I went out to dinner Tuesday night with a female friend and as the hostess sat us down, she wished us a happy International Women’s Day. After I thanked her, she told us, unprompted, that she had lived in many countries in her life and that the United States was the first one where the day passed completely without notice. She said that normally, in other parts of the world, it’s a day for wild celebration. From personal experience, I knew this to be mainly true, and it’s always been something that perplexed me too.
It was the late ’90s when I discovered that International Women’s Day was a thing. I was studying abroad in Florence, and while I fully loved my time in the city, I also understood that my experiences as a young woman there were largely defined by sexism. It was an era when to venture out of your flat was to assume you’d receive catcalls, and to go to a nightclub was to anticipate some kind of sexual predation. At the time, I deemed it a culture more “backward” in this respect than what I knew at home in America.
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