War & Peace Quote by Clara Zetkin

Zetkin’s line doesn’t merely widen the franchise; it polices the terms of the fight. The sharp move is her insistence that a “battle for suffrage” is legitimate only if it’s waged “according to socialist principles.” That phrasing is a boundary marker aimed as much at rival feminisms as at the patriarchal state. She’s warning that a vote won on liberal, piecemeal terms risks becoming a vote for the wrong people: a new political lever captured by propertied women, leaving working-class women still governed by bosses, husbands, and scarcity.

The demand for “universal suffrage for women and men” is doing double work. On the surface it’s egalitarian, but the subtext is factional: Zetkin is rejecting a women-only suffrage campaign detached from class politics, and also rejecting any male socialist movement tempted to postpone women’s rights for some later revolution. Universalism here is a strategic glue, binding gender emancipation to class solidarity so neither can be traded away.

Context matters: Zetkin is speaking from the European socialist milieu where suffrage politics were a battleground between socialist parties and bourgeois reformers, and within feminism itself between working-class organizers and elite-led suffrage groups. Her sentence reads like an organizing directive: don’t let the movement be domesticated into respectability politics. If suffrage becomes just another credential of citizenship for the already-advantaged, it can stabilize the system it claims to challenge. Zetkin wants the vote to be a weapon, not a prize.