Learn about the history of the International Women’s Day Committee (IWDC) by checking out our Women’s Unite Interview with Cynthia Wright!
This audio-only interview focuses on the international solidarity politics of the International Women’s Day Committee (IWDC) during the 1980s. It explores how an engagement with liberation struggles in Central America, South Africa, Palestine, and Ireland shaped the debates and struggles that were unfolding in Toronto and Canada, thereby challenging any easy distinction among different geopolitical scales of politics whether local, national, or international. Cynthia Wright joined IWDC as a young woman in the early 1980s. She provides basic interpretive frameworks for those unfamiliar with this history, while emphasizing the partial and tentative nature of her account, given the richness of this history, the range of actors, and the breadth of organizing in this period.
“It was clearly an anti-capitalist organisation as well as a feminist one, but it didn’t necessarily explicitly identify as socialist, and that came at a certain transition moment in the group as well. It became part of the basis of unity.”
– Cynthia Wright