Leadership Quote by Clara Zetkin

Zetkin’s sentence lands like a two-part indictment: capitalism didn’t just shop for bargains; it shopped for obedience. By pairing “lower price” with “greater submissiveness,” she refuses the comforting story that women’s exploitation is an accidental byproduct of the market. It’s structural. Cheap labor is the headline, but pliability is the real asset, a form of social engineering that turns gender hierarchy into profit.

The intent is surgical: to yank women’s inequality out of the private sphere (custom, family, “nature”) and place it on the factory floor, where it can be named as strategy. “Attractive to the capitalists” reads like a cold market report, deliberately flattening human lives into the language of demand. That tonal choice is the subtext: the system speaks in prices, so she answers in its dialect, then exposes what the spreadsheet hides.

Context matters. Zetkin, a leading socialist and feminist organizer in Germany and a key figure in the Second International, is writing amid rapid industrialization, the feminization of certain low-wage sectors, and intense fights over labor protections. Employers and some reformers framed women’s work as “supplemental,” a pin-money myth that justified depressed wages. Zetkin flips it: underpayment is not a misunderstanding of women’s worth; it’s a business model reinforced by cultural training that rewards deference and punishes militancy.

The line also carries a warning aimed leftward. If workers’ movements treat women as secondary, capital gets a double win: a cheaper workforce and a wedge to discipline everyone else. Submissiveness here isn’t personality; it’s manufactured vulnerability, leveraged to keep wages down and resistance fragmented.