International Women's Day: Remembering Clara Zetkin

By Roy Rydell

This article was reprinted from the March 7, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

Clara Zetkin, secretary of the International Socialist Women's Organization (ISWO), proposed this date during a conference in Copenhagen because it was the anniversary of a 1908 women workers' demonstration at Rutgers Square on Manhattan's Lower East Side that demanded the right to vote and the creation of a needle trades union.

The demonstration was so successful that the ISWO decided to emulate it and March 8 became the day that millions of women and men around the world celebrated the struggle for women's equality.

Actually, International Women's Day is one of two working class holidays "born in the USA." The other is May Day, which commemorates Chicago's Haymarket martyrs in the struggle for an eight-hour day. Until the 1950s, both holidays were widely observed in the United States. But cold warriors unleashed a drive to erase them on the spurious grounds that they were "Communist" or "Soviet- inspired." With the end of the Cold War, International Women's Day and May Day are now being celebrated in the country of their birth by increasing numbers of working people.

Zetkin was born Clara Eissner on July 15, 1857 in the town of Wiederau in Saxony, Germany. Her father was a schoolteacher and her mother was a strong believer in the ideals of the French Revolution. Zetkin became politically conscious in her youth at the Steyber Teachers' Training Institute in Leipzig. She attended lectures by Wilhelm Liebknecht, founder of the German Social Democratic (DSD) Party. In 1878, although it was illegal for women to join political parties, she became closely associated with the DSD and was a believer in socialism.

When Otto von Bismarck, Germany's "Iron Chancellor," outlawed the DSD, Zetkin became active in underground work for the party. She met and fell in love with Ossip Zetkin, a Russian socialist woodworker then living in Leipzig. When he was forced to flee to Paris in 1882, Clara went with him. They never married, but she took his name and gave birth to two sons. Living in grim poverty, both Clara and Ossip contracted tuberculosis.

In 1886 she returned to Germany with the children. She began to speak at secret meetings of the DSD. Despite the burdens of motherhood, she delivered an estimated 300 speeches a year, each time risking arrest. Those who heard her said Zetkin spoke with an eloquent sympathy for the toiling masses. She knew first-hand of women factory workers forced to toil 14-hour days, six days a week, subsisting on a diet of black bread and potatoes.

Philip Foner writes in his introduction to Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings (International Publishers) that Zetkin spoke to audiences ranging from "several hundred to several thousand ... on the role of women in industry, the terrible conditions they were forced to undergo and the burning need for organizing working class women."

Zetkin was a personal friend of Frederick Engels and agreed with his conclusion in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that the oppression of women arose with the appearance of private property. She also read August Bebel's Women and Socialism, which challenged the existing bourgeois theory that women's inferior position was an unalterable, natural state of affairs. She was deeply influenced by Bebel's statement that "there can be no liberation of mankind without the independence and equality of the sexes."

In January 1889, Clara Zetkin returned to Paris to care for Ossip, who was soon to die of TB. She was a delegate to the founding congress of the Second International (Socialist), which took place in Paris on July 14, 1889, the centennial of the fall of the Bastille.

Zetkin was one of eight women among 400 delegates from 19 countries. She delivered a speech urging the congress to embrace the cause of equal rights for women, including suffrage and equal pay for equal work. The congress approved a resolution that "male workers have a duty to take women into their ranks upon the basis of equal rights and demand in principle equal pay for the workers of both sexes and without discrimination of nationality."

In 1890 Bismarck was dismissed, the law banning the DSD was not renewed and Zetkin returned to Germany. In 1892, she became the founding editor of Die Gleichheit (Equality). She was to hold this post until 1917.

Zetkin turned the magazine into a militant advocate of the international women's movement. The publication reported on strikes and labor activities. The paper advocated women factory inspectors and urged the Social Democrats to push on this issue. By 1914 Die Gleichheit's circulation was 125,000.

Zetkin was also active in several labor unions including the Bookbinders, of which she was an executive committee member. She was also active in the Garment Workers, Woodworkers, Glovemakers and Seamstress and Tailors unions. She authored the groundbreaking History of the Proletarian Women's Liberation Movement.

When the First International Socialist Women's Conference was held in conjunction with the 1907 Stuttgart International Socialist Congress, there were 59 women from 15 countries taking part. The International Women's Bureau was established and Zetkin was elected secretary.

A person's character is tested in moments of great crisis and Clara Zetkin was among those tested in the early years of the new century. Monopoly capitalism had grown to an immense, dominant power in the world. A handful of advanced capitalist countries including Germany, Britain, France, the U.S. and Japan launched a military buildup, preparing for a war to divide the world among themselves.

