17.3 Socialism and Women: Clara Zetkin, The German Socialist Women’s Movement, 1909
Marxist socialism focused largely on issues of class, but that movement coincided with the emergence of feminism, giving rise to what many socialists called “the woman question.” The main theoretical issue was the source of female subjugation. Did it derive from private property and the class structure of capitalist society, or was it the product of deeply rooted cultural attitudes independent of class? While middle-class feminists generally assumed the second view, orthodox Marxist thinking aligned with the first one, believing that the lack of economic independence was the root cause of women’s subordination. Their liberation would follow, more or less automatically, after the creation of socialist societies. On a more practical level, the question was whether socialist parties should seek to enroll women by actively supporting their unique concerns—suffrage, equal pay, education, maternity insurance. Or did such efforts divide the working class and weaken the socialist movement? Should socialists treat women as members of an oppressed class or as members of an oppressed sex? Among the leading figures addressing such issues was Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), a prominent German socialist and feminist. In Source 17.3, Zetkin outlines the efforts of the German Social Democratic Party to reach out to women and describes the party’s posture toward middle-class feminism.
- How would you describe Zetkin’s view of the relationship between socialism and feminism? Which one has priority, in her thinking?
- Why is she so insistent that the Social Democratic Party of Germany address the concerns of women? How precisely did it do so?
- Why does she believe that women’s issues will be better served within a socialist framework than in a bourgeois women’s rights movement?
- How might critics—both feminist and socialist—argue with Zetkin?
The German Socialist Women’s Movement
In 1907 the Social-Democratic Party of Germany [SDP] embraced 29,458 women members, in 1908 they numbered 62,257…. One hundred and fifty lecture and study circles for women have been established…. Socialist propaganda amongst the workers’ wives and women wage-earners has been carried on by many hundred public meetings, in which women comrades addressed more particularly working-class women….
The women’s office works now in conjunction with the Party’s Executive…. They are to make a vigorous propaganda that the wage-earning women shall in large numbers exercise the franchise to the administrative bodies of the State Sick-Insurance, the only kind of franchise women possess in Germany. The women comrades were further engaged to form local committees for the protection of children…. Besides this, Socialist women were reminded to found and improve protective committees for women workers, and collect their grievances on illegal and pernicious conditions of labor, forwarding them to the factory inspector.
Besides their activity in that line, the Socialist women have continued their propaganda in favor of the full political emancipation of their sex. The struggle for universal suffrage … was a struggle for adult suffrage for both sexes, vindicated in meetings and leaflets…. The work of our trade unions to enlighten, train, and organize wage-earning women is not smaller nor less important than what the S.D.P. has done to induce women to join in political struggles of the working class….
The most prominent feature of the Socialist women’s movement in Germany is its clearness and revolutionary spirit as to Socialist theories and principles. The women who head it are fully conscious that the social fate of their sex is indissolubly connected with the general evolution of society…. The integral human emancipation of all women depends in consequence on the social emancipation of labor; that can only be realized by the class-war of the exploited majority. Therefore, our Socialist women oppose strongly the bourgeois women righters’ credo that the women of all classes must gather into an unpolitical, neutral movement striving exclusively for women’s rights. In theory and practice they maintain the conviction that the class antagonisms are much more powerful, effective, and decisive than the social antagonisms between the sexes…. [T]hus the working-class women will [only] win their full emancipation … in the class war of all the exploited, without difference of sex, against all who exploit, without difference of sex. That does not mean at all that they undervalue the importance of the political emancipation of the female sex. On the contrary, they employ much more energy than the German women-righters to conquer the suffrage. But the vote is, according to their views, not the last word and term of their aspirations, but only a weapon—a means in struggle for a revolutionary aim—the Socialistic order.
The Socialist women’s movement in Germany … strives to help change the world by awakening the consciousness and the will of working-class women to join in performing the most Titanic deed that history will know: the emancipation of labor by the laboring class themselves.
Source: Clara Zetkin, The German Socialist Women’s Movement (1909; Marxists Internet Archive, 2007), http://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1909/10/09.htm.