Clara Zetkin

Clara Zetkin: The Woman Who Invented a Global Holiday

In August 1910, at the international socialist women's conference in Copenhagen, a fifty-three-year-old German editor proposed something with no precedent: that working women everywhere should mark one particular day of the year together. On 19 March 1911, more than a million people did so, in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. The date later moved to 8 March, at a Moscow conference she chaired. International Women's Day is now observed in most countries on earth, and almost nobody who marks it could name the woman who thought of it.

Wiederau

She was born Clara Josephine Eißner on 5 July 1857 in Wiederau, in Saxony. Her father, Gottfried Eissner, was a village schoolmaster and church organist; her mother, Josephine Vitale, came from a middle-class Leipzig family with French roots. The family moved to Leipzig in 1872, and Clara entered the Leipzig Teachers' College for Women — one of the few routes to an education a girl of her class could take.

Teaching was not what she got out of it. In Leipzig she fell into the circles around German social democracy and met Ossip Zetkin, a Russian Jewish Marxist. She took his name without marrying him and had two sons with him, Maxim and Konstantin. The 1880s were spent largely in Switzerland and Paris, in exile and revolutionary organising among the leading socialists of the International. Ossip died in June 1889. She moved to Stuttgart with the boys, and later, from 1899 to 1928, was married to the artist Georg Friedrich Zundel.

Die Gleichheit

From 1892 to 1917 she edited *Die Gleichheit* — Equality — the SPD's newspaper for women. This was the machine. Under her the circulation grew forty-fold by 1910, which is the concrete measure of what she actually did for a living: she built a mass readership of working-class women where none had existed, and used it to organise them.

The politics she pushed through it were uncompromising and, to modern ears, hard. Zetkin rejected bourgeois feminism outright. The emancipation of women, she argued, was not an isolated question existing in itself but part of the great social question; only socialism could deliver it, and alliances with middle-class suffragists would blunt the point. That position defined the socialist women's movement in Europe for a generation.

She was instrumental in founding the International Socialist Women's Congress in 1907 at Stuttgart, and it was from that structure that Copenhagen and International Women's Day followed three years later.

The War and the Break

When the SPD voted for war credits in 1914 and accepted the *Burgfrieden* — the domestic political truce — Zetkin refused. In 1915 she convened the first international women's conference against the war; sources differ on whether it met at Bern or Berlin. She was arrested more than once and held in protective custody in 1916, when illness got her released.

In 1916 she was among the founders of the Spartacist League. She had known Rosa Luxemburg since about 1898, a friendship of twenty years across a considerable temperamental gap — Luxemburg had little interest in women's organising, and joked that their shared epitaph should read that here lie the last two men of German Social Democracy.

After the revolution of 1918–19 Zetkin joined the newly formed Communist Party of Germany in January 1919 and sat for it in the Reichstag from 1920 until 1933. She served on the KPD Politburo until 1924 and its Central Committee from 1927 to 1929, and on the executive committee of the Communist International from 1921 to 1933. In 1920 she recorded conversations with Lenin about women's emancipation; the memoirs she wrote of him became canonical Soviet texts. Britannica's assessment is that her influence declined sharply after Lenin's death in 1924.

The Last Speech

In August 1932 the newly elected Reichstag convened with the Nazis as its largest party. By parliamentary custom the oldest member presides at the opening, and the oldest member was Clara Zetkin, seventy-five and gravely ill. She was carried in and delivered an address calling for the formation of a united front of all workers to turn back fascism.

She had months left. After Hitler took power in 1933 she went into exile in the Soviet Union and died on 20 June at Arkhangelskoye near Moscow, weeks short of seventy-six. Her ashes were placed in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis; Stalin and Lenin's widow Nadezhda Krupskaya attended the funeral. East Germany later named streets after her and created a Clara Zetkin Medal in 1954.

Why Clara Is Called a Genius

None of these sources applies the word to her, and it should not be claimed on theoretical grounds: her central argument — that women's oppression is a dimension of class society and cannot be resolved separately — comes out of Marx and Bebel rather than out of her.

What she possessed to a rare degree was institutional imagination of a very practical kind. Consider what she actually built. A newspaper that grew forty-fold in circulation and turned scattered working women into an addressable political constituency. A permanent international conference structure for socialist women from 1907. And, out of that structure, an annual date that has outlived the movement, the party, the country and the ideology that produced it — a piece of political infrastructure so durable that the United Nations and the governments of capitalist states now observe it. Very few organisers of any period have designed something that survives its own context that completely.

The counter-case is substantial. Her hostility to cross-class feminism was a strategic choice with costs: it kept the socialist women's movement out of the suffrage coalitions that in several countries actually won the vote, and it treated as enemies women whose immediate aims she shared. Her later decades were spent as a Comintern official in an apparatus that punished independence, and by Britannica's account her influence faded after 1924; the memoirs of Lenin that made her famous in the Soviet Union were also, plainly, a service to a regime. Most poignantly, the united front she demanded from the Reichstag chair in 1932 was a plea born of failure — the German left she had helped lead for forty years was too divided to stop what was coming, and it did not stop it.

Legacy

The holiday is the monument, and it is a strange one — a socialist organising device now marked by corporations and foreign ministries, its origins largely forgotten. But the more serious inheritance is the argument. Zetkin insisted that women's emancipation be treated as a structural question about work, wages and class rather than a matter of rights alone, and that dispute has never closed; it runs straight through modern feminism. She also demonstrated, at a moment when almost no woman in Europe could vote, that a woman could edit the press, sit in the parliament, and command the platform of an international movement. She did all three, and she was doing the last of them at seventy-five, from a chair, against the Nazis.

Achievements

• member of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic
• Order of Lenin
• Order of the Red Banner