100 Years of International Women's Day

Portraits of Isala Van Diest, Belgium's first female physician, and Marie Popelin, Belgium's first female lawyer. Beneath the portraits, flanking the year '2011', their names and the symbols of their respective professions are struck. The mint director's mark and mint mark appear to either side of the country code 'BE' above.

International Women's Day traces back to resolutions passed at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Copenhagen in 1910 on the initiative of Clara Zetkin. As early as 1911, it was observed for the first time in several European countries - in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark, hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets to demand equal voting rights, the right to work and better working conditions. Belgium has its own distinctive place in this history: Isala Van Diest earned her medical degree in Bern in 1879, because Belgian universities did not yet admit women, and upon her return practised as the country's first female doctor. Marie Popelin passed her law degree with distinction in Brussels in 1888 - yet was still not permitted to practise as a lawyer. Only after a long legal battle that reached the Court of Cassation did the 1922 Women's Rights Act finally open the profession to women.

Both women exemplify a generation that refused to accept systematic legal exclusion, choosing instead to fight it publicly. Van Diest founded a women's clinic in Brussels and campaigned for healthcare for working-class women; Popelin co-founded the Belgian League for Women's Rights and played a key role in bringing the issue into civic public discourse. In 2011, on the occasion of the 100th International Women's Day, Belgium honoured both women with a joint coin issue - a tribute that grounds the struggle for equality not in the abstract, but in two concrete life stories.