Clara Zetkin (; ; Eißner ; 5 July 1857 – 20 June 1933) was a German Marxist theorist, communist activist, and advocate for women's rights.
Until 1917, she was active in the Social Democratic Party of Germany.Clara Zetkin | bpb She then joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) and its far-left wing, the Spartacist League, which later became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). She represented that party in the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1933.Gilbert Badia, Clara Zetkin: Féministe Sans Frontières (Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières 1993).
Biography Background and education In July 1857,"Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) | Towards Emancipation?". hist259.web.unc.edu. Retrieved 2024-10-22. Clara Josephine Eißner (Eissner) was born the eldest of three children in , a peasant village in Saxony that is now part of the municipality of Königshain-Wiederau. Her father, Gottfried Eissner, was a schoolmaster, church organist and a devout Protestant. Her mother, Josephine Vitale, who had French roots, came from a middle-class family from Leipzig and was highly educated. In 1872, her family moved to Leipzig, where she was educated at the Leipzig Teachers' College for Women. There, she established contacts with the infant Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD; Social Democratic Party).
Because of the ban placed on socialist activity in Germany by Otto von Bismarck in 1878, Zetkin left for Zürich in 1882 and then went into exile in Paris, where she studied to be a journalist and a translator. During her time in Paris, she played an important role in the foundation of the Socialist International group. She also adopted the name of her lover, the Russian Jewish , a devoted Marxist, with whom she had two sons, Maxim and Konstantin (known as Kostja). Ossip Zetkin became severely ill in early 1889 and died in June of that year. After the loss of her lover, Zetkin moved to Stuttgart with her children. She married artist Georg Friedrich Zundel, who was eighteen years her junior, from 1899 to 1928.Clara Zetkin biography from the University of Leipzig (in German)
Early engagement in the Social Democratic Party Her political career began after being introduced to Zetkin. Within a few months of attending and taking part in socialist meetings, Zetkin became entirely committed to the party, which offered a Marxist approach to the demand for women's liberation. Around the time of 1880, due to the political climate in Germany, Zetkin went into exile in Switzerland and later in France. Upon her return to Germany, nearly a decade later, she became the editor of the Social Democratic Party of Germany's newspaper for women, Die Gleichheit (Equality), a post that she occupied for 25 years.
Having studied to become a teacher, Zetkin developed connections with the women's movement and the labour movement in Germany from 1874. In 1878 she joined the Socialist Workers' Party (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei, SAP). This party had been founded in 1875 by merging two previous parties: the ADAV formed by Ferdinand Lassalle and the SDAP of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. In 1890, its name was changed to its modern version Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
Around 1898, Zetkin formed a friendship with the younger Rosa Luxemburg that lasted 20 years. Despite Luxemburg's indifference to the women's movement, which absorbed so much of Zetkin's energies, they became firm political allies on the far left of the SPD. Luxemburg once suggested that their joint epitaph would be "Here lie the last two men of German Social Democracy". In the debate on Revisionism at the turn of the 20th century, they jointly attacked the reformist theses of Eduard Bernstein, who had rejected the ideology of a revolutionary change in favour of "evolutionary socialism".Clara Zetkin biography, Fembio.org. Accessed 14 October 2022. (in German)]
Fight for women's rights Zetkin was very interested in women's politics, including the fight for equal opportunities and women's suffrage, through socialism. She helped to develop the social-democratic women's movement in Germany. From 1891 to 1917, she edited the SPD women's newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality). In 1907 she became the leader of the newly founded "Women's Office" at the SPD. She also contributed to International Women's Day (IWD). In August 1910, an International Women's Conference was organised to precede the general meeting of the Socialist Second International in Copenhagen, Denmark. Inspired in part by American socialists' actions, Zetkin, Käte Duncker and others proposed that "a special Women's Day" be organized annually, but no date was specified at that conference. Delegates (100 women from 17 countries) agreed with the idea as a strategy to promote suffrage for women. The following year on 19 March 1911, IWD was marked for the first time, by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland.
However, Zetkin was deeply opposed to the concept of "bourgeois feminism," which she claimed was a tool to divide the unity of the working classes. In a speech that she delivered to the Second International in 1889, she stated: The working women, who aspire to social equality, expect nothing for their emancipation from the bourgeois women's movement, which allegedly fights for the rights of women. That edifice is built on sand and has no real basis. Working women are absolutely convinced that the question of the emancipation of women is not an isolated question which exists in itself, but part of the great social question. They realize perfectly clear that this question can never be solved in contemporary society, but only after a complete social transformation.
