Clara Zetkin: Our Day

[My own translation of the text in "Die Gleichheit. Zeitschrift für die Interessen der Arbeiterinnen", 21st volume No. 13, 27 March 1911, p. 193 f. Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome]

The first attempt to rally the working women masses internationally around the banner of Social Democracy for the struggle for the full political citizen's rights of the female sex and to place them in a united, cohesive front has turned out brilliantly. The First Social-Democratic Women's Day in Denmark and Switzerland, and especially in Austria and Germany, has turned out to be a great and significant success, which must instruct those who doubt not the goodness and justice of the cause at stake, but the strength of their own power to lead it to victory. In many hundreds of meetings across the borders of the country, many hundreds of thousands, certainly more than a million, of women and men have been united in expressing the conviction that the female sex deserves the right to vote and to be elected to all legislative and administrative bodies as a recognition of social maturity and of the social necessity of life to look after one's own interests. And the marching masses added to the fundamental commitment to the same political, unrestricted right for man and woman the equally unified expression of will to wrest this right from the protectors of age-old injustice in a persistent struggle.

With joyful pride we may write it down: this International Social Democratic Women's Day was the most powerful demonstration for women's suffrage that the history of the movement for the emancipation of the female sex can record to this day. In spite of its simple outward form, the colourful demonstrations of the English Suffragettes, organised with great skill and even greater material means, pale beside it and its significance. In terms of their content, they relate to the international social democratic rally like a temporarily captivating stage set to the powerfully pulsating life itself. That is why our demonstration will never be followed, like the giant march of the suffragettes in London, by the farce of a candidature for women's suffrage which attracted only 20 votes. The hundreds and thousands who flocked to the individual meetings could only take part in the events at the price of personal sacrifice and inconvenience, foregoing even the first beautiful Sunday in spring, which at least here in Germany the capricious weather gods provided. They were almost exclusively women and men, on whose necks the yoke of merciless capitalist exploitation weighs day in and day out. But precisely for this reason, they were driven by a holy seriousness of clearly conscious and well-founded conviction, an unshakeable will to express their will. The struggle for the full political emancipation of the female sex as a right of personality, detached from every privilege of property and education, is above all a struggle of working women. It is therefore inseparable from the struggle of the class-conscious proletariat for a thoroughgoing democracy. Its decisive battles will be fought in connection with this struggle, under the leadership of Social Democracy, by the working and exploited masses, without distinction of sex, whose legal demands are likewise tenaciously and bitterly opposed by the exploiting minority, without distinction of sex. In Germany and, as far as we can judge so far, also in Austria, this distinctly proletarian-social democratic character of the struggle for women's suffrage has become unequivocally apparent. The bourgeois women have generally been almost completely absent from our assemblies, and where they have been represented here and there, they have formed a vanishing minority, too weak to imprint a different character on the assemblies. No wonder! According to the latest publications, the bourgeois women's suffrage organisations don't even have 3,000 members, and these are also divided into supporters and opponents of universal suffrage. Moreover, the social democratic rally was not mentioned at all in the women's rights press. And this despite the fact that the same papers are wont to raise a stupefying cry of joy if even two people in an American or South African Buxtehude [small town in Germany] declare themselves in favour of women's suffrage. And this despite the fact that the lively systematic agitation in the social democratic and trade union press as well as in the organisations was bound to draw attention to the forthcoming event.

These facts, however, reflect more than the weakness, indecisiveness and disunity of the bourgeois women's movement in Germany in the struggle for the political citizen's rights of the female sex and the universal suffrage of all women of legal age in particular: the politically dull and obtuse sense of bourgeois women in general. In it we are confronted with a sin of bourgeois democracy that mocks it, it does not even know how, in that until recently it fought, and in part still fights, every political awakening of women with the unmitigated bigotry of the pre-March [1848] philistine. Like day from night, the merit of Social Democracy differs from this, coming alive in the politically alert and mature spirit of hundreds of thousands of proletarian women. The mischievous whim of chance has arranged that the contrast shown between bourgeois democracy and social democracy was instructively illustrated precisely on 19 March. While the Social Democrats were demonstrating for women's suffrage, the "Central Committee of the Progressive People's Party" [Left Liberals] meeting in Berlin toasted "to the ladies" in the usual manner. No report reports that there was any talk during the deliberations of finally listening to the pleas of the liberal "ladies" and including the demand for women's suffrage in the party's programme.

