm not saying we should go back to the era of silent suffering and expectations. Lord, no. I've spent my entire career watching women fight for basic respect in classrooms where they were supposed to be "the softer touch" with children. I remember when equal pay was a joke punchline. Things have changed in ways my grandmother couldn't have imagined. But I've also seen how easily a meaningful movement gets packaged, sold back to us, and stripped of anything that might make anyone uncomfortable.

The thing is, my granddaughter will never know what it was like to be told women shouldn't run marathons. Back in my day, we didn't have women running 5Ks for fun—we had women being told their bodies weren't designed for endurance. Now I run them with my granddaughter every spring, and she thinks nothing of it. That's progress. That's the kind of change worth marking.

So when she asked me what I was doing for international womens day, I wiped my hands on my apron, looked at her, and said: "I'm making bread. Same as every day. But I'll tell you what—we should do something together. Something that actually matters." Because that's the thing about this holiday now. It's not about what corporations tell us to celebrate. It's about what we decide matters, and whether we're willing to put in the work the rest of the year.

What international womens day Actually Means to a Generation That Remembers

Let me tell you what international womens day looked like when I was growing up in the 1960s: absolutely nothing. March 8th came and went like any other day. My mother went to work. My grandmother tended her garden. Nobody hung banners or posted online about women's strength. The strength was just there, invisible because it was so constant, so expected, that nobody thought to name it.

The first time I actually heard the phrase was in college, around 1977, and it felt radical just to say it out loud. There was a small gathering in the student union—maybe thirty women, mostly graduate students, some faculty. We talked about the wage gap, about reproductive rights, about the fact that women still couldn't get credit in their own names without a husband's signature. I remember thinking how strange it was that we needed a specific day to discuss what should be obvious every single day of the year.

But here's what I've learned in the decades since: sometimes you need a focal point. Sometimes you need a date on the calendar that forces people to pay attention, even if just for a moment. My grandmother would have called it "making a fuss," but she also knew that sometimes the fuss is what gets things moving.

Now, international womens day is everywhere. Banks change their logos. Clothing stores run sales "for strong women." Every brand suddenly discovers feminism like it's a new invention. And I get it—this is how awareness spreads. This is how younger generations learn that there was a time when things were different, when women couldn't own property, couldn't vote, couldn't dream of certain careers without being labeled difficult or worse.

But I've also seen trends come and go, and I've learned to be skeptical of anything that feels like it's been packaged for easy consumption. Real change is messy. It's arguments with family members, lost promotions, quiet perseverance through setback after setback. It's not a hashtag that trends for twenty-four hours.

What I appreciate about international womens day now is what younger women have made of it—the way they've claimed it, shaped it, turned it into something that includes intersectionality, that acknowledges the different struggles different women face. My mother never had those words. My grandmother certainly didn't. So even when the corporate pandering makes me want to scream, I recognize that something important is happening here, even if it's not quite what any of us would have imagined.

Digging Into What international womens Day Actually Promises vs. Delivers

When I actually sat down to think about what international womens day promises—the messaging, the campaigns, the whole aesthetic of empowerment that gets rolled out every March—I started making a list. I do this sometimes, when something feels bigger than it should be. I write down what it's claiming, then I write down what I'm actually seeing.

The promise: recognition of women's achievements across every field. The reality: one day of visibility followed by eleven months of the same unequal structures that got us here. The promise: solidarity among all women. The reality: complicated by race, class, sexuality, ability, geography. The promise: a moment of reflection on how far we've come. The reality: for many women, particularly older ones, it's a reminder of battles still being fought, just with different weapons.

I talked about this with my friend Dorothy over coffee last week—she's seventy-one, taught high school history for forty years, and has opinions that would make a corporate HR department weep. She said what I was thinking: "Grace, they give us one day and expect us to be grateful for the crumbs." She's not wrong. There's something hollow about a holiday that asks women to celebrate their resilience without asking what they're resilient against.

But then I also started thinking about my granddaughter, about the girls on her track team, about the confidence with which they expect to compete, to lead, to take up space. That didn't exist in a vacuum. That came from decades of women making noise, demanding to be seen, creating moments like international womens day even when the celebration felt inadequate.

Here's what gets me about the whole thing: I've seen trends come and go, and the ones that stick around are the ones that have teeth. The international womens day of my college years had teeth—it was tied to activism, to organizing, to real demands. The version we have now is softer, more palatable, easier to monetize. But maybe that's also what makes it accessible to more people. Maybe accessibility is its own form of progress.

I don't know. At my age, I've learned that wanting something to be perfect is a fast track to disappointment. The question isn't whether international womens day is everything it should be—it's whether it's moving us in a direction worth going, even if the path is messier than the marketing suggests.

