Rebel women: Clara Zetkin

Zetkin (centre) and Rosa Luxemburg in 1910 (Picture: Wikimedia commons)

Clara Zetkin saw the struggles for socialism and for women’s liberation as two sides of the same coin.

Zetkin was born in 1857 in a small village in Saxony, one of the most industrialised parts of Germany and a birthplace of its socialist movement. 

Aged 21, she joined the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany—forerunner of the then Marxist SPD. 

Only six months later, the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck pushed through a series of “anti-socialist laws” that banned the SPD and its press. She was thrust into illegal activity and, eventually, exile for ten years. Zetkin went first to Austria and then to Zurich in Switzerland, a base for the SPD to smuggle socialist literature back into Germany.

In 1891, she returned to Germany and began editing the SPD’s women’s newspaper Gleichheit (Equality). She rose to prominence in the SPD and the socialist women’s movement in Germany and internationally.

German law banned women from being part of political organisations and public meetings. But socialist women like Zetkin found creative ways to get around the laws. Luise Zietz, an SPD member, said, “A male comrade spoke for ten minutes from the top table, and then I participated in the discussion from the floor, by speaking for one and a half hours.”

Zetkin had a deep understanding of the many ways that sexism shapes women’s lives. 

One of her essays, The Servant Girls’ Movement, looked at the sexual abuse and exploitation that women servants suffered at the hands of their masters. And she argued that socialists had to take up their struggles.  

Zetkin combined her analysis of oppression with an understanding of why class was the key divide in capitalist society. When she proposed International Women’s Day in 1907, it was to celebrate the struggles of women workers against the system. 

Zetkin understood that women of all classes experienced oppression. She described how a ruling class woman “by virtue of her possession of property, can freely develop her individuality—she can live in accordance with her inclinations”.

But such a woman was still “legally subjected to the man” as a wife. “The wife is tired of living like a doll in a doll house, where she wants to take part in the broader development of modern culture,” she wrote. And she said that the “strivings of the bourgeois feminists are entirely justified” on such questions.

But Zetkin argued ruling class women didn’t have the same interests as working class women, because they had a stake in the system that perpetuates sexism. 

For her, the working class was a social force with a unique power to take on the capitalist system. “The emancipation of women as well of all humankind will only occur within the framework of the emancipation of labour from capital,” she wrote. 

But, if the working class movement was divided by sexism, there would never be a socialist revolution. 

She wrote, “Just as the working class can achieve its emancipation only if it fights together without distinction of nationality, it can achieve its emancipation only if it holds together without distinction of sex.”

Zetkin was part of bitter rows in the women’s movement in Germany, which was divided among socialists and liberal feminists.

She also had to take on some of her own SPD comrades. The SPD was divided into three tendencies. On the right were the “revisionists” who argued revolution was no longer necessary to achieve socialism. A “centrist” tendency spoke the language of Marxism but had abandoned its core of working class self-emancipation. 

On the left, revolutionary socialists like Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg battled against this right wing drift. 

These divisions ran through the socialist women’s movement, with the right “revisionists” wanting to make cross-class alliances with the liberals. The right hated the fact that Zetkin used the pages of Gleichheit to argue against them, saying the paper should have more fashion and cooking supplements.

The SPD’s adaptations to working through the capitalist state saw it back German imperialism when the First World War broke out in 1914.

As part of a minority of revolutionary socialists in the SPD, Zetkin argued against the war and imperialism. “To have been silent would have been to assume an attitude of undignified cowardice,” she wrote.

Revolution—in Russia in 1917 and then Germany in 1918—ended the war and Zetkin broke with the SPD and joined the Communist KPD.

The failure of the German Revolution fuelled the rise of fascism in Germany, and she developed a path-breaking analysis of fascism with the book Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win.

By the late 1920s, as Stalinist counter-revolution buried the gains of 1917 in Russia, she was ill and spent much of her time in hospitals in the Soviet Union. 

But she returned to Germany one last time in 1932 to bravely denounce the Nazis in parliament as they prepared to take power. 

We are publishing a new article as part of our Rebel Women series every day in the run up to International Women’s Day next week