The fact that in Berlin, Wurtemberg and Mannheim some bourgeois women's rights activists expressed their sympathy for the idea did not add a dash to the decidedly proletarian-social democratic content of the meeting. The solemnly invoked enthusiasm for our struggle takes on a peculiar flavour when one recalls some facts. In Berlin, among the bourgeois women's rights activists who greeted our demonstration for universal suffrage for all people of legal age without distinction of sex, there was, in addition to the honest democrat Mrs. Cauer, the ruthless Hohenzollern enthusiast Miss Lischnewska. But Miss Lischnewska is the founder and egeria of the same "liberal women's party" which with its hatpin stabbed the proletariat's struggle for suffrage in Prussia in the back by initially declaring itself satisfied with a limited right to vote. And Miss Lischnewska, only last autumn at the General Assembly of the Federation of German Women's Associations in Heidelberg, expressly refused to commit this organisation programmatically to demanding municipal suffrage for women on the basis of universal suffrage. Mrs. Altmann-Gottheiner, the spiritual head of the women's rights activists in Mannheim, sounded the same horn, after she had avoided taking a position on the burning question of universal women's suffrage or ladies' suffrage in a cowardly ambiguity in her presentation. We have not heard that this would have called to order by her followers. But let us think of the future! The bourgeois women's rights activists have it in their own hands to dispel any doubts about the seriousness and reliability of their convictions. For this purpose, they only need to put action after words. As soon as they do not confine themselves to speaking in favour of universal suffrage to the applause of Social Democratic assemblies as soon as they fight for it in the bourgeois world and against its resistance: they can be sure of their rating as champions of democracy. In any case, one thing is certain: the Social Democratic rally for universal women's suffrage will have a clarifying effect on the situation, a parting of the ways on the women's rights movement. It is up to the honest bourgeois fighters for the equal rights of all to draw the consequences from this, i.e. to oppose with increased emphasis and increased confidence the open and secret supporters of the money-bag suffrage disguised as women's suffrage.

March 19 is a life-abounding proof of the inner unity between the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat and the striving for the full liberation of humankind. It confirmed anew that there is no need of body and soul oppressing working women - from the gnawing hunger aggravated by the policy of customs and tax usury to the exhausting longing for the development and exercise of forces in the light of culture - which the fighting socialist working class does not seriously strive to alleviate; that every legal demand of the masses of women toiling with hand and brain finds in it its advocate and championess. But it has also confirmed that the proletarian women - as far as they have awakened to class consciousness - give loyalty for loyalty. All those who long for liberation and look forward to the dawn of a new era have gathered around the red banner. The proletarian women have thus declared that they understand the close connection of their individual fate with the historical situation of their class and recognise that full humanity will only blossom for them beyond the dungeon walls of this capitalist order. From this knowledge they have drawn the strength to make all the work and struggles of the working class their own. There is not a single activity in the service of proletarian liberation - from the quiet, dusty detailed work of everyday life to the most tremendous struggles for bread and justice - which women did not feel to be their very own cause, for which they would have devoted themselves right down to the last atom of their strength. This is written in the history of the great strikes and lock-outs; this is engraved in the tablets of the suffrage struggle; this can be observed by anyone who follows the daily communal life of the proletariat, from which its great historical activity draws its strength.

The Social-Democratic women have put into this work of theirs the highest sum of all the old virtues which are attributed to their sex; they are stingy in their efforts to exercise all the new civic virtues which the working class needs in order to fulfil its enormous historical task. They, the often unlearned and untrained, have thus become knowers, trained and acting in strict voluntary self-discipline with the community. They have grown with their task; the work for the common higher goal has at the same time become work on themselves. From it they have gained that personal, human elevation and development which the bourgeois social order withholds from them, and with which they anticipate a piece of the liberated humanity of their class. This personal and political maturity of theirs was just as indispensable a prerequisite for the brilliant course of the demonstration for women's suffrage as was the historical insight, the sense of justice, the longing for higher culture on the part of the political and trade-union struggle organisations of the proletariat. It is certainly well founded in history that the decisive victories for the right of women in bourgeois class society can only be won by the armies of the one undivided revolutionary working class. No less firmly established, however, is the other fact that working women themselves must remain the driving force of the struggle for this right. To the initiative of women the tremendous force of common action! It is thanks to this realisation that the first international socialist women's day for women's suffrage has become a day of glory for social democracy, a day of glory for proletarian women, for socialist women, a political event. It rises as a landmark that shows us the path on which we advance from stage to stage to the land where the last social fetters of woman will be broken by socialism that liberates humanity.