Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept "Bourgeois Feminism"

Abstract

ON BASTILLE DAY 1889, German socialist Clara Zetkin announced to delegates from twenty countries assembled in Paris on centennial of French Revolution that the emancipation of women, together with that of all humanity, will take place only with emancipation of labor from capital. Zetkin assured these founders of Second International that they need fear losing proletarian women to others who were claiming to advance their interests, especially women's rights groups who held their own international congresses in French capital that summer. Despite her own comfortable origins as daughter of a schoolteacher and a doctor's widow who had herself co-founded a women's rights organization, Zetkin denounced nonsocialist women's movement as a vain effort built upon sand ... [with] no basis in reality. While challenging her overwhelmingly male audience to recognize women's need for paid work to ensure their economic independence, she emphasized in this speech that bourgeois women offered no solution to woman question. Speaking at a women's rights congress in Berlin in 1896, she startled participants by declaring herself their adversary [Gegnerin].' Zetkin's message would reverberate far and wide and last into twenty-first century, bolstered in its long life by New Left and feminist activists and scholars, including historians of 1970s generation. In 2004, anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee, assessing condition of women in postsocialist Eastern Europe, asserted that not much has changed since 1907, and quoted Zetkin's speech at First International Congress of Socialist Women, held that year in Stuttgart: There cannot be a unified struggle for entire [female] sex ... No, it must be a class struggle of all exploited without differences of sex against all exploiters no matter what