Kmflett's Blog

Not cancelling history but remembering it: International Women’s Day, still getting Hidden from History

International Women’s Day 2026 comes not so long before the 60th anniversary of the first women’s liberation conference held at Ruskin College, Oxford.

A key impetus for the conference came from a women’s history strand organised in History Workshop events in the late 1960s. A key figure in that was Sheila Rowbotham who has written a number of important books about women’s history including Hidden From History

If historical memory is not refreshed what is known by activists in one generation can disappear in the next. How many will recall that one of the key figures behind IWD was the German Communist Clara Zetkin. A link below provides a brief summary of a London Socialist Historians Seminar on her writings from 2016

Likewise how well remembered currently is someone like Alexandra Kollontai a pioneering socialist feminist who served in the Bolshevik Government in Russia after 1917.

Much historical work as ever to be done.