Clara Zetkin: Our March Day

[My own translation of the German text in "Die Gleichheit. Zeitschrift für die Interessen der Arbeiterinnen", No. 12, 13 March 1911, pp. 177-179]

March 19 will - we are sure - become an important date in the history of the struggle for women's suffrage. In Germany and Austria, Social Democracy has called on working women to rise up on this day and, gathered around the red banner, to express their firm determination to win for themselves unabated citizen's rights. Behind Women's Day in both countries is the one revolutionary workers' movement as embodied in social democracy and the free trade unions. This fact alone points to what is sharply marked by the content, the circumstances of the event: This struggle is not about women's rights in the narrow bourgeois feminist conception that declares itself satisfied when the chain of political rightlessness of the female sex is loosened only "in principle" by giving the thin stratum of women "of property and education" ballots and eligibility as a privilege of their class. No, its aim is women's right as a human right, as a right of personality, detached from any social title of ownership; its aim is therefore only achieved when the political gagging of the entire female sex comes to an end "practically" by recognising all women of legal age indiscriminately as full citizens.

The struggle which breaks out at such an award is in the main a struggle of working women - no matter whether they "plough" with their hands or their brains, bend their backs under the yoke of labour drudgery or rule over the domestic hearth on which the heavy hand of exploiting capital weighs. As such a struggle, it remains welded to the struggle of the working class for a complete democratisation of political life. It proves to be - as we demonstrated in the last issue - part of the historical mission which the German bourgeoisie has neither fulfilled nor is willing or able to fulfil in the days of intensified confrontations between capital and labour. Thus its battles must also be fought by the proletariat, which in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, junkerdom and semi-absolutism is now consciously and clearly beginning to complete what its fathers began in the Storms and Stress of the forties in alliance with the revolutionary bourgeoisie against the feudal state. Indeed, universal women's suffrage is the last demand that must be enforced in order to achieve real democracy. Unbreakable threads of organic historical development therefore link the struggle for this right to the March days of the crazy year to which the date of the social democratic event refers. This date is of historical significance. On 19 March 1848, Prussian absolutism capitulated formally to the power of the street, the revolution. It was the morning after the glorious barricade fights in Berlin. Frederick William IV, the king of the turgid, sanctimonious absolutist phrase, had sunk humbly to his knees in the face of the wild-eyed apparition of revolution. He published the manifesto full of promises to "his beloved Berliners" who had been mercilessly martyred the day before by his surely even more beloved troops; he decreed that the military be withdrawn immediately while the barricades still rose defiantly as a sign of the people's strength and will to fight. In the thunderstorm atmosphere of the 1840s, which finally discharged in March 1848, the demand for the political emancipation of the female sex had also been championed.

This demand had not suddenly sprung armour-clad from a brilliant head, it had developed slowly, almost unnoticed, with the rise of capitalist production and the preconditions it created for bourgeois society. We hear it as an echo of the revolutions in which the young bourgeoisie of England and France, as fighters for a change in the world, measured themselves against the ruling powers of the feudal order. The embers of the great French revolution carried it across the border to Germany, where it found its defender in Theodor v. Hippel in 1792. But what a contrast! In England, the demand for political equality of the sexes had been championed by women. It had found its theoretical founder above all in Mary Wollstonecraft, and its martyrs in the struggles for universal suffrage at the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the Great French Revolution, the richly gifted Olympe de Gouges demanded full citizenship as a human right for women in a ravishing rhapsody of the ideology of natural law. She and Rose Lacombe organised women so that, as a united force, they could influence legislation, the surging sea of political events, and fight for their own rights. The first political women's associations flourished, soon enclosing thousands of members, especially in Paris, and sought to intervene with passionate impetuosity - albeit with an uncertain, clumsy hand - in the day-to-day affairs of history.

In Germany, on the other hand, there was no loud and angry call for the political emancipation of the female sex from the women's world itself, trembling for justice. And this despite the fact that at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century there was no lack of outstanding female figures who, nourished by the freedom ideas of the classical art and philosophy of the time, dragged religion, marriage, family, etc. before the judgement seat of their reason and in their personal lives as well as in their literary confessions opposed all social ties to the right of the woman as the right of individuality. It is significant that the most important and mature of these women, the witty Rahel [Varnhagen], spoke out for the full equality of her sex, as it were, only in private. As early as 1819, she expressed the justification for this demand in the following words: "It is ignorance of humans if people imagine that our minds are constituted differently and for other needs, and that we can live entirely off the existence of our husband or son. Rahel's wide-ranging education and intellectual acuity was not denied in the fact that Saint-Simon's teaching, which proclaimed the equality of the sexes, had a deep and lasting effect on her. In 1832, in a letter to Heinrich Heine, she described the utopian socialism of the ingenious Frenchman as "the new, grandly invented instrument which at last touches the great old wound, the history of people on earth". His goal was hers: "Beautifying the earth: my old theme. Freedom to every human development: likewise."

