Leadership Quote by Clara Zetkin

Zetkin doesn’t dress this up as a moral dispute about “gender roles”; she frames it as a wage strategy with a human face. The sentence reads like an exposure of a business plan: keep women’s pay low, then use their presence in the labor market as a lever to push men’s wages down. The cold phrasing - “speculate,” “factors,” “competition” - matters. It mimics the language of employers and economists, then turns it into an indictment. Her target isn’t individual men who resent women workers, or individual women blamed for “undercutting” wages; it’s the system that benefits when workers are set against each other.

The subtext is a warning about how gender can be weaponized inside class relations. If women are forced into cheaper labor by law, custom, or discrimination, their “competition” isn’t a natural market fact; it’s engineered. Employers can then present wage cuts as inevitable - not the result of power, but of supply and demand. Zetkin is trying to snap that spell: the market story is cover for a deliberate tactic.

Context sharpens the edge. As a socialist and leading figure in the German workers’ movement, Zetkin argued that women’s emancipation couldn’t be separated from labor politics. At the turn of the 20th century, women’s work was expanding in factories and services, often under legal and social constraints that made organizing harder and wages lower. Zetkin’s intent is to redirect anger away from women entering paid work and toward solidarity: equal pay, union inclusion, and political rights as tools not only of justice, but of wage defense for everyone.