International Women’s Day is celebrated across the globe annually on March 8. We honor this day with a pair of photos demonstrating the power that women have achieved in the past 100 years.

Library of Congress	James Gordon
THEN	NOW

Taken circa 1910, this portrait of Elisabeth Freeman at a suffragette rally shows the tenacity of women struggling to attain voting rights. Freeman braved arrest and a brutal wintertime march, the Suffrage Hike, from New York City to President Wilson’s White House, in protest of the inability of women to vote.

Fast forward to 2005, where we witness an Iraqi woman having her finger inked after casting a vote at a polling station in Mosul, Iraq. The photographer, James Gordon (jamesdale10 on Flickr), was deployed to Iraq in 2005 as the Army Corps of Engineers Gulf Region Division (Baghdad) public affairs photographer, where he documented Corps reconstruction and new construction activities in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, including this historic vote.

Hind Fadhil, a young woman, called an American-run talk show, ”Your Voice,” from the Arab neighborhood of Islah Zirai, which residents of Mosul refer to as an insurgent stronghold, to explain why some on the west bank went to the polls despite the danger.

”We didn’t care,” she said. ”We just wanted to vote.” —New York Times, Feb. 3, 2005

See more photos from various Commons’ institutions that celebrate this great day of women.

Tags: International Womens Day, jamesdale10, Library of Congress

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Then and Now. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.