Leadership Quote by Clara Zetkin

Zetkin’s line is a deliberate refusal of a comfortable story: that women’s liberation can be won by pleading for inclusion in a society built on exploitation. By centering “the proletarian woman,” she’s drawing a hard boundary around which women she’s speaking for and which politics she distrusts. The intent is polemical and strategic: to weld gender struggle to class struggle, not as an alliance of convenience but as a shared battlefield. “Hand in hand” isn’t sentimental; it’s organizing language. It pictures solidarity as a physical formation, a corrective to both bourgeois feminism that might bargain with capital and labor movements that treat women’s demands as a distraction.

The subtext is also disciplinary. Zetkin is warning working-class women against being recruited into cross-class “sisterhood” that, in her view, would ultimately protect property and patriarchy alike. At the same time, she’s issuing a challenge to working-class men: you don’t get to talk about emancipation while keeping domestic hierarchies intact. The phrase “man of her class” matters; it suggests that the primary line of political identification is economic position, not gender, and it implicitly ranks solidarities.

Context sharpens the edge. Zetkin wrote and organized amid rapid industrialization, expanding factory labor for women, and fierce debates inside the socialist movement over “the woman question.” Her formulation insists that women’s oppression is not a side issue to be solved after the revolution, but a lever for it. It works because it compresses an entire political program into one image: not equal seats at the table, but overturning the table.