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.
