Creator of International Women's Day, she set women's liberation at the heart of class struggle
Six months before Hitler took power, she opened the Reichstag as its oldest member with a call for a united front against Nazism (1932)
Founder of Marxist feminism, she saw women's liberation as inseparable from class struggle and proposed International Women's Day in 1910. From anti-war resistance to co-founding the KPD, she opened the Reichstag at seventy-five with a call for a united front against Nazism.
Career Timeline
- 1878–1917Leads the SPD women's movement; edits Die Gleichheit (1892–1917)
- 1910Proposes International Women's Day at Copenhagen
- 1915–1919Anti-war work; in at the founding of the Spartacus League and the KPD
- 1920–1933Reichstag deputy; Comintern executive
- 1925Published the memoir Lenin on the Women’s Question
- 1932Opens the Reichstag as its oldest member, calling for a united front against Nazism
- 1933Exile to the USSR; dies in June, buried in the Kremlin Wall
Copenhagen 1910 — inventing International Women's Day
In August 1910 the Second International's women's congress met in Copenhagen. A hundred delegates from seventeen countries; among them Clara Zetkin, fifty-three years old, rose to submit a resolution: 'Every year, on the same day, in every country, a Women's Day shall be held.'
The suffrage movement of the day was led by bourgeois liberal feminism, focused on the vote for upper- and middle-class women. Working-class women's economic and social emancipation lay outside its frame. Zetkin set out to break that frame.
The 'Women's Day' she proposed was no observance. It was an organizing tool: a device for the political mobilization of women workers that repositioned the vote within the class struggle. 'The emancipation of the proletarian woman is impossible without the emancipation of the entire proletariat.' That was the core of Zetkin's feminism.
The first International Women's Day, in March 1911, drew over a million participants. After the Russian Revolution (whose February rising began with a women's-day strike) the date settled on 8 March.
Zetkin never let anyone forget that this was a day of combat, not commemoration.
Berlin 1915 — women against the war
In August 1914 the SPD parliamentary group voted for war credits. For Zetkin it was the moment the principle of international solidarity collapsed. Together with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg she rejected the party's Burgfrieden: the 'fortress truce' with the Kaiser's government.
In March 1915 Zetkin organized an international socialist women's anti-war conference in Berlin. Under wartime censorship and police surveillance, women delegates from belligerent nations (Britain, France, Russia, the Netherlands among them) gathered in defiance of the chauvinist tide. 'Who profits from this war? Only a tiny minority in each nation: the makers of cannons and armour-plate.' Her opening address called for class solidarity across the battle lines.
She was taken into 'protective custody' immediately after the conference and arrested repeatedly for anti-war activity over the following years. In 1916 she co-founded the Spartacus League, in 1917 the Independent Social Democrats (USPD), and at the end of 1918 the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). For Zetkin the anti-war fight and the women's movement were one and the same practice.