People always like to be more politically correct than others. It is, therefore, quite usual to have an assortment of urban men ? smart or eccentric, successful or sombre ? dismissing International Women?s Day as tokenism in a struggle that should be on all the time, or as a self-defeating way of underlining inferiority, or just a plain attention-drawing trick. ?We always treat them as equals,? they claim, ?by defining themselves as an endangered species they merely lose respect.? Since these gentlemen have had the privilege of an education, it is rather startling to find that to them International Women?s Day is little better than a politically correct version of Mother?s Day, on which women expect to be treated as special and equal at the same time, or to be coddled and revered in alternating bursts. But it is also a sad indication of how obscure the radical beginnings of this day have become. Yet the women?s struggles that grew to an irresistible movement for better working conditions and pay, for equality, voting rights, ?bread and peace? all over the Western world, began and flowered only at the turn of the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries. Is it so easy to forget how ordinary women in their thousands joined hands across lands and cultures to make history, especially since that history is still in the making?

It is precisely because of the sense of an emerging, changing history, of an ongoing struggle, which has now taken as many forms as there are countries, regions and populations, that an annual stock-taking is important. For another segment of the population ? totally unlike the confident urban Indian male just mentioned ? this explanation is more acutely relevant today than ever before. With the spread of the women?s movement in India, the underprivileged working woman, in the villages and small towns, is asking what the International Women?s Day means, what it has to do with her. To be able to locate her place in this particular strand of history is one of the many ways in which she can arm herself in the fight against everyday violence, oppression and discrimination. This is especially significant in a society like India?s, where the women?s movement has developed with remarkable power in spite of the extraordinary hurdles it has had to, and still has to, overcome. The sceptical gentlemen may think about that.