Publication Information

Basic Information

Access and Citation

AI Researcher Chatbot

Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot

Primary Location

Authors

Topics

Keywords

Related Works

Title: $Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept "Bourgeois Feminism"
Abstract: BASTILLE DAY 1889, German socialist Clara Zetkin announced to delegates from twenty countries assembled in Paris on the centennial of the French Revolution that "the emancipation of women, together with that of all humanity, will take place only with the emancipation of labor from capital."Zetkin assured these founders of the Second International that they need not fear losing "proletarian" women to others who were claiming to advance their interests, especially the women's rights groups who held their own international congresses in the French capital that summer.Despite her own comfortable origins as the daughter of a schoolteacher and a doctor's widow who had herself co-founded a women's rights organization, Zetkin denounced the nonsocialist "bourgeois 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 the "woman question."Speaking at a women's rights congress in Berlin in 1896, she startled participants by declaring herself their "adversary [Gegnerin]." 1 Zetkin's message would reverberate far and wide and last into the twenty-first century, bolstered in its long life by New Left and feminist activists and scholars, including historians of the 1970s generation.In 2004, anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee, assessing the condition of women in postsocialist Eastern Europe, asserted that "not much has changed since 1907," and quoted Zetkin's speech at the First International Congress of Socialist Women, held that year in Stuttgart: "There cannot be a unified struggle for the entire [female] sex . . .No, it must be a class struggle of all the exploited without differences of sex against all exploiters no matter what