The origin of the Internationl Women’s Day is strictly connected to women’s strong demands for right to vote between the end of 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Saint Petersburg, on March 8, 1917, (February 23 according to the Julian calendar in force in Russia),  following a women’s protest asking to put an end to the war, the February Revolution started: for this reason the Second Communist Women’s International Conference, held in Moscow in 1921, chose that day as the common date for all countries to celebrate the International Women’s Day. However, during the Cold War period, the women’s protest in Saint Petersburg was actually turned into a mythological remembrance cerimony dedicated to a hundred women who had died in the fire of the shirt factory Cotton (inexistent) in New York in 1908.

Italy celebrated its first Women’s day in 1921 in agreement with the initiative of the newly founded Communist Party. Fascism stopped the women’s requests that were resumed only after the war mainly by the intervention of the Italian Women’s Union (Udi) and the Women’s Italian Center that introduced divorce and abortion in the seventies.

In 1977 the General Assembly of the United Nations asked all governments to fix  the date of March 8 to celebrate the “Day of the United Nations for women’s rights and international peace”.