Women and the Industrial World

CLARA ZETKIN, Women’s Work and the Trade Unions (1887)

German socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin (1857–1933) was an influential politician and women’s suffragist from 1878 until her forced exile by the Nazi regime shortly before her death. A friend of many prominent German radicals including Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the German Social Democratic (i.e., Socialist) Party, Zetkin was part of the first generation of modern European feminists. Like their British, French, and American counterparts, late-nineteenth-century German feminists—most of them, like Zetkin, from middle-class backgrounds—devoted the bulk of their energies to obtaining the vote. Zetkin founded the German social democratic women’s movement and, for more than twenty-five years, edited the Social Democratic Party’s women’s newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality).

It is not just the women workers who suffer because of the miserable payment of their labor. The male workers, too, suffer because of it. As a consequence of their low wages, the women are transformed from mere competitors into unfair competitors who push down the wages of men. Cheap women’s labor eliminates the work of men and if the men want to continue to earn their daily bread, they must put up with low wages. Thus women’s work is not only a cheap form of labor, it also cheapens the work of men and for that reason it is doubly appreciated by the capitalist, who craves profits. The economic advantages of the industrial activity of proletarian women only aid the tiny minority of the sacrosanct guild of coupon clippers and extortionists of profit.

Given the fact that many thousands of female workers are active in industry, it is vital for the trade unions to incorporate them into their movement. In individual industries where female labor plays an important role, any movement advocating better wages, shorter working hours, etc., would be doomed from the start because of the attitude of those women workers who are not organized. Battles which began propitiously enough, ended up in failure because the employers were able to play off non-union female workers against those that are organized in unions. These non-union workers continued to work (or took up work) under any conditions, which transformed them from competitors in dirty work to scabs [nonunion strikebreakers].

Certainly one of the reasons for these poor wages for women is the circumstances that female workers are practically unorganized. They lack the strength which comes with unity. They lack the courage, the feeling of power, the spirit of resistance, and the ability to resist which is produced by the strength of an organization in which the individual fights for everybody and everybody fights for the individual. Furthermore, they lack the enlightenment and the training which an organization provides.

From Clara Zetkin, “Women’s Work and the Trade Unions” in Clara Zetkin, Selected Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1984), pp. 54-56.