Image Credits: Clara Zetkin, 1910, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin
(1896) - Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Women Will Socialism Be Victorious - Clara Zetkin
In 1896, Clara Zetkin grappled with the divide between bourgeois feminism and working-class women’s struggles. In Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Women Will Socialism Be Victorious, Zetkin argued that gender oppression could not be separated from capitalism. She maintained that bourgeois feminists sought only legal and political rights, failing to challenge the economic exploitation of proletarian women. She argued that working-class women must align with the socialist movement, as only through the overthrow of capitalism could they achieve true liberation, as their oppression stems from capitalism rather than gender alone.
As far as the proletarian woman is concerned, it is capitalism’s need to exploit and to search incessantly for a cheap labor force that has created the women’s question. It is for this reason, too, that the proletarian woman has become enmeshed in the mechanism of the economic life of our period and has been driven into the workshop and to the machines.