The demand for equal value and equality of the sexes, a salient trait of utopian socialism, only resounds in Germany to the slogan of full citizen's rights for women as the revolutionary fervour swells, thundering against the feudal order in 1848. Revolutionary times make women aware that the home is not a self-contained world in which to dwell in peace; it is at most a chamber within the great edifice of society. When this structure cracks in its joints, when its beams threaten to burst, when the raging flames race through its walls: then women, too, feel the social connections, those of the individual lot in good and bad with the fate of a totality, which connect the family with the state. And with her and her family's dependence on the social powers, they recognise the crying injustice that they lack the political rights and thus the power to direct and shape these powers. That is why the revolution has always introduced women as fighters into history; that is why the bourgeois revolutions have loosened the tongues of the otherwise silent and given them the courage of those desiring rights. In the fermenting, roaring time in the pre-march era, when the fire-drink of revolutionary ideas rumbled in the blood of the young German bourgeoisie, women also began to demand the right and the duty to promote the common good as full citizens. In 1844, Robert Blum's "Vaterlandsblätter" [Patriotic Sheets] raised the question: "Do women also have a right to participate in the interests of the state?" "A Saxon Girl" answered the question in the affirmative in an article that culminated in the sentence: "Participation in the interests of the state is not only a right, it, is a duty of women." The Saxon girl who gave expression to the yearning of the most advanced of her sex was Luise Otto, a founder of the bourgeois women's movement and to her end a faithful confessor of the democracy for which she fought and suffered in her youth. Events proved her word true: "When the times become violently loud, it cannot fail that women hear and obey their voices, too."

Women became outstanding bearers of the German Catholic movement, in which a part of the bourgeois revolutionary aspirations gained life and form. They found their own associations to promote this movement, but are also fully authorised members in the German Catholic parishes. Ronge calls on women to "demand their share in the struggle of world history". Malwida v. Meysenbug, the great idealist, one of the best, like others like her, takes the view: "How could a people regenerate itself and become free if one half of it were excluded from the careful, all-round preparation which true freedom demands for the people as well as for the individuals?” In Hamburg, at the cost of great sacrifices, a college for women was established to serve this preparatory work; women entered the actual political movement in growing numbers. In Saxony and elsewhere they follow the proceedings in the chamber with passionate attention, they are the enthusiastic participants in the political festivals, their rapturous enthusiasm for the cause of democracy fires the poets and is undoubtedly influential in the revolutionary poetry of the time. Committees and organisations of women in support of the cause of freedom, and later in support of revolutionary fighters, sprout up in great numbers. A woman calls out to women: "to carry a sword in myrtles," when "men sin cowardly by trembling at the spirit of the time." Women's eyes plunge into the abyss of social misery, which oppressed craft guild production and stretching capitalism bring upon the masses, and not least upon the women of the toiling people. Luise Otto became the courageous, never-silent advocate of the lace-makers and other women workers before the Saxon government and the public. Her slogan of full civil rights for women was coupled with her demand for a national "organisation of labour" that would also do justice to the vital necessity of her sex, a demand that breathed the spirit of utopian socialism. Women champion the demands for freedom in literary form, they are also not missing in revolutionary struggles between the absolutist state powers and the politically disenfranchised masses of the people, and as if they were heroines, they became martyrs of their democratic convictions. The bourgeois revolutionary period gave birth to Germany's first political women's newspaper, which Luise Otto published in 1849 with the proud motto: "Dem Reich der Freiheit werb' ich Bürgerinnen" ("I am recruiting women citizens for the empire of freedom"), and which fell in 1852 as a victim of the reaction that followed on the heels of the bourgeoisie's betrayal of the revolution. The brief victory of democracy over absolutism in March 1848 was also women's work, and together with the proletariat, women were cheated of their rights by the bourgeoisie.

The history of the struggle for the political civil rights of the female sex necessarily directs our gaze to the political decay of the German bourgeoisie. It must turn with hopefulness to the class that rises from the night and misery of the factories into the light of history. A new springtime of democratic thought has dawned. The class-conscious proletariat, under the leadership of Social Democracy, carries the banner forward, on which the demand for full citizen's rights for women is also emblazoned. March 19 seals the alliance that has always been alive and effective between working women and Social Democracy in the struggle for the full rights of the female sex. It confirms by deed that the citizen's rights of women means an essential, indissoluble part of the proletarian class struggle for full political democracy. It proclaims that the conquest of this right is not merely a woman's affair, but must be equally a man's affair, a great legal bargain of humanity, which in our country the proletariat brings to bear. It gathers the masses who have the will and the strength to do this. It deepens the conviction that victory in this one cause is nothing more than a stage in the struggle for the full human liberation of woman through social revolution. Our March Day, which points beyond the present into the future, is a life-giving testimony to the historical truth of Bettina v. Arnim's prophetic word: "No! Not one drop of blood of the revolution has flowed in vain; all has been recruited into spirit, it is now blossoming again in humanity".