Clara Zetkin

German political and social theorist

• Born: July 5, 1857
• Birthplace: Wiederau, Saxony
• Died: June 20, 1933
• Place of death: Arkhangelskoye, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

With Friedrich Engels and August Bebel, Zetkin pioneered a Marxist analysis of women’s status in a capitalist society. Her objective was to create a new social order free of political and economic oppression.

Early Life

Clara Zetkin (KLAHR-ah ZEHT-kihn), born Clara Eissner, the eldest of three children, was born in Wiederau near Leipzig in Saxony, a small town of textile workers and small farmers. Her father, Gottfried Eissner, poor but educated, was the village schoolteacher and church organist. His second wife, Josephine Vitale Eissner, was the widow of a doctor in Leipzig, a believer in the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Frau Eissner founded in Wiederau a Frauenverein, or women’s educational society, to teach local women to expect and get economic equality.

Women’s educational societies of this type were offshoots of the bourgeois German Women’s Association and the Federation of German Women’s Associations, led by feminist idealists such as Auguste Schmidt and Luise Otto. In 1872, when Herr Eissner retired, the family moved to Leipzig so that Zetkin could attend the Van Steyber Institute founded by Schmidt and Otto. While at the institute from 1875 to 1878, Zetkin read social democratic newspapers and other socialist writings and attended meetings of the Leipzig Women’s Education Society and the National Association of German Women.

In 1878, Zetkin met some local Russian students and émigrés, who introduced her to Wilhelm Liebknecht’s German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and her political education began. One of the émigrés from Odessa, Russia, Ossip Zetkin, introduced her to scientific socialism and the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He also encouraged her to live a working-class lifestyle and to attend lectures of the Leipzig Workers’ Education Society. In 1879, she visited Russia, and during an extensive stay she developed a strong appreciation of the Russian revolutionary spirit. Zetkin’s newly raised proletarian consciousness led to a break with her family and her mentor, Schmidt.

When Ossip was expelled from Germany for illegal political activity under the government’s 1878 Anti-Socialist Law, Zetkin left Germany. First, she went to Linz, Austria, where she tutored factory workers. In 1882, she moved to Zurich with leaders of the exiled SPD to write propaganda for party literature to be smuggled into Germany. In November, 1882, after five months in Zurich, she moved to Paris to join Ossip. Although she did not marry him, for fear of losing her German citizenship, Zetkin took Ossip’s name and had two sons with him, Maxim (1883) and Konstantine (1885).

Life’s Work

During these years in Paris, Zetkin began her life’s work of using scientific socialism to improve the condition of the proletariat and to achieve equality for proletarian women. Ironically, the second stage in her evolution from political theorist to activist resulted from a reconciliation with her bourgeois family. In 1886, Zetkin succumbed to the harsh poverty of the Paris years and, suffering from tuberculosis, was invited by her family to return to Leipzig to convalesce. In Leipzig, she gave her first public speech to explain August Bebel’s ideas in his book Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1879; Woman and Socialism, 1910). Bebel’s theory was that class revolution would end the oppression of both workers and women and lead to women’s economic development and equality with men. This was Zetkin’s view as well.

Returning to Paris, Zetkin nursed Ossip until his death in January, 1889, from spinal tuberculosis. Zetkin’s grief was cut short by the need to prepare for the Second International Congress, which met in Paris on the centennial of Bastille Day (July 14, 1889). As one of only eight official woman delegates, Zetkin represented working-class women of Berlin and had clearly moved from theory to activism. Zetkin’s speech, published later as Die Arbeiterinnen und Frauenfrage der Gegenwart (1889; Working Women and the Contemporary Woman Question , 1984), stated clearly that the issue of women’s emancipation is a question of work. Blaming capitalism for women’s oppression, Zetkin declared that women’s work outside the home would not result in an improvement of the family income or independence until women’s labor no longer resulted simply in profits for capitalists. Neither political equality nor access to education and the benefits of capitalism would solve the problem; only a social revolution and the end of the capitalist system would. At the congress, however, Zetkin’s view that women should have no special privileges was vetoed. The delegates favored equal pay for equal work and opposed dangerous work for women.