Within the DSD, and within the socialist movement worldwide, opportunist elements had gained control, preaching a line of accommodation to monopoly and imperialist war. The German revisionist Edward Bernstein argued that capitalism was evolving toward a more equitable distribution of wealth, that it was able to overcome its internal contradictions. "To Clara Zetkin as to Karl Liebknecht ... and Rosa Luxembourg ... all this was reformism pure and simple and she fought it with all her energy," Foner wrote.

The opportunism surfaced again when World War I broke out in August 1914. The DSD deputies in the Reichstag voted for war credits to pay for the armament buildup in Germany. But one socialist deputy - Karl Liebknecht - courageously broke ranks and voted against the war credits. He was denounced by the ruling parties, the press and the Social Democrats. But he was staunchly supported by Luxembourg and Zetkin.

The Nov. 7, 1914 edition of Die Gleichheit carried Zetkin's appeal "to the Socialist Women of All Countries," calling for a women's conference in Switzerland to mobilize opposition to World War I. The DSD leadership opposed the conference, but when it met in Switzerland in March 1915 there were 28 delegates from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Holland and Switzerland. This was the first Socialist opposition to the war.

Zetkin told the conference, "Only if the large majority of women, too, back up the slogan 'Resist the war' with deepest conviction, only then can peace be assured to the peoples."

The conference approved a manifesto written by Zetkin which stated, "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 ... In the interests of their profits, they have fanned the hatred among the people ... The workers have nothing to gain from this war, but they stand to lose everything that is dear to them."

Shortly after the conference, Zetkin was arrested and held in "protective custody" for four months in Karlsruhe, Germany. On Nov. 7, 1917 the Russian masses rose in a struggle for "peace, land, bread," a revolution born of the death and misery inflicted by the world war.

"The October Revolution is the most tremendous event in world history," Zetkin wrote. "This is a dawn of a new era. Mankind is faced with a fresh start." She greeted the world's first socialist state as a long stride toward the emancipation of women.

World War I was a disaster for the German people, who suffered millions of dead and wounded. In November 1918, the German working class rose to overthrow the monopoly capitalists who had led the country to ruin. But the revolutionary uprising was ruthlessly crushed.

In this time of terror, December 1918, Liebknecht, Luxembourg, Zetkin and their comrades founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Zetkin became a founding member of the Party, appointed to serve as international secretary. A few weeks later on Jan. 15, 1919, Liebknecht and Luxembourg were murdered by soldiers working with the right-wing Social Democrats.

In her grief, Zetkin wrote, "Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht are no longer with us! The revolutionary vanguard of the German working class has lost its most resolute, bold and strong leaders. The proletariat of all countries and international Socialism are most severely hit by this loss."

Zetkin went on to serve as a leader of the German Communist Party until her death. During her stays in the Soviet Union as the KPD representative to the Communist International, she helped mobilize solidarity all over the world.

As head of International Red Aid, she wrote an appeal to save the lives of the Scottsboro youth who had been framed on rape charges. "Save the Scottsboro Black youths," she wrote, "(All) who still possess a humane mind and heart! Let us save these eight young men from the executioner and the pyre of the electric chair." The young men were saved.

During those years, she discussed with Russian Revolution leader V.I. Lenin the struggle for women's equality and wrote a pamphlet, "Lenin on the Woman Question." She cited Lenin's observation that while women are members of the Communist Party with equal rights and duties, it was still necessary for the Party to set up women's commissions to help elaborate the Party's policies in the struggle for equality. Lenin warmly embraced Zetkin's ideas on organizing to bring millions of working class women into the struggle for socialism.

In 1901 she wrote in Die Gleichheit, "The total liberation of the world of proletarian women ... is only possible in a socialist society." On another occasion she wrote, "The woman worker needs suffrage not only to defend her economic and cultural interests, she does not need suffrage to fight against the men in her class, but above all to fight against the capitalist class." Zetkin herself was elected to the Reichstag on the Communist Party ticket, serving from 1920 until 1933. Although she was blind and sick, Zetkin defied Nazi death threats and opened the session of the German Reichstag on Aug. 30, 1932, a right due her as the oldest member of that body. She stood and spoke for more than an hour. Foner reported that she "vehemently denounced fascism and appealed for a United Front of all workers" to defeat this most bestial form of monopoly capitalist rule.

The anti-fascist cause, she said, "must not lack the millions of women who still bear the chains of sex slavery and are therefore exposed to the most oppressive class slavery." She voiced her hope that she would live to see a socialist Germany.

With World War II looming, Clara Zetkin took refuge in the Soviet Union. She died on July 22, 1933 in Archangelskoye near Moscow, nine years to the day before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.