Breaking Down What Actually Works About international womens day

Let's be fair: there are things about international womens day that actually work, that serve a purpose, that I can appreciate even through my skepticism. And there are things that are pure garbage, that make me want to throw my coffee mug at the television every time a car commercial tries to tell me about "strong women."

The Good: It creates a touchpoint. For young women who don't know the history, who didn't grow up with mothers and grandmothers who fought these battles, having a specific day forces a conversation. My granddaughter asked me about it—that's valuable. That's intergenerational knowledge passing down in the most organic way possible: through a question, over bread dough, in a kitchen that smells like yeast and possibility.

The Good: It normalizes talking about women's issues. Even when the conversation is surface-level, even when it's wrapped in corporate branding, the fact that we're talking about women's contributions, women's challenges, women's futures at all is better than silence. Back in my day, we didn't have these conversations in mainstream spaces. You kept your head down, did your work, and hoped things would change slowly enough that you could adapt.

The Good: It sparks action. I've seen women use international womens day as a launchpad for year-round organizing, for mentorship programs, for community initiatives. The day becomes a catalyst, not a conclusion. That's how change actually happens—not in the celebration itself, but in what grows from it.

The Bad: The commercialization is out of control. Every company suddenly cares about women's empowerment, but only in March, and only if it doesn't require anything uncomfortable like examining their own pay structures or leadership pipelines.

The Bad: It can feel like a participation trophy for progress we've already made. We celebrate the holiday but skip the harder work of actually achieving equity in our institutions, our homes, our relationships.

Here's my honest assessment: international womens day is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used well or used poorly. It can be a genuine moment of recognition or it can be empty performance. What I've learned from decades of watching trends come and go is that the tool itself doesn't matter as much as what you do with it.

My Final Verdict on Whether international womens day Still Matters

So here's my final take on international womens day, after all these weeks of thinking about it, talking about it, watching my granddaughter navigate her version of it while I navigate mine.

I don't need to live forever, I just want to keep up with my grandkids—and I want the world they inherit to be one where they don't have to fight the same battles I fought. That's what this holiday should be about, in my opinion. Not the marketing, not the hashtags, not the corporate virtue signaling. Just that simple, stubborn hope: that the next generation has it easier than the last.

Will I participate in international womens day? Sure. I'll talk to my granddaughter about it. I'll share some of the stories my mother told me, the ones about women who worked in the shadows, who got no credit, who built things that still stand today. I'll probably make that bread again—there's something powerful about continuing traditions that connect us to the women who came before.

But I won't pretend it's enough. That's the thing about being sixty-seven years old: you've seen enough to know that holidays are starting points, not finishing lines. The work happens the other three hundred sixty-four days a year. It happens when you mentor a younger teacher who doesn't know she can demand better conditions. It happens when you call out sexist behavior in your own family, even when it's uncomfortable. It happens when you vote, when you speak up, when you refuse to accept "that's just how it is" as an answer.

international womens day is a marker on the calendar. What you do with the rest of your time is what actually counts.

The Bottom Line: Where Does international womens Day Actually Fit Now

After all this consideration—and I've been thinking about this for weeks now, turning it over in my mind like a student essay that almost makes the grade but needs more work—here's where I land on international womens day.

It fits as a starting point, nothing more. It's useful for what it can spark: conversations between generations, moments of reflection, visibility for achievements that might otherwise go unrecognized. My grandmother would have called it "a fine beginning" and then immediately asked what came next. She was never interested in celebrations that didn't lead to action.

What concerns me is when people treat the day itself as the achievement. When they post their International Women's Day messages and feel like they've done their part. That's the trap—that's where the holiday becomes what I distrust most: a way to feel good about progress without actually pushing for more.

But here's what's give me hope: my granddaughter and her friends don't see it that way. They see it as a platform, a conversation starter, a reminder that there's still work to do. They ask questions—good questions, hard questions—and they're not satisfied with easy answers. That's what I was like at their age, too. That hunger for something real, something that matches the complexity of the world.

I don't need to live forever. I just want to keep up with my grandkids, to understand their world even if I don't always agree with it. And in that world, international womens day will continue to evolve, to mean different things to different people, to spark arguments and collaborations and all the messy, beautiful chaos of actual human connection.

The question isn't whether the holiday is perfect. Nothing is. The question is whether we're willing to do the harder work that comes after the celebration ends. My grandmother always said that talk is cheap and action is expensive. She was right about that. She was right about most things, really.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have bread to finish. And my granddaughter is coming over tomorrow—we're going for a run, then maybe we'll talk more about what International Women's Day means to her. I'm curious to hear her answer. I'm always curious to hear what the next generation has to say. They just might surprise us all.

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