No Woman, No Revolution,
Part 1b
Working-class Women’s Political History
The general form of this course, like all of the Communist
University courses, is that it is a selected set of original texts by
revolutionary writers. The writer of this (attached and downloadable) text is
not otherwise known to us. Her name is Janine Booth and the article was found
on the plainly Trotskyist web site of a British publication called “Workers’
Liberty”. We must thank Janine Booth for her public scholarship.
Booth’s work assists us with a narrative of the years from
the founding of the German Social Democratic Party in 1875, when Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels were both still alive, alert, active and writing, up until the
time, thirty to forty years later, when the major initiative began to pass from
the German Party to Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
The revolutionary activities of the communists were
prominent at different times in Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and
Russia, among many other countries. In the last quarter of the 19th
century and the first decade of the 20th, these revolutionary
activities were much more massive in Germany than anywhere else; and it was in
the German language, and in the revolutionary practice of the German
communists, that the organised movement for the advancement of proletarian
women, as part of the revolutionary struggle for communism, got under way and
first reached a high stage of explicit development.
In our course we represent this period with singular texts
from Engels, Zetkin, Kollontai, Luxemburg and Lenin. Some of the history of the
period can be seen in these texts through the eyes of these revolutionary
participants. Booth’s text can help us to step back and think about some of the
other participants, like August Bebel and Emma Ihrer, on the forms of
organisation that the German Party used, and on the means of propaganda that
were employed, such as the periodical founded by Ihrer and mainly edited by
Zetkin, Die Gleichheit (“Equality”).
We have to take Booth’s word for it on the numbers that she
gives, and on most of the detail that she relates. We do not have an Internet
archive of Die Gleichheit, or even a single article from it. Booth’s article as
reproduced here has no references or bibliography. These are some of the kinds
of reasons why, in general, we have normally preferred to use original writings
for the Communist University.
In the case of this article, some of it has been removed for
the sake of brevity, and where the points made are covered by our other material.
Remarks about Rosa Luxemburg’s alleged indifference towards women’s particular
position in society are less useful than Luxemburg’s own text, for example,
which we give in the next part. Comrades can go to the web site to read Booth’s
full article, if they wish.
Part of what our course is asserting is that the proletarian
women’s cause has been the occasion of major historical events, and it also
comprises a substantial body of thought. In the process we are overturning the
tacit and sometimes explicit historiography of the bourgeois feminists.
We are identifying our own struggles against bourgeois
feminism with the struggles that took place in this earlier time, between the
days of Marx and Lenin, and the days of Luxemburg and Lenin.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: German Socialism and the ‘woman question’, Booth, 2005.
- A PDF file of the reading text is attached
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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