The Women’s and Women Workers’ Question of our Time

Bourgeois morality is the desert sand in which the ostrich buries its head when something unpleasant approaches; it must also serve as the last resort when it comes to defending keeping women tied to the household.’
In 1889, the communist politician Clara Zetkin began her meteoric rise to prominence within the international workers’ movement and published her first pamphlet, which is translated into English here for the first time. It outlines one of her most significant contributions to Marxist theory: a historical materialist understanding of the oppression of women and the theoretical justification for a ‘clean break’ between the bourgeois feminist movement of the ‘women’s rightists’ [Frauenrechtlerinnen] and the International Socialist Women’s Movement.