Clara Zetkin

Lore & Background

Her father was a schoolmaster and church organist, her mother highly educated. Her political career began after being introduced to Zetkin, and she became committed to the party's Marxist approach to women's liberation. She opposed bourgeois feminism, arguing that working women's emancipation required complete social transformation through socialism.

Reader's Guide

Clara Zetkin's significance lies in her dual role as a leading Marxist theorist and a pioneering advocate for women's rights within the socialist movement. Zetkin's rejection of bourgeois feminism and insistence that women's emancipation required a socialist revolution influenced leftist thought on gender and class. She represented the Communist Party of Germany in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933. Her interview with Lenin on 'The Women's Question' in 1920 underscored her role in linking women's liberation to communist state-building. Zetkin's legacy endures as a key figure in the intersection of Marxism and feminism, though her work was later undermined under Stalin.

Did You Know?

• She edited the SPD women's newspaper Die Gleichheit for 25 years.