Seriously? Women's Day?
Michel Heitzmann
© Michel Heitzmann - Le fardeau
This started as a Reddit post in r/changemyview. The thread got 3,500 views in the first hour and 13 comments. Several of them changed how I wrote this.
Women’s Day is bullshit. It should not exist.
That was my opening on Reddit. I meant it as a provocation. The responses taught me something.
But let me start where I actually started.
I grew up in Brazil. Lived in the US. Then Western Europe. March 8th passed unnoticed. A mention somewhere, perhaps. Nothing I can remember.
Then I worked in Central and Eastern Europe.
Moscow. Skopje. Bucharest. Sibiu. Sofia. Novosibirsk. You could not ignore it. I tried. I knew its origins — socialist, Soviet, instrumentalised. But flowers appeared on desks. Small gestures. Genuine warmth. To ignore it was not progressive. It was rude.
These societies had lived through things the comfortable West had not. They understood something we had sanitised out of existence.
I found that interesting. And humbling.
We are in 2026. A day set aside to acknowledge half of humanity should feel unnecessary. Patronising even. Most of us hold that hope. That one day the gesture becomes redundant.
Then I remember Switzerland.
My country of birth. The country that projects the peak of civilised governance. Precision. Neutrality. Order.
Swiss women got the federal vote on national matters in 1971.
Not 1871. Not 1921. 1971. Two years after Woodstock. Three years after 1968 shook the world — Paris, Prague, Chicago, MLK, RFK. All of that. And Swiss women still couldn’t vote federally.
And that was only the federal vote. Women in Appenzell Innerrhoden could not vote on local matters until 1990. Not 1890. 1990. The year the web was invented. The year Mandela walked free.
The Federal Supreme Court had to force it.
On Reddit, someone told me Women’s Day was invented by the UN in 1975 and was always just politics. Another pointed out it predates that — socialist movements, 1910, Clara Zetkin. A third said the date itself is arbitrary and the whole thing is performative.
They were not wrong about any of it.
And yet.
Switzerland. 1971. The Supreme Court. 1990.
The question is not whether Women’s Day is ideologically pure. Nothing is. The question is what we do with it.
Flowers. Acknowledgement. Presence. Not a lecture. Not a campaign. Not a brand turning its logo pink for 24 hours.
One day to remember what the other 364 forget.
The world is loud. That’s why silence and awareness matter.
I write about silence, attention, and what we choose to carry. If that interests you, you’re in the right place.