Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings

by Clara Zetkin, Philip S. Foner (Editor), Angela Y. Davis (Introduction), Rosalyn Baxandall (Foreword by)

Overview

Here is an essential collection of essays and speeches from 1889 to 1933, long unavailable in the United States, on women's equality, labor, peace and socialism. Zetkin broke new ground by exploring the intersections of gender and class. In these writings, she describes the political process that ultimately allowed for socialized reproduction–namely the establishment by the Soviet revolutionary government of communal kitchens, laundries and child care facilities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608463909
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	07/14/2015
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Clara Zetkin was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and advocate for women's rights. In 1911, she organized the first International Women's Day

Philip S. Foner was one of the most prominent Marxist historians in the United States. A prolific author and editor, he tirelessly documented the lives of workers, African Americans, and political radicals. Because of his political affiliations he was shut out of academic employment for a quarter century.

Angela Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis was politically active during the late 1960s through the 1970s and was associated with the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party. Davis was a political prisoner and is now a world-renowned scholar and author of Are Prisons Obsolete?

Rosalyn Baxandall was a Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Old Westbury and taught at the Bard Prison Project, and the CUNY Labor School. Baxandall is the author of Words on Fire, the Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, (New Brunswick: Rutgers UniversityPress, l987), the co-author of Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, (New York: Basic Books 2000), the coeditor of America’s Working Women, An Anthology of Women’s Work, 1620-1970, (New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1995) and (New York: Random House l976), and coeditor of Dear Sisters, Dispatches From Women Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 2000), as well as the author of almost 50 articles, book reviews, on day care, working women, sexuality, reproductive rights and class, race and gender in suburbia, l945- 2000.

Table of Contents

Foreword to the 2015 Edition Rosalyn Baxandall 3

Foreword Angela Y. Davis 9

Introduction Philip S. Foner By Clara Zetkin 17

1889 For the Liberation of Women 45

1893 Women's Work and the Organization of Trade Unions 51

1895 Concerning the Women's Rights Petition 60

1896 Only in Conjunction with the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious 72

1902 Protect Our Children 84

1903 What the Women Owe to Karl Marx 93

1907 Women's Right to Vote 98

1910 International Women's Day 108

1914 Proletarian Women Be Prepared 110

1914 To the Socialist Women of All Countries 114

1914 Letter to Heleen Ankersmit 117

1915 Women of the Working People 130

1917 To the Socialist Women of All Countries 133

1917 The Battle for Power and Peace in Russia 136

1919 Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg Must Remain Alive 142

1919 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht 145

1926 In the Muslim Women's Club 158

1932 Save the Scottsboro Black Youths 167

1932 Fascism Must Be Defeated 170

1933 The Toilers Against War 176

Notes 181

Index 199

Editorial Reviews

"Clara Zetkin's arguments in support of women workers contain a logic which can be effectively employed today in defense of strong affirmative action programs, not only for women but for the racially and nationally oppressed as well … [her] analysis of the relationship between the woman suffrage campaign and the struggle of working women … is significant not only because of its important historical value, but all .. with respect to the class nature of such contemporary women's struggles as the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States."
—From the Foreword to the 1984 edition by Angela Y. Davis

"In January, 1915, the British journal Labour Woman wrote of Clara Zetkin: 'She is Socialist in her very fibre, and she is a fighter ready to face death rather than give way in any issue of import in the people's struggle.' [Zetkin] displayed these qualities in leading the largest women's socialist movement in Europe, in editing the most important woman's journal in Europe for over twenty-five years, in organizing working women into trade unions, in battling for women's suffrage and equal rights … in the battle against revisionism, and in her militant opposition to militarism, imperialism and the first World War…[She] was able to exert a powerful influence in the formation of socialist and communist policy on the woman question, and on the policy of a number of trade unions toward women workers…Clara Zetkin's writings and speeches are still too little known in the United States. With the publication of the present volume, there will finally be available a representative selection of the thoughts of the leading woman of European socialism."
—From the introduction by Philip Foner

From the Publisher