Clara Zetkin
German Marxist theorist and women's rights activist.
Clara Zetkin, born Clara Josephine Eißner in July 1857 in a Saxon peasant village, was a German Marxist theorist, communist activist, and advocate for women’s rights. Her father was a schoolmaster and church organist, her mother a highly educated woman of French descent. After her family moved to Leipzig in 1872, she attended a teachers’ college for women and made early contacts with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Due to Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, she left for Zürich in 1882 and later Paris, where she trained as a journalist and translator and helped found the Socialist International group. She took the name Zetkin from her lover, the Russian Jewish Marxist Ossip Zetkin, with whom she had two sons; he died in 1889. She later married artist Georg Friedrich Zundel from 1899 to 1928.
Zetkin joined the Socialist Workers’ Party in 1878. After returning to Germany, she edited the SPD women’s newspaper *Die Gleichheit* for 25 years. She formed a long friendship with Rosa Luxemburg, and together they opposed Eduard Bernstein’s reformist “evolutionary socialism,” defending revolutionary Marxism. Zetkin led the SPD’s Women’s Office from 1907. She was instrumental in establishing International Women’s Day, first observed in March 1911 after a 1910 conference in Copenhagen where she and others proposed an annual women’s day to promote suffrage. She rejected bourgeois feminism, arguing that working women’s emancipation could only come through socialism, not through a movement serving upper-class interests. She believed women should enter the workforce to join trade unions. In 1917 she left the SPD for the Independent Social Democratic Party and its Spartacist wing, which became the Communist Party of Germany. She represented the KPD in the Reichstag from 1920 until her death in June 1933.
- died
- 20 June 1933
- field
- Marxist theory, communist activism, women's rights advocacy
- nationality
- German
- known_for
- Leading the socialist women's movement, editing Die Gleichheit, co-founding the
Verified Timeline
Lore & Background
Clara Zetkin was born in July 1857 in a peasant village in Saxony, now part of Königshain-Wiederau, as the eldest of three children. Her father, Gottfried Eissner, worked as a schoolmaster and church organist and was a devout Protestant; her mother, Josephine Vitale, came from a middle-class, highly educated family in Leipzig with French roots. In 1872 the family moved to Leipzig, where Zetkin attended the Leipzig Teachers’ College for Women and first made contact with the infant Social Democratic Party. Due to Bismarck’s ban on socialist activity in Germany, she went into exile in Zürich in 1882 and later to Paris, where she trained as a journalist and translator and helped found the Socialist International group. There she took the name of her lover, Ossip Zetkin, a Russian Jewish Marxist, with whom she had two sons, Maxim and Konstantin. After Ossip’s death in 1889, she moved to Stuttgart with her children. She later married artist Georg Friedrich Zundel from 1899 to 1928. Upon returning to Germany, she edited the SPD women’s newspaper *Die Gleichheit* for 25 years. She became leader of the SPD’s Women’s Office in 1907 and helped establish International Women’s Day in 1910, inspired partly by American socialist actions. She opposed bourgeois feminism, arguing that working women’s emancipation required complete social transformation through socialism, not isolated reforms.
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.
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