Käte Duncker 1932
Source: International Press Correspondence, Vol. 12, No. 29, June 30, 1932, p. 599-600.
Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive 2021
Translated and Transcribed: Geoff
HTML Markup: Zdravko Saveski
Comrade Clara Zetkin will be 75 years old on 5th of July next. More than two-thirds of her life have been spent in active fight for the aims of the international Labour Movement. The daughter of an elementary school teacher in Saxony, Clara, when she was about 20 years old, came to Leipzig and there attended the Teachers' Training College, which was conducted by a leader of the bourgeois women's movement, Auguste Schmidt. Here Clara showed and developed extraordinary gifts, even though her warm temperament and irrepressible energy caused her to rebel against the high-brow atmosphere, remote from actual reality, which prevailed at the school. Here Clara also became acquainted with the half hearted and confused attitude of the bourgeois women's movement towards economic and class conditions.
In Leipzig, Clara came into the circles of Russian political refugees. In intercourse with them her keen intellect acquired its Marxist training and she developed into a conscious class fighter and revolutionary. In this circle of emigrants she got to know Ossip Zetkin, with whom she later lived in free union. When later he was expelled from Germany as an "undesirable alien", she followed him first to Switzerland and afterwards to Paris. Soon after the death of Ossip Zetkin, which took place in 1889, Clara returned to Germany and found work in the Dietzgen Publishing House in Stuttgart. In 1892 she took over the editorship of "Gleichheit", the social democratic women's paper, which had been founded a year previously by Emma Ihrer.
Both as editor of the "Gleichheit" and also as a speaker at numerous meetings Clara Zetkin regarded it as her main task to educate the proletarian women to class-consciousness and prevent them from being drawn into the bourgeois women's movement.
In Germany women's work had developed to great extent already in the eighties of the last century. But the women who were engaged in trades or professions were for the greater part still dominated by petty-bourgeois ideas. In addition, it was difficult to reach the women, as the majority of them were scattered in home industries or in small undertakings. Moreover, the complicated and reactionary laws regarding the right of organisation and assembly rendered almost impossible the political and trade-union enlightenment and organisation of women.
Then it was Clara Zetkin, who - equipped with a Marxist training and an equally thorough and many-sided education, and as an eloquent and rousing speaker and writer - rallied the proletarian women under the flag of the class-conscious international labour movement. With great clearness and sharpness she elaborated in the "Gleichheit" and in various speeches the differences between the proletarian and the bourgeois women's movement. For the proletarian women it was necessary to fight with the men of her class against capitalist exploitation; and whilst striving for political equality, this was only a means to an end. Not a fight between the sexes, but class struggle was her slogan.
It was chiefly due to Clara Zetkin's activity on the "Gleichheit" that the proletarian women's movement, right from the beginning, kept itself free from the bourgeois feminist movement and came forward at the same time as a part of the general labour movement. As editor of the "Gleichheit" she considered it her task to train and educate a body of capable women agitators who then, armed with good material and clear as to their aims, should work among the proletarian women.
Clara edited "Gleichheit" until 1916, when the party Central committee, which was violently pro-war, deprived her of it.
But Comrade Zetkin was not only a leader of the proletarian women's movement; she was also in the front line in the general fight of the Party. She took up an attitude on all political questions and right from the beginning adopted the revolutionary Marxist standpoint. Already in the nineties of last century there commenced in the social democratic party, at first almost imperceptibly, but later more openly, that change which found its conclusion in the world war. From a party of revolutionary class struggle it became a petty-bourgeois reform party. This process began with a small group of party comrades seeking to change the attitude of the party to the bourgeois State; voting for the budget was justified; colonial policy was approved; criticism of German militarism was moderated. Clara Zetkin opposed all such tendencies with passion and determination. This attitude brought her into close alliance with Rosa Luxemburg, with whom she was united by the closest friendship until the murder of Rosa in 1919.
When the world war broke out Clara Zetkin at first endeavoured to restore the severed connections with the women comrades in other countries. In March 1915, she convened the Women's Conference at Berne. She was placed under preventive arrest for several months for having spread the Berne Manifesto. Together with Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring she published in June 1915 the first number of the "Internationale", the only number which was published during the war. She then consistently pursued her path via the Spartakus Bund to the Communist Party and the III. International.
And even if today age and ill-health prevent her from standing in the front ranks of the proletarian fight for emancipation, she nevertheless follows with passionate interest all phases of this fight, and as far as possible takes part in events by word and pen.
As an outstanding international personality her name stands in history alongside that of Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Franz Mehring, of all of whom she was a close friend.
We trust that our veteran comrade may live to see the barbarism of fascism vanquished and the red flags flying over Soviet Germany.