“A Clean Break”: Clara Zetkin, the Socialist Women’s Movement, and Feminism

ABSTRACT

The movement of proletarian women of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and by extension of the Second International (1889–1914), was structured by Clara Zetkin around the principle of a “clean break” between the women of the exploiting and exploited classes, which laid the programmatic foundations for the development of a mass movement of socialist working women that eventually grew to have 174,754 members in 1914. This movement, whose central axis was the magazine Die Gleichheit edited by Zetkin, had as its central organizational proposition the idea that Marxism, as a working-class political tendency, and feminism, as a multi-class movement, were incompatible, and that therefore working-class women had to have their own organizations within socialist parties which also included working-class men. The International Socialist Women’s Movement, which celebrated its first conference in Stuttgart in 1907 and adopted universal female suffrage as its central transitional slogan, was responsible for the proclamation of International Women’s Day by the Second International Socialist Women’s Conference held in Copenhagen in 1910. The Russian Revolution started with demonstrations organized by the working women of Petrograd to celebrate International Women’s Day. The article closes with a brief assessment of the legacy of the proletarian women’s movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Clara Zetkin
• German social democracy
• socialist women’s international
• Russian Revolution

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Daniel Gaido is a researcher at the National Research Council (Conicet), Argentina. He is the author of The Formative Period of American Capitalism (Routledge, 2006) and co-editor, together with Richard B. Day, of Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record (Brill, 2009) and Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I (Brill, 2009).

Cintia Frencia is an assistant professor of Contemporary History at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. Her main area of research is the history of the socialist and communist women’s movement. Her publications include the book El marxismo y la liberación de lasmujerestrabajadoras: de la Internacional de Mujeres Socialistas a la Revolución Rusa (Santiago de Chile: Ariadna Ediciones, 2016), and academic articles on the socialist origins of International Women’s Day and on the policy of the Bolshevik government for the eradication of prostitution.

ORCID

Daniel Gaido http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9660-4834

Notes

1. Alternatively Zetkin employed the (also pejorative) term Frauenrechtelei (see Zetkin 1902, 1904).

2. From Zetkin’s perspective, the concept of “socialist feminism” is but an oxymoron, since women have to choose between a working-class socialist perspective for their liberation, which must necessarily go beyond the framework of bourgeois society in order to socialize household work, and a “female popular front” comprised of women of all classes, which must necessarily restrict its demands to obtaining as many rights as possible for women within capitalist society.

3. An English version of Zetkin’s letter of protest to the Vorwärts of January 12, 1895, and of the Vorwärts editors’ reply of January 25, 1895, appear in Zetkin (2015, 60–71), under the title “Concerning the Women’s Rights Petition.”

4. German Social Democrats were almost alone in their continued opposition to the repressive Civil Code. In a speech at the Reichstag delivered on January 13, 1898, Bebel called for the decriminalization of homosexuality by eliminating Paragraph 175, in support of the petition promoted by the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee created by Magnus Hirschfeld the previous year (Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 1898, 410).

5. Käte Duncker (1871–1953) was, together with Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, one of the founding members of the Spartacus League and of the German Communist Party. She was the author of a brochure on child labor called Die Kinderarbeit und ihre Bekämpfung (1906).

6. The autobiography of Ottilie Baader (1847–1925), a textile worker since the age of 13 and one of the leaders of the German Social Democratic women’s movement and of the Socialist Women’s International, closes in 1908, with the abolition of the laws that forbid the women in Prussia from belonging to political parties and from holding assemblies (Baader 1921).

7. Legien finally carried out his threat and launched a chauvinist working women’s journal edited by the union federation, the Gewerkschaftliche Frauenzeitung, in January 1916 (Sachse 2010, 110–112).

8. For data on the socialist movement of working women in other countries, such as Austria-Hungary, Finland, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom, see Evans (1977).

9. Kollontai noted both the opposition of the Austrians to female suffrage (on the ground that it would hinder the introduction of universal male suffrage) and the opposition of the Socialist Parties of the Latin countries to universal female suffrage, based on the alleged spiritual hold of the Catholic priesthood on peasant and working women. She criticized,

all the arguments advanced by the Austrians to the effect that the “obstinacy” of the Social-Democrats only served to make political gains by the proletariat more difficult to achieve, all the arguments of the representatives of Catholic countries—Belgium and France—that the influence of clericalism would allegedly increase with the involvement of women in politics and would lead to a regrouping of parliamentary representation to the disadvantage of the working class. (Kollontai [[1907−1916] 1984, 45)

10. For Zetkin’s speech at the International Socialist Congress held in Stuttgart on August 18, 1907, see Zetkin (2015, 99–107); for Lenin’s assessment of the Stuttgart Congress see Lenin ([1907] 1972).

11. In order to visualize the progress made by the working women’s movement in the two decades before the outbreak of the First World War, let us recall that 18 years earlier, in 1892, the German trade union federation reported 237,094 members, of which only 4355 (1.84%) were women (Sachse 2010, 54).

12. See the documents of the Bern Conference as well as a description of the proceedings by one of the Bolshevik delegates, Olga Ravich, published in Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia, no. 10, 1925, in Gankin and Fisher (1940, 286–301).

13. On the role of the main Russian feminist organization, the League for Women’s Equal Rights, during the Russian Revolution see Goldberg (2001).

14. English edition in The Marriage Laws of Soviet Russia (Russian Soviet Government Bureau 1921).

15. On the Bolsheviks’ struggle to eradicate prostitution see Kollontai ([1921] 1978), Quigley (1991) and Bronner (1936).

16. On the activities of the Women’s Section of the Comintern see further Marie (2003).