Clara Zetkin

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. 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.

Biography

Background and education

In July 1857, 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).

thumb|left|Zetkin during a congress in Zürich in 1897

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.

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).

thumb|left|Zetkin and [[Rosa Luxemburg on their way to the SPD Congress in 1910]]

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 SDP. 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".

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 organized 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. 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.

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. 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. Among other anti-war activities, Zetkin organized an international socialist women's anti-war conference in Berlin in 1915. 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.

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. 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.

thumb|right|Zetkin's official [[Reichstag (Weimar Republic)|Reichstag portrait, 1930]]

In August 1932, despite having recently fallen gravely ill in Moscow, she returned to Berlin to preside over the opening of the newly elected Reichstag, as its oldest deputy. She used her opening address to call for workers to unite in the struggle against fascism:

<blockquote>The most important immediate task is the formation of a United Front of all workers in order to turn back fascism [..] in order to preserve for the enslaved and exploited, the force and power of their organization as well as to maintain their own physical existence. Before this compelling historical necessity, all inhibiting and dividing political, trade union, religious and ideological opinions must take a back seat. All those who feel themselves threatened, all those who suffer and all those who long for liberation must belong to the United Front against fascism and its representatives in government.</blockquote>

She was a recipient of the Order of Lenin (1932) and the Order of the Red Banner (1927). Originally, the newspaper was titled Die Arbeiterin (The Woman Worker), however, its publications received little success. The published periodicals expanded globally and became a forum for communist women to hear about the lives of other communists. The periodical rejected “bourgeois feminism” (a position consistent with Zetkin’s views) and advocated for women to become workers in the proletarian state. Stalin's politics stunted and regressed much of the progress of the women's movement in the Soviet Union, returning the country to be based in conservative ideals. This was an appendage to the decision to move the International Women's Secretariat from Berlin back to Moscow. The rise of Stalin's bureaucracy in the Soviet Union dissolved the relationship the women's movement established with the government under the leadership of Lenin.

Exile and death

Soon after Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party took power in 1933, the Reichstag fire gave the Nazi government opportunity to outright ban the KPD and other dissenting political parties. Zetkin went into exile for the last time, this time to the Soviet Union. She died there, at Arkhangelskoye, near Moscow, in 1933, aged nearly 76.

After 1949, Zetkin became a much-celebrated heroine in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and every major city had a street named after her. Her name can still be found on the maps of the former lands of the GDR. There appeared to be a negative connotation associated with her name as political figures, even Stalin, labeled her as an ‘old witch.’ In 1994, Christian Democrat Chancellor Helmut Kohl, put a stop to naming a street by the Reichstag in Berlin after Zetkin. His hard stop to acknowledging her legacy is because he believed her works played a part in destroying the first German democracy. As second-wave feminist ideologies took hold, a direct consequence was the exclusion of men from participation in women's movements. In the 1920s, Maxim joined Clara in attending several Comintern congresses and worked for a number of Comintern missions.

In 1967, a statue of Clara Zetkin, sculpted by GDR artist Walter Arnold, was erected in Johannapark, Leipzig in commemoration of her 110th birthday.
In 1987, the GDR issued a stamp with her picture.
Since 2011, the German party Die Linke issues an annual "".
There is also a street named after Clara Zetkin in the city of Tula, Russia, which is located near the intersection of Leyteyzena Street and Red Army Prospect. (Red Army Prospect is a major thoroughfare In Tula which leads to the main train station.)

References

Sources

External links

Clara Zetkin at Spartacus Educational (biography, extracts)
Zetkin at marxists.org (biography, some writings, links)
My Recollections of Lenin by Clara Zetkin
"Clara Zetkin calls for an anti-fascist united front in the Reichstag, 30 August 1932" in Ernst Thälmann (1986)

Biography

Background and education

Fight for women's rights

Opposition to the First World War

Exile and death

See also

References

Sources

Further reading

External links

Biography

Background and education

Early engagement in the Social Democratic Party

Fight for women's rights

Opposition to the First World War

Exile and death

See also

References

Sources

Further reading

External links