March 8 is International Women's Day, and March is Women's History Month. Should you buy candies and flowers for your wife or mother? Join other women and march for economic and social justice? Or perhaps do nothing and hope that nobody notices you haven't a clue about why this date and month are celebrated? Consider another alternative: Find out what it's all about.

International Women's Day and Women's History Month are among the few holidays that have remained relatively uncommercialized in the United States. No advertisements tell you what to buy, how to celebrate, or why you should do so. Yet these March commemorations reveal a great deal about the role women have played in history -- as well as about how women have struggled to preserve their history.

International Women's Day (as it was then called) was first proposed by the German socialist and the feminist leader Clara Zetkin, but it was first celebrated in the United States, on February 23, 1909 when socialist working women declared it a holiday. Their goal, according to their slogan, was to win bread and roses: As labor activists, they wanted to improve the conditions under which women worked; as women, they wanted respect.

Just a few years later, Russian women led protests among starving people on the bread lines and worked in the factories, igniting the February 1917 Revolution. Nudged by his comrade Zetkin, Lenin formally proclaimed International Women's Day a holiday in 1922. (It was set on what, in our calendar, was March 8.) Eventually, all Communist countries celebrated the day. That, in turn, yoked it too closely to socialism to be observed in the United States; International Women's Day vanished for decades into obscurity, honored by only a handful of activists and labor organizers who remained dedicated to gaining social and economic justice for women workers.

That is, until the modern women's movement sent feminist diving into history, searching for connections to their past. They were looking for models, for inspiration, for traditions on which they could build a movement.

Then, on March 8, 1969, some 50 Berkeley feminists paraded through their city dressed in early-20th-century costumes. They took as their slogan "Bread and Roses," the phrase American working women had first used in 1909.

As the modern women's movement swept across the United States, so too did recognition of International Women's Day. By 1970, 30 cities and towns were celebrating the day; by 1978, many elementary and secondary schools were doing so. Even in the midst of the cold war, despite its earlier associations with socialism, March 8 became an officially recognized holiday. That was a testimony to the growing strength of the U.S. women's movement.

Meanwhile, feminist activists and historians were agitating for all of March to be celebrated as Women's History Month. How they brought that about reveals the extraordinary effort, and confluence and cross-fertilization among various feminist activists and institutions, that gave rise to the modern women's movement.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy had created a Commission on the Status of Women to gather data on the economic, political, and social situation of women in the United States. That commission inspired commissions in all 50 states, which in turn, led to county and city commissions. Armed with data collected by those commissions, women activists lobbied for legislation and public-policy changes to improve their lives at home and in the workplace.

Molly MacGregor worked on the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women in California during the 1970's. Neither a professional historian nor academic, MacGregor had been contemplating how to promote a week that honored women's history. Three thousand miles away, in New York, Professors Gerda Lerner and Joan Kelly, two pioneers in women's history, created a graduate program in the field at Sarah Lawrence College in 1972. Five years later, Lerner organized a Summer Institute on Women's History, which brought together 45 women representing the leaders of 37 national women's organizations for 17 days of study. Lerner believed that women needed to know about their past -- to know what analyses and organizational strategies had and had not worked -- to be effective in the present. Without that knowledge, she warned, the women's movement might fail to build on gains already made. Molly MacGregor was one of the women at the summer institute.

According to Lerner, MacGregor and the other students at the institute decided to build on the celebration of the International Women's Day and to adopt as their class project the goal of creating an annual Women's History Week. To do that, they needed a resolution passed by both houses of congress, and a declaration signed by the president.

Inspired by her experience, MacGregor returned to California, where she and other activists formed the National Women's History Project. The project, which now circulates curricula on women's history to million of children, from kindergarten through Grade 12, successfully lobbied Congress to recognize Women's History Week in 1981. In 1987 women activists got Congress to expand that week to a month.

And that's how we came to celebrate International Women's Day, which was created to honor the lives of working women, as part of a month long celebration of all aspects of women's lives. With the fall of Communism, International Women's Day has shed the last of its cold-war associations, and has spread around the world. As it has done so, it has been defining women's rights as basic human rights.

Now . . . you can barely pass a bookstore that hasn't stuffed its windows full of books on women's history. Nor can you go to a college or university without noting events that commemorate both International Women's day and Women's History Month, and without noting courses and readings on women's history.

It's all too easy to take our successes for granted. Knowing about International Women's Day and Women's History Month reminds us of the battles women had to fight to gain recognition for themselves and their past. Nothing is set in concrete; gains can be lost. Every new generation must remember and build on the struggle.

All social movements invent traditions. Indeed, all countries invent traditions through which they celebrate their national identity. The modern women's movement both resurrected and invented traditions through which women could be accorded greater visibility in the past, and therefore, in the present and the future.

So what should you do to celebrate the month of March? There are as many answers as there are stories from the past. At the very least, pass on these traditions, tell your colleagues, friends, and families about them, and, in the truest sense of being an educator, show them that the past can set them free.

Ruth Rosen, a professor of history at the University of California at Davis, is the author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (Viking Penguin, 2000).