Wemen’s Day

According to a common version of the holiday’s origins, it was established in 1907, to mark the 50th anniversary of a brutally repressed protest by New York City’s female garment and textile workers. But there’s a problem with that story: Neither the 1857 protest nor the 50th-anniversary tribute may have actually taken place. In fact, research that emerged in the 1980s suggested that the origin myth was invented in the 1950s, as part of a Cold War-era effort to separate International Women’s Day from its socialist roots.