At this Second International Congress, Zetkin was named one of seven women to create the Berlin Agitation Committee responsible for educating and recruiting women into the SPD. This committee became the executive of a socialist women’s movement. Zetkin accepted this appointment only because women were by German law forbidden membership in political parties; she believed that women should be equal members of the party.

In 1890, the Reichstag did not renew Otto von Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws, and the SPD exiles returned to Germany. In Stuttgart, Zetkin was named editor of Die Gleichheit, the SPD’s journal for women. The first issue, in January, 1892, defined the journal’s policy and purpose as educating enlightened women about Marxism and Social Democratic principles and the need for economic equality while opposing bourgeois feminist emphasis on reforms of the law.

During these years when women could not belong to the SPD, the trade union movement served as a means of recruiting women. Zetkin printed handbills, gathered strike funds, and set up international communication networks among the unions. She gave more than three hundred speeches, and, by 1896 and the SPD Congress at Gotha, her position on women had changed in response to the contemporary German political context. Although Zetkin still believed that the needs of proletarian women were different from those of bourgeois women and that only the destruction of the capitalist system would relieve women’s oppression, she conceded that women needed special protections to allow them to be mothers as well as workers. Zetkin did not claim special privilege, however, and, while working for the SPD, she also reared her two sons. Zetkin also conceded that woman suffrage would make socialism stronger in the fight against capitalism.

Such concessions were the exception not the rule. As early as 1890, Zetkin was fighting the battle against Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist interpretation of Marx’s doctrine that approved compromise with capitalism and the abandonment of the class struggle. The years after 1900 saw the SPD and the women’s movement become more concerned with protective legislation insurance benefits, education, and suffrage. Zetkin found herself under attack as well. Revisionists complained that Die Gleichheit under Zetkin’s leadership was too theoretical and demanded that the journal appeal to a more general audience. In 1905, as the circulation began to grow, she added supplements for housewives and for children, until by 1914, with a readership of 125,000, these features became a regular part of the paper.

Complaints against Zetkin were difficult to act on because she had become an important leader in the SPD. Although women could not be members of the SPD until 1908, after 1890 women were elected to party congresses, and in 1895, Zetkin was the first woman elected to sit on the SPD governing body. In 1906, she was appointed one of seven members of the central committee on education at a time when the German government was trying to strengthen religious influence in the schools.

In 1908, when women were finally permitted to participate legally in political party activity, Zetkin fought hard to preserve an autonomous women’s movement both to prevent decisions about women from being made by a predominantly male SPD executive committee and to preserve a radical enclave within the party. Again Zetkin’s perspective had changed. She saw not only that proletarian women had different needs from those of bourgeois women but also that proletarian women had different needs from proletarian men. In 1907, the First International Women’s Conference was held in Stuttgart at the same time that the International Socialist Congress was meeting there. A separate International Women’s Bureau was created with Zetkin as secretary and Die Gleichheit as the official organ of communication. The Second International Women’s Conference met in 1910 in Copenhagen, where Zetkin led the fight to oppose socialist support for a restricted female suffrage as proposed in Great Britain and Belgium.

As Europe moved closer to war, Zetkin, along with Rosa Luxemburg and other radical socialists, found their struggle against revisionism becoming more difficult and unpopular. They had to fight not only the German government and capitalism but also a more conservative SPD that favored parliamentary methods and officially opposed the mass strike. In 1911, at the SPD Congress in Jena, Zetkin and Luxemburg fought unsuccessfully to get the party to condemn all imperialism, including that of Germany. On August 4, 1914, Zetkin, Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, and Karl Liebknecht denounced the party’s decision to vote for war credits. In March, 1915, Zetkin, without party permission, organized another women’s conference to protest the war. After spending a few months in protective custody for continuing to oppose the government in Die Gleichheit against party orders, Zetkin was finally removed as editor by the SPD in May, 1917. They claimed her views in support of the Bolshevik Revolution and against war were unpalatable to women.

