"Women's propaganda must touch upon all those questions which are of great importance to the general proletarian movement. The main task is, indeed, to awaken the women's class consciousness and to incorporate them into the class struggle"
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“Propaganda” lands here with the blunt, pre-spin candor of early socialist politics: not persuasion as sleight of hand, but as organized education, agitation, and discipline. Zetkin’s intent is practical and strategic. She is arguing that women are not a “special interest” to be managed in a side room of the movement; they are a decisive constituency whose participation can’t be left to moral appeals or philanthropic reform. Women’s organizing has to be welded to “all those questions” that matter to the proletariat as a whole: wages, labor conditions, war, the state, unions, party power.
The subtext is a warning against two temptations. One is bourgeois feminism that frames women’s emancipation as an abstract rights project detached from class relations; the other is a labor movement content to treat women as auxiliary supporters rather than political subjects. “Awaken the women’s class consciousness” signals that oppression is being interpreted through a Marxist lens: gender inequality is real, but it becomes politically legible, and actionable, when tied to exploitation and workplace power.
Context matters. Zetkin is writing and organizing amid industrialization, expanding female wage labor, and intense fights inside European socialist parties over how to address “the woman question.” Her formulation reveals both the promise and the limit of that moment: it’s an invitation into the movement, but on terms set by the movement’s central story. The line “incorporate them into the class struggle” is inclusion with an edge; it imagines women less as a separate bloc than as an untapped force multiplier in a larger conflict.
The subtext is a warning against two temptations. One is bourgeois feminism that frames women’s emancipation as an abstract rights project detached from class relations; the other is a labor movement content to treat women as auxiliary supporters rather than political subjects. “Awaken the women’s class consciousness” signals that oppression is being interpreted through a Marxist lens: gender inequality is real, but it becomes politically legible, and actionable, when tied to exploitation and workplace power.
Context matters. Zetkin is writing and organizing amid industrialization, expanding female wage labor, and intense fights inside European socialist parties over how to address “the woman question.” Her formulation reveals both the promise and the limit of that moment: it’s an invitation into the movement, but on terms set by the movement’s central story. The line “incorporate them into the class struggle” is inclusion with an edge; it imagines women less as a separate bloc than as an untapped force multiplier in a larger conflict.
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| Topic | Equality |
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