About how many people marked the first International Women's Day across Europe in 1911?

About one million people marked the first International Women’s Day across Europe in 1911. The events took place on 19 March in Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland, drawing more than a million women and men to meetings, marches, and demonstrations.

The day grew from a proposal made by Clara Zetkin and other socialist women at an international conference in Copenhagen in 1910. Their aim was to create an annual mobilization for women’s political and economic equality, especially voting rights.

The 1911 rallies were not simply celebratory gatherings. Participants demanded suffrage, access to public office, fair employment, and an end to discrimination at work. Austria-Hungary alone held hundreds of demonstrations, including a large procession in Vienna.

A common mix-up is the date: International Women’s Day was not always observed on 8 March. The date became fixed internationally only after later developments, including women’s demonstrations in Petrograd in 1917. The often-repeated story that it began with an 1857 New York garment-workers’ protest is also considered a later myth, not the event that founded the observance.