By this time Zetkin had transferred her political allegiance first to the Independent Social-Democratic Party, or antiwar socialists, and then had joined Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Mehring as a founding member of the Gruppe Internationale, or the Spartacus League, which in November, 1918, became the German Communist Party (KPD).

Zetkin’s message, however, did not change. In 1919, addressing the Comintern (the Third International Congress), she reminded the party that a dictatorship of the proletariat could not work without proletarian women. She warned the Communist Party to educate women for their role in the international struggle. Elected international secretary of Communist women in 1920, she proclaimed again that the woman question was part of the worker question.

Zetkin’s new postwar political duties required her to live part of the time in the Soviet Union, where she worked with Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Aleksandra Kollontai, the only Russian woman on the Comintern. Although her health was not good, Zetkin continued to write and speak out against persecution, including racist acts in the United States. In addition, she represented the German Communist Party in the Reichstag as long as Adolf Hitler allowed it to meet. In the summer of 1932, she went to Berlin to convene the Reichstag, a privilege traditionally exercised by the eldest living member. She took the opportunity to denounce fascism and Hitler and to appeal for the creation of a United Front of Workers to include the millions of laboring women. Within a year, she died, on June 20, 1933, in the Soviet Union.

Significance

Although Zetkin was estranged from Soviet politics after the death of Lenin, she was buried with great ceremony in the Kremlin wall. Attending her funeral and eulogizing her were Soviet and Eastern European Communist officials, including Joseph Stalin, Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s widow), Kollontai, Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin, Andrei Marti of Czechoslovakia, Karl Radek of Germany, and Béla Kun of Hungary.

Zetkin had little personal life, but she reared her two sons and, in 1899, she married the painter Georg Friedrich Zundel, eighteen years younger. This marriage lapsed during World War I and ended in divorce in 1927, when Zetkin was seventy. Politics was the core of her being. In this political struggle, it was Zetkin’s dynamic personality that allowed her to carry on simultaneously the struggle with and against socialist men, fighting with them for class and party solidarity and against them for women’s autonomy and power. A staunch defender of the proletariat, from first to last, she saw women’s rights in the larger historical context of the workers’ drive for socialism. Women’s concerns, she believed, would be solved only by socioeconomic change and through class struggle. An internationalist to the end, she opposed war as a capitalist tool against the workers. Clear-sighted and committed, Zetkin lived and died devoted to her causes.

Bibliography

Boxer, Marilyn J. “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept ’Bourgeois Feminism.’” American Historical Review 112, no. 1 (February, 2007): 131. Examination of the concept of “bourgeois feminism” that also discusses Zetkin’s ideas about women’s issues and the women’s rights movement.

Boxer, Marilyn J., and Jean H. Quataert, eds. Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New York: Elsevier, 1978. A collection of articles on the relationship of women’s issues and socialism linking Zetkin to the movement in several European countries.

Evans, Richard J. “Theory and Practice in German Social Democracy, 1880-1914: Clara Zetkin and the Socialist Theory of Women’s Emancipation.” History of Political Thought 3 (Summer, 1982): 285-304. Contrasts Zetkin’s views about the women’s movement in 1889 with those in 1896 seen in the contemporary German political context. Her new position favored a separate socialist women’s organization and women’s suffrage.

Nettl, J. P. Rosa Luxemburg. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. This work illuminates the significant relationship between Zetkin and Luxemburg. There is also a one-volume abridged edition (Oxford University Press, 1969).

Pore, Renate. A Conflict of Interest: Women in German Social Democracy, 1919-1933. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Attributes the character of women’s involvement in the SPD to Zetkin, lauding her unswerving adherence to the twofold fight for socialism and women’s rights.

Porter, Cathy. Alexandra Kollontai: The Lonely Struggle of the Woman Who Defied Lenin. New York: Dial Press, 1980. Contains some discussion of the relationship between Zetkin and the Soviet government after World War I.

Zetkin, Clara. Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings. Edited by Philip S. Foner. Translated by Kai Schoenhals. Foreword by Angela Y. Davis. New York: International, 1984. The introduction supplies the most complete analytical survey published in English of Zetkin’s life and ideas. It draws substantially on an unpublished Ph.D. thesis by Karen Honeycutt.