Clara Zetkin (born Clara Josephine Eißner, 5 July 1857 – 20 June 1933) was a German Marxist theorist, journalist, and politician who shaped the socialist women’s movement in Europe for half a century. She linked the emancipation of working-class women to the overthrow of capitalism, edited the influential paper Die Gleichheit for 25 years, helped found International Women’s Day, opposed the First World War from the left of German Social Democracy, co-founded the Spartacus League, and served as a Communist deputy in the Weimar Reichstag until the Nazi seizure of power.
She was born in Wiederau, a small Saxon village of textile workers and small farmers at the foot of the Erzgebirge. Her father, Gottfried Eißner, was the village schoolteacher and organist; her mother, Josephine Vitale Eißner, came from a Leipzig family with ties to the early bourgeois women’s movement and knew Louise Otto-Peters and Auguste Schmidt. In 1872 the family moved to Leipzig so the children could continue their education. Through her mother’s connections Clara attended the teacher-training seminar directed by Auguste Schmidt from 1874 to 1878 and passed her examination with distinction. She specialized in modern languages, literature, and history.
Leipzig at the time was a center of both the women’s and the workers’ movements. Zetkin heard lectures by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht and joined a circle of Russian émigré students. There she met Ossip Zetkin, a carpenter and socialist from Odessa who introduced her to Marx. In 1878 she joined the Socialist Workers’ Party (later the SPD). The same year Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws banned socialist organizations, press, and unions. Ossip was expelled in 1880; Clara followed him into exile, working first as a governess in Linz and Zurich before joining him in Paris in 1882. They never married, because she would have lost her German citizenship; she nevertheless took his name and they had two sons, Maxim (1883) and Konstantin (“Kostja,” 1885). The family lived in poverty on Montmartre while she wrote, translated, and distributed illegal socialist literature. Ossip died of tuberculosis in January 1889.
A few months later, at the founding congress of the Second International in Paris, Zetkin delivered a landmark speech on “the liberation of women.” She rejected the view, common even among socialists, that women’s entry into industry merely undercut male wages. The “woman question,” she argued, was not a single issue but class-specific: bourgeois women sought legal equality within existing property relations, while proletarian women needed economic independence through wage labor and, ultimately, the abolition of class society. The speech helped commit the International to organizing working women rather than treating them as a threat to male workers.
After the Anti-Socialist Laws lapsed she returned to Germany in 1891 and settled in Stuttgart. In 1892 she became editor of Die Gleichheit (“Equality”), the SPD’s paper for working women. Under her direction its circulation rose from a few thousand to more than 100,000 by 1913. The paper combined practical demands—equal pay for equal work, protective legislation, factory inspection by women, suffrage—with Marxist theory. Zetkin insisted that suffrage and legal equality, while necessary, were insufficient; only a socialist transformation could end the double exploitation of working women as wage laborers and as unpaid domestic workers. She was elected to the SPD’s executive in 1895, one of the first women in such a position, and in 1907 became secretary of the International Socialist Women’s Secretariat.
In 1899 she married the painter Georg Friedrich Zundel, eighteen years her junior. They lived in a house with a large garden in Sillenbuch near Stuttgart, where Rosa Luxemburg was a frequent guest and Lenin visited in 1907. The marriage later foundered; they separated during the war and divorced in 1928. Politics remained the center of her life.
At the Second International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen on 27 August 1910, Zetkin and Käthe Duncker proposed an annual Women’s Day. The resolution, adopted by delegates from 17 countries, stated that socialist women of all countries should hold a Women’s Day each year, “whose foremost purpose it must be to aid the attainment of women’s suffrage,” treated “in conjunction with the entire women’s question according to Socialist precepts.” The first observances took place on 19 March 1911 in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Denmark; the date later settled on 8 March after the February Revolution in Russia. Zetkin’s initiative grew out of earlier American socialist women’s demonstrations and was conceived as a counterpart to May Day, not as a celebration of bourgeois feminism.
When war broke out in 1914 the SPD majority voted war credits. Zetkin, Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and others formed the Internationale Gruppe, later the Spartacus League. In 1915 she organized an illegal international women’s conference against the war in Bern and was imprisoned for several months. She lost control of Die Gleichheit in 1917 because of her anti-war line and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). After the November Revolution she entered the newly founded Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1919, served in the Württemberg constituent assembly—one of the first women to speak in a German parliament—and was elected to the Reichstag in 1920, remaining a deputy until 1933. She sat on the KPD central committee and the executive of the Communist International, spending increasing time in Moscow. After Lenin’s death her influence waned; she was honored but increasingly isolated as Stalinization advanced.
On 30 August 1932, as the oldest member of the newly elected Reichstag, the nearly blind and frail 75-year-old Zetkin opened the session. Two Communist deputies helped her to the rostrum. Before a chamber packed with Nazi deputies in uniform she delivered a 40-minute speech calling for a united front of all working people against fascism. Differences of party, union, or religion, she said, must yield to “this imperious historical necessity.” She demanded the impeachment of President Hindenburg, denounced the Papen cabinet as the instrument of monopoly capital, and closed with the hope that she might yet open “the first Soviet Congress of a Soviet Germany.” The speech was her last public act in Germany. After Hitler’s appointment as chancellor she returned to the Soviet Union. She died on 20 June 1933 in a rest home at Arkhangelskoye near Moscow; her urn was placed in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
Zetkin’s legacy is double-edged. She built a mass socialist women’s movement that treated working women’s demands as part of class struggle rather than a separate “women’s issue.” International Women’s Day still bears her imprint even after its later official and commercial transformations. At the same time she remained loyal to the Soviet Union and the Comintern after they had abandoned the united-front tactics she advocated against fascism. Her life illustrates both the radical potential of Marxist feminism and the political constraints that later Communist parties imposed on it. Parks, streets, and a hall in the German Bundestag still carry her name; her writings on women’s labor, war, and fascism continue to be read by those who regard gender oppression as inseparable from class society.