Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings

Clara Zetkin was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and advocate for women's rights. In 1911, she organized the first International Women's DayPhilip S. Foner was one of the most prominent Marxist historians in the United States. A prolific author and editor, he tirelessly documented the lives of workers, African Americans, and political radicals. Because of his political affiliations he was shut out of academic employment for a quarter century.Angela Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis was politically active during the late 1960s through the 1970s and was associated with the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party. Davis was a political prisoner and is now a world-renowned scholar and author of Are Prisons Obsolete?Rosalyn Baxandall was a Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Old Westbury and taught at the Bard Prison Project, and the CUNY Labor School. Baxandall is the author of Words on Fire, the Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, l987), the co-author of Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, (New York: Basic Books 2000), the coeditor of America’s Working Women, An Anthology of Women’s Work, 1620-1970, (New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1995) and (New York: Random House l976), and coeditor of Dear Sisters, Dispatches From Women Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 2000), as well as the author of almost 50 articles, book reviews, on day care, working women, sexuality, reproductive rights and class, race and gender in suburbia, l945- 2000.

"Clara Zetkin's arguments in support of women workers contain a logic which can be effectively employed today in defense of strong affirmative action programs, not only for women but for the racially and nationally oppressed as well … [her] analysis of the relationship between the woman suffrage campaign and the struggle of working women … is significant not only because of its important historical value, but all .. with respect to the class nature of such contemporary women's struggles as the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States." —From the Foreword to the 1984 edition by Angela Y. Davis"In January, 1915, the British journal Labour Woman wrote of Clara Zetkin: 'She is Socialist in her very fibre, and she is a fighter ready to face death rather than give way in any issue of import in the people's struggle.' [Zetkin] displayed these qualities in leading the largest women's socialist movement in Europe, in editing the most important woman's journal in Europe for over twenty-five years, in organizing working women into trade unions, in battling for women's suffrage and equal rights … in the battle against revisionism, and in her militant opposition to militarism, imperialism and the first World War…[She] was able to exert a powerful influence in the formation of socialist and communist policy on the woman question, and on the policy of a number of trade unions toward women workers…Clara Zetkin's writings and speeches are still too little known in the United States. With the publication of the present volume, there will finally be available a representative selection of the thoughts of the leading woman of European socialism." —From the introduction by Philip Foner

• Foreword by Angela Y. DavisIntroduction by Philip S. Foner1889 For the Liberation of Women1893 Women's Work and the Trade Unions1895 The Women's Rights Petition and a Reply1896 Only with the Proletarian Woman1902 Protect Our Children 1903 What the Women Owe to Karl Marx1907 Women's Right to Vote1910 International Women's Day1914 Proletarian Women Be Prepared1914 To the Socialist Women of All Countries 1914 Letter to Heleen Ankersmit1915 Women of the Working People 1917 To the Socialist Women of All Countries1917 The Battle for Power and Peace in Russia 1919 Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg1919 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht1926 In the Muslim Women's Club 1932 Save the Scottsboro Black Youths1932 Fascism Must Be Defeated1933 The Toilers Against War