It's Ladies' Day All Day Today

If you hadn't heard, today is a special day in Hungary. Nőnap - or nők napja - ("Women's Day") is one of those quasi-holidays that even for most locals comes and goes without more than a passing thought. But not here at Pestiside, where we take pride in our civic duties. So to help make your nőnap as rewarding and stimulating as possible, we'll be having an all-nők nap, featuring stories and ideas of special interest to women in Hungary, and people who live with, work with, know, like, dislike, fear or want to become a woman, meaning just about everyone.

Believe it or not, nőnap has been celebrated in Hungary for more than 90 years, having first turned up on the calendar in the first year of the First World War. The larger holiday of "International Woman's Day" was ginned up four years earlier, in 1910, at a meeting of the Socialist International in Copenhagen, whose participants wanted to show their respect for all the sisters fighting on the frontlines of the embryonic women's rights movement. While no date was chosen for the proposed International Women's Day, a year later women in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland enjoyed national days on the same day (March 19th). Then, in 1913, Russian women chose the last Sunday of February to protest for "bread and peace" and against the war. While the government didn't want the women to protest, the ladies refused to give in, and a few days later a set of sweeping political changes overtook the Tsarist government, and Russian women for the first time earned the right to vote. Women around Europe seized on the event, and quickly agreed that the International Women's Day be on the same day as the explosion of girl power in Russia, though adjusted for the differences in calendars. (February 23rd in Russia's crackpot Julian calendar is March 8th according to the Gregorian calendar.)

The rest, as they say, is history. While the nőnap brand may have suffered a bit due to its association with Communism - the stamp reproduced above gives you a good idea of how much the reds dug it - it has managed to survive, and is being celebrated throughout Hungary today by women and men of all ages, faiths, economic classes and political affiliations. So from all of us here at Pestiside, a big nőnapra óriási szeretettel to our women readers. Now, go out there girls, and bust some heads!