Marxism and the Emancipation of Women

quote of the issue

We print below excerpts of an article by Clara Zetkin whose pioneering work among women in the late 19th and early 20th century served as a stepping stone for the Bolsheviks as they sought to implement their revolutionary program for women’s liberation. Zetkin was a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party and later the Communist Party as well as a personal friend of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin. Today Zetkin is often falsely described as a feminist. In fact, as this passage shows, she was hostile to feminism which she rightly understood to be a bourgeois ideology counterposed to the struggle for the emancipation of women. Marking the 20th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, her article underlines how Marx’s materialist understanding of society laid the basis for a program of women’s liberation through proletarian revolution.

To be sure, Marx never dealt with the women’s question “per se” or “as such.” Yet he created the most irreplaceable and important weapons for the women’s fight to obtain all of their rights. His materialist concept of history has not supplied us with any ready-made formulas concerning the women’s question, yet it has done something much more important: It has given us the correct, unerring method to explore and comprehend that question. It was only the materialist concept of history which enabled us to understand the women’s question within the flux of universal historical development and the light of universally applicable social relationships and their historical necessity and justification. Only thus did we perceive its driving forces and the aims pursued by them as well as the conditions which are essential to a solution of these problems.

The old superstition that the position of women in the family and in society was forever unchangeable because it was created on moral precepts or by divine revelation was smashed. Marx revealed that the family, like all other institutions and forms of existence, is subjected to a constant process of ebb and flow which changes with the economic conditions and the property relationships which result from them....

Das Kapital shows most convincingly that there are incessant and irresistible historical forces at work in today’s society which are revolutionizing this situation from the bottom up and will bring about the equality of women. By masterfully examining the development and nature of capitalist production down to the most refined details, and by discovering its law of motion, i.e., the Theory of Surplus Value, he has conclusively proven in his discussions of women and child labor that capitalism has destroyed the basis for the ancient domestic activity of women, thereby dissolving the anachronistic form of the family. This has made women economically independent outside of the family and created a firm ground for their equality as wives, mothers and citizens. But something else is clearly illustrated by Marx’s works: The proletariat is the only revolutionary class which by establishing Socialism, is able to and must create the indispensable prerequisites for the complete solution of the women’s question. Besides the fact that the bourgeois suffragettes neither want nor are able to achieve the social liberation of women proletarians, they are incapable of solving the serious new conflicts which will be fought over the social and legal equality of the sexes within the capitalist order. These conflicts will not vanish until the exploitation of man by man and the contradictions arising therefrom are abolished....

The women’s movement, however, owes much more to Marx than just the fact that he, as no other person before him, shed bright light upon the painful path of the development that leads the female sex from social servitude to freedom and from atrophy to a strong, harmonious existence. By his profound, penetrating analysis of the class contradictions in today’s society and its roots, he opened up our eyes to the differences of interest that separate the women of the different classes. In the atmosphere of the materialist concept of history, the “love drivel” about a “sisterhood” which supposedly wraps a unifying ribbon around bourgeois ladies and female proletarians, burst like so many scintillating soap bubbles. Marx has forged and taught us to use the sword which has severed the connection between the proletarian and the bourgeois women’s movement. But he has also forged the chain of discernment by which the former is inextricably tied to the Socialist labor movement and the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat.

—Clara Zetkin, “What the Women Owe to Karl Marx” (March 1903), reprinted in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings (1984)