International Women’s Day: banking on women

International Women’s Day was born in the New York sweat shops, where female textile workers suffered crowded, unsanitary conditions, long working days, and poverty wages. Highly skilled women were often trapped in a category known as ‘learners’, earning a fraction of the wages of the semi-skilled, and a pittance in comparison with the almost exclusively male pattern-makers and cutters. On 8 March 1908 hundreds of these women decided enough was enough. They gathered in Rutgers