What Happened on March 8?

March 8 is International Women's Day — celebrating girls and women everywhere! It's also when striking women helped change Russia forever in 1917, and when the first woman ever earned a pilot licence.

• 1910 — Raymonde de Laroche becomes the world's first licensed female pilot

  The Aéro-Club de France issued Baroness Raymonde de Laroche pilot licence #36 — making her the first woman in the world officially certified to fly an airplane. Read the full story →

• 1917 — Women textile workers strike in Petrograd, sparking revolution

  Thousands of women marched through Petrograd demanding bread — and their strike snowballed into the February Revolution that ended centuries of czarist rule in Russia. Read the full story →

• 1979 — Philips demonstrates the compact disc prototype

  Engineers in Eindhoven showed off a shiny new way to play music: a laser-reading disc that never wore out from touching — the ancestor of CDs, DVDs, and streaming's crisp sound. Read the full story →

Famous birthdays

Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932) · Olga Korbut (1955) · Freddie Prinze Jr. (1976) · James Van Der Beek (1977)

Days & observances

International Women's Day · National Proofreading Day