"We would, however, perform an injustice to the bourgeois women's rights movement if we would regard it as solely motivated by economics. No, this movement also contains a more profound spiritual and moral aspect"
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Zetkin pulls off a neat rhetorical feint: she grants her opponent moral depth without surrendering an inch of socialist critique. Calling the women’s rights movement “bourgeois” is not a neutral descriptor; it’s a class verdict. Yet she warns against the lazy reductionism of treating it as “solely motivated by economics.” The move is strategic. Inside a Marxist ecosystem that can sometimes sound like it’s translating every desire into a wage relation, Zetkin insists that ideology has a soul: people are mobilized not just by bread, but by dignity, recognition, and ethical revolt.
The phrase “perform an injustice” is telling. She’s not praising bourgeois feminism as sufficient or emancipatory on its own; she’s policing her own side’s tendency toward caricature. Zetkin is trying to keep the socialist movement intellectually honest and politically effective: if you dismiss feminist agitation as mere class self-interest, you misunderstand why it attracts followers and why it can’t simply be out-organized with better pay. “Spiritual and moral” isn’t religious sentimentality here; it’s a claim about subjective experience - humiliation, dependency, social shame - and the way those pressures harden into a politics.
Context matters: Zetkin was a leading Marxist feminist arguing that women’s liberation could not be fully achieved within capitalism, while still building bridges to women radicalized by patriarchal law and custom. The subtext is coalition and competition at once: respect the moral force of bourgeois feminism, then show why socialism can harness it without blunting it.
The phrase “perform an injustice” is telling. She’s not praising bourgeois feminism as sufficient or emancipatory on its own; she’s policing her own side’s tendency toward caricature. Zetkin is trying to keep the socialist movement intellectually honest and politically effective: if you dismiss feminist agitation as mere class self-interest, you misunderstand why it attracts followers and why it can’t simply be out-organized with better pay. “Spiritual and moral” isn’t religious sentimentality here; it’s a claim about subjective experience - humiliation, dependency, social shame - and the way those pressures harden into a politics.
Context matters: Zetkin was a leading Marxist feminist arguing that women’s liberation could not be fully achieved within capitalism, while still building bridges to women radicalized by patriarchal law and custom. The subtext is coalition and competition at once: respect the moral force of bourgeois feminism, then show why socialism can harness it without blunting it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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