Social-Democracy and Woman Suffrage: A Paper Read by Clara Zetkin to the Conference of Women Belonging to the Social-Democratic Party Held at Mannheim, Before the Opening of the Annual Congress of the German Social-DemocracyZetkin, Klara
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Social-Democracy and Woman Suffrage: A Paper Read by Clara Zetkin to the Conference of Women Belonging to the Social-Democratic Party Held at Mannheim, Before the Opening of the Annual Congress of the German Social-Democracy
Zetkin, Klara
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; Women -- Suffrage
We must always press on the question of Woman Suffrage when we are
agitating about the Suffrage. We have always argued in the Suffrage
agitation that it was a question of equal rights for men and women, and
we must continue to do so till we succeed. We must be united. We know
that we shall not attain the victory of Woman Suffrage in a short time,
but we know, too, that in our struggles for this measure we shall
revolutionise hundreds of thousands of minds. We carry on our war, not
as a fight between the sexes, but as a battle against the political
might of the possessing classes; as a fight which we carry on with all
our might and main, without hatred of the other sex; a fight whose final
aim and whose glory will be that in the broadest masses of the
proletariat the knowledge shall arise that when the day of the
historical development shall have made sufficient progress then the
proletariat, in its entirety, without distinction of sex, shall be able
to call out to the capitalist order of society: “You rest on us, you
oppress us, and, see, now the building which you have erected is
tottering to the ground.”
The speaker then submitted the following resolution:—
“The demand for Woman Suffrage is the result of the changes which
have occurred owing to the capitalist method of production in modern
economic and social conditions, especially since the changes in
labour, owing to the position and the destiny of women. Woman is in
this position as a consequence of the middle-class democratic
principle which regulates the destiny of all social callings, not
depending on wealth and on social position. The demand for Woman
Suffrage has thus, from the beginning, been connected in the minds
of a few thinkers with the struggle in which the middle class has
been engaged for the democratisation of political rights as a means
of procuring its political emancipation and its rule as a class.
This class has received great and increasing power partly through
the great and growing wealth produced by woman’s labour, which is
continually increasing in modern industry. Woman Suffrage is the
assertion of the economic emancipation of woman from home, and her
economic independence from the family as an only means of
subsistence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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