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International Women’s Day (IWD) in Australia has lost its radical edge. In recent years, it has become more about holding cosy breakfasts and receptions where female bureaucrats and businesswomen can rub shoulders with political leaders and congratulate themselves on their “success”.

These events can make us forget that IWD has a radical socialist history of women determinedly marching for their rights. And once it even helped spark a revolution.

International Women’s Day (IWD) — originally called International Working Women’s Day — was first proposed in 1910 as an initiative of the socialist women’s movement. The following year, on March 19, 1911, IWD was marked for the first time, by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.

It is hard to distill what it is like to live in poverty into a few words, because poverty is so huge and complex, particularly for single mothers. On my own, it’s easy to feel powerless to do anything about it and as a woman the injustice of poverty makes me so angry. It makes me angry that in one of the most prosperous countries in the world, we have more than 600,000 children living in poverty. It makes me angry that right now there are women and children living in cars or in unsafe and insecure housing because rents have become impossible to manage.

Another International Women’s Day passes. It’s been 157 years since working women first took to the streets. Back then, thousands of women textile workers marched through the wealthy boroughs of New York, protesting their miserable working conditions.