No Woman, No
Revolution, Part 1a
Socialist
Victory Only With Proletarian Woman
Clara Zetkin’s speech at the Party Congress of the Social
Democratic Party of Germany at Gotha on 16 October 1896 sets the theme which
will provide the backbone of this ten-part course.
Says Zetkin:
“The granting of political equality to women
does not change the actual balance of power. The proletarian woman ends up in
the proletarian, the bourgeois woman in the bourgeois camp. We must not let
ourselves be fooled by Socialist trends in the bourgeois women’s movement which
last only as long as bourgeois women feel oppressed.”
“We must not conduct special women’s
propaganda, but Socialist agitation among women.”
Zetkin continues:
“Therefore the liberation struggle of the
proletarian woman cannot be similar to the struggle that the bourgeois woman
wages against the male of her class. On the contrary, it must be a joint
struggle with the male of her class against the entire class of capitalists.
She does not need to fight against the men of her class in order to tear down
the barriers which have been raised against her participation in the free
competition of the market place. Capitalism’s need to exploit and the
development of the modern mode of production totally relieves her of having to
fight such a struggle. On the contrary, new barriers need to be erected against
the exploitation of the proletarian woman. Her rights as wife and mother need
to be restored and permanently secured. Her final aim is not the free
competition with the man, but the achievement of the political rule of the
proletariat. The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class
against capitalist society. To be sure, she also agrees with the demands of the
bourgeois women’s movement, but she regards the fulfilment of these demands
simply as a means to enable that movement to enter the battle, equipped with
the same weapons, alongside the proletariat.”
The German Social Democratic Party was the leading centre of
this kind of thinking from before the death of Marx in 1883 until the Russian
Revolution in 1917. Clara Zetkin was its principal leader in this field and by
1896 had been editor of the socialist women’s newspaper Die Gleichheit (“equality”) for five years. We will return to “Die
Gleichheit” in the next item.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Socialist
Victory Only With Proletarian Woman, Clara Zetkin, 1896.
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