She viewed the feminist movement as being primarily composed of upper-class and middle-class women who had their own class interests in mind, which were incompatible with the interests of working-class women. Thus, feminism and the socialist fight for women's rights were incompatible. In her mind, socialism was the only way to truly end the oppression of women. One of her primary goals was to get women out of the house and into work so that they could participate in trade unions and other workers rights organizations to improve conditions for themselves. While she argued that the socialist movement should fight to achieve reforms that would lessen female oppression, she was convinced that such reforms could only prevail if they were embedded into a general move towards socialism; otherwise, they could easily be eradicated by future legislation.
She interviewed Vladimir Lenin on "The Women's Question" in 1920.The interview transcript (in English) is available at The Emancipation of Women: From the Writings of V.I. Lenin, interview with Clara Zetkin, International Publishers, on the Marxist Archives
From Zetkin's perspective, the women's movement was a key component to the whole of women's rights. Not only was the movement essential to the women's rights movement, but it was also essential to building the Communist state. Lenin made it a point to mention that everyone who has been exploited or oppressed under the capitalist system should be included in the women's rights movement, further pushing the movement in Communist ideals.
Lenin and Zetkin's work as colleagues in the work of pushing the Communist and women's rights agendas progressed the liberation of women in the Soviet Union. By associating the movement with the larger proletarian revolution, they advanced the cause of women's liberation. Their combined efforts pushed for systematic changes such as labor protections, childcare facilities, women's suffrage, and dismantling the bourgeois societal norms. All of this would eventually become for naught as Stalin assumed political power in the Soviet Union, as women's reproductive health and personal liberties began to be stripped away.
Opposition to the First World War During the period of the First World War, at the international women's peace conference in Switzerland, activists, revolutionaries, and supporters gathered to confront the concern for unity among workers across the battle lines. There, Zetkin spoke: Who profits from this war? Only a tiny minority in each nation: The manufacturers of rifles and cannons, of armor-plate and torpedo boats, the shipyard owners and the suppliers of the armed forces' needs. In the interests of their profits, they have fanned the hatred among the people, thus contributing to the outbreak of the war. The workers have nothing to gain from this war, but they stand to lose everything that is dear to them.
Zetkin, along with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Luise Kähler and other influential SPD politicians, rejected the party's policy of Burgfrieden (a truce between political parties the government and a promise to refrain from strikes during the war). Among other anti-war activities, Zetkin organized an international socialist women's anti-war conference in Berlin in 1915.Timeline of Clara Zetkin's life, at the Lebendiges Museum Online (LEMO) Because of her anti-war opinions, she was arrested several times during the war and was in 1916 taken into "protective custody" from which she was later released on account of illness.
Joining the Communist Party
In 1916 Zetkin was one of the co-founders of the Spartacist League and the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) which had split off in 1917 from its mother party, the SPD, in protest at its pro-war stance.
In January 1919, after the German Revolution in November of the previous year, the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) was founded. Zetkin also joined it and represented the party from 1920 to 1933 in the Reichstag.Marxist Internet Archive Biography
Zetkin became further enveloped in the Communist movement through her interactions and fellowship with Vladimir Lenin. The relationship between Zetkin and Lenin first began in 1920 when she conducted and recorded interviews with him. In her journal entries outlining their conversations, she discussed her admiration for his leadership as he used his position of power to give a voice to the oppressed people. Three separate lifetime editions of Zetkin's memoirs about Lenin (Clara Zetkin. Memories of Lenin; Clara Zetkin. From a Notebook; Clara Zetkin. Lenin and the Masses) were included in the 5th volume of “Memories of Lenin,” published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee, and became canonical for citation in the USSR.“Воспоминания о Ленине», Институт марксизма-ленинизма при ЦК КПСС, Москва, издательство «Политической литературы», 1979 (“Memories of Lenin”, Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU, Moscow, Political Literature Publishing House, 1979). Included in speaking for the voices of the oppressed, Lenin discussed with Zetkin the need to establish an international women's movement.
From the outline of the conversations, it is apparent that Lenin respected Zetkin as a colleague who could help him implement his political strategy, not as an inferior. In addition to the conversation's rhetoric, Lenin's respect for Zetkin is evident as he employed her to establish the women's movement based on the principles of Marxist theory. Zetkin was allocated a position to provide support to the women's rights committee drafting a resolution, theses, and directives to move along the progression of the movement. Because of its previous success in bringing women's emancipation in both theory and practice, Zetkin subscribed to the socialist movement in the early 1920s.