Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day
At a seminar in the socialist history series at the Institute of Historical Research on 7th March 2016, Ben Lewis introduced a new volume of translations of the German socialist Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) he had co-edited He raised a number of interesting points on international women’s day and historical memory.
Zetkin is widely credited with being the key figure behind the original decision to have an International Women’s Day, yet her name is comparatively little known today. In 2022 perhaps thanks to social media there is perhaps increased visibility but also of course a reminder that long after Zetkin died she became an official icon of the old East German State. Hardly what her politics and life had been about.
Numbers of those attending the 2016 seminar were people did remember her name and writings from the 1970s when she was better known in the UK.
Stuart King made the point that Zetkin’s writings on working class women and women’s liberation had, in so far as any were available, been widely read in the women’s movement of the 1970s.
Her focus on working women and socialism and what she saw as the link between the two are less ‘fashionable’ now perhaps.
John Lindsay made the point that Zetkin in any case needed to be understood in her own historical context and not judged by the concepts of the twenty-first century, some of which at least might not have been current in the early twentieth century.
The appearance of a new volume of her writings reminds that while Zetkin was once well known to a generation of socialists in the UK and elsewhere, the work of drawing attention to the significance of what she wrote and did remains to be done anew amongst a new generation of the left who are often unaware of her.
Could there be a better case for the existence of socialist historians…..
http://www.merlinpress.co.uk/acatalog/CLARA-ZETKIN–LETTERS-AND-WRITINGS.html
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