On 17 August 1907, fifty-eight delegates from European and overseas countries met at the first International Socialist Women's Conference at Stuttgart and decided to establish an international secretariat with Clara Zetkin of Germany in charge. The Conference adopted a resolution on women's franchise, which was to become the starting point of an untiring struggle for women's political rights.

This stand on women's franchise was endorsed by the great Socialist Congress which followed the women's conference. At that time, various types of women's organisations existed, but most of them still weak. Some trade unions catered for women, but the wage rates for women were very much lower than those paid to men. In most states the women had no political rights whatever. There were exceptions: in Finland and Norway the franchise for women had already been won. One of the Finnish delegates to the Stuttgart Conference, Hilja Parssinen, was a member of parliament. At the Stuttgart Conference a woman delegate from India, mentioned as comrade Rama from Bombay, and the Japanese delegate, Tokyiro Kato, spoke of the unimaginable poverty, exploitation and lack of rights of women in their countries.

The second conference, which took place in Copenhagen 1910 adopted a resolution to set one day in the year aside as International Women's Day and on that day agitate for women's suffrage and the political emancipation of women. The conference adopted also a resolution on peace. Socialist International Women's plea for peace in 1910 was timely, but it could not stop events. In 1912 the Socialist International held an extraordinary conference in Basle to monitor peace and ask for an end to the Balkan war. Clara Zetkin gave a much applauded speech at this conference: Socialist women of all countries, she said, fight in indestructible unity with the Socialist International against the war. The modern war is mass destruction and mass killing. But war is only the expansion of the mass killing that capitalism is perpetrating every hour of every day against the proletariat. Year after year, there fall on the battlefield of work in the capitalist developed nations, hundreds of thousands of victims, more victims than in any war. Women are a growing number of these victims. War is only the maddest form of mass exploitation through capitalism. It is the sons of the proletariat who are led against each other, to kill each other. Women and mothers deplore such a crime but do not think only of the mutilated bodies of their own relatives, they also think of the emasculating of souls.

War threatens all that mothers have taught their children about solidarity and international community. Women can fill their children with profound feelings against war, but this does not mean that women are not willing to make sacrifices. They know that it is necessary to fight and to die in the struggle for freedom. Both fights, the fight against war and the fight for freedom, cannot be fought without women. With the appeal "Krieg dem Krieg" (war against war), she closed her speech.

After the first world war the women's movement was restructured. In 1925, Edith Kemmis then took charge of the Women's Secretariat in Zurich, under the guidance of Friedrich Adler, Secretary of the Labour and Socialist International, who valiantly supported the women's cause.

Martha Tausk, Member of Parliament in Styria, took over the post of International Women's Secretary in 1928 and gave it up only in 1934, at the time of the persecutions against the Austrian Socialists when many of them had to go into exile. A year later, the Secretariat of the International was moved to Brussels and Alice Pels was the secretary till 1940.

The themes discussed at conferences between the two world wars, were 'Women and Mobilisation', 'Women and Fascism' and 'The Economic Crisis'. The outbreak of the second world war made the work of the International impossible. Once again the organisation was destroyed. In March 1941, Mary Sutherland and the British Labour Women organised an International Women's Day where comrades of the countries under fascist regimes held speeches in their mother tongue. This was the last International meeting of women for some time.

In 1955 the International Council of Social Democratic Women was founded, following a series of international women's conferences demanding the renewal of the movement. The name of the organisation was changed to its present name Socialist International Women in 1978.