International Women’s Day is celebrated on March 8 each year to connect and inspire women everywhere.
Club committee member and event organiser Dawn Perkins said the early celebration last Thursday was one of the largest events on their calendar.
The theme this year is #AccelerateAction. It underscores the importance of swift and decisive steps to achieve gender equality.
It calls for increased urgency in addressing systemic barriers and biases women face, both in personal and professional spheres.
The group gathered in the Moeraki Room, where the two guest speakers and club members, May Ludemann and Louis McMillan, spoke about their life experiences.
Both women related times when they found their identity as a woman overshadowed.
"When I was newly married and attended a women’s division of Federated Farmers in the hall at Herbert, I was announced as Mrs Ian McMillan.
"I had shared my surname, which was Wilcox. It was a real shock because I had lost my identity and my Christian name. That was a wake-up call for me, in the early ’60s," Mrs McMillan said.
Mrs Ludemann said when they moved to the Waitaki district in the 1950s, her husband, Harry Ludemann, was very reserved and she was the outgoing one, yet husbands were deemed "the important ones".
She talked of growing up with five sisters and three brothers and said her father would have "loved to have all girls".
She was grateful for her father, Norman Smillie, who she said "was ahead of his time in acknowledging women".
The Zonta Club of Oamaru also hosted a picnic for women’s day at Lakeside Oamaru last Saturday.
