AS we saw earlier, the theses of the Third Congress of CI put the whole stress on “drawing them into all forms and types of civil conflict...encouraging women to participate in the struggle against capitalist exploitation, in mass action against the high cost of living,...unemployment...” — in short, on mobilising women in the general stream of class struggle. And this was precisely what veterans like Eleanor Marx, Zetkin and Luxembourg had long been doing and advocating. In the process they had to wage a relentless battle against bourgeois feminists, whom they called ‘women’s-rightsers’ because the latter regarded women’s juridical rights (under the existing social order) to be the be-all and end-all of their agitation and programme.

Eleanor worked by preference among the most exploited workers of London’s East End, and was one of the founders the new-type Gas Workers’ and General Labourers Union– ‘by far the best union’ in Engels’ opinion — which organised the unskilled workers into a militant mass organisation. In Working-Women vs. Bourgeois Feminism she discussed in detail “...the difference between the party of the ‘women’s rightsers’ on the one side, who recognised no class struggle but only a struggle of sexes, who belong to the possessing class, and who want rights that would be an injustice against their working class sisters, and, on the other side, the real women’s party, the socialist party, which has a basic understanding of the economic causes of the present adverse position of workingwomen and which calls on the workingwomen to wage a common fight hand-in-hand with the men of their class against the common enemy, viz. the men and women of the capitalist class.”

Similarly, Zetkin observed: “... we have no special women’s agitation to carry on... rather socialist agitation among women. It is not women’s petty interests of the moment that we should put in the foreground; our task must be to enrol the modern proletarian women in the class struggle. ... just as the proletariat can achieve its emancipation only if it fights together without distinction of nationality or distinction of occupation, so also it can achieve its emancipation, only if it holds together without distinction of sex. Insofar as there are reforms to be accomplished on behalf of women within present-day society, they are already demanded in the Minimum Programme of our party.” [“Only with the proletarian woman will socialism be victorious”! (Speech to the Gotha Congress)]

Now, does not all these smack of left sectarianism, if not an ultra-left deviation? That indeed would appear to be the case if we miss the historical context. In those initial years, the socialist or proletarian women’s movement had to demarcate itself most demonstratively from bourgeois feminism, to counter the influence the latter would have on working class women, and to strongly highlight the indivisibility of interests between proletarian men and women. This was the accepted line that the whole party unitedly implemented, with women comrades taking the lead from the forefront. Thus the “First Socialist Women’s Conference” held in 1907 in Stuttgart elected Clara Zetkin as its secretary and passed a resolution calling upon socialist parties to fight actively for the “introduction of general women’s suffrage”. Thanks largely to the efforts of Luxembourg, Zetkin and others, the German Social Democratic party (SPD) became the first party to incorporate equal rights for women in its political agenda. We all know about the contributions of leaders like Alexandra Kollontai and Clara Zetkin in launching the International Women’s Day.

The apparently exclusive stress on class, however, meant no negation of gender, no unconcern for problems women encountered as women and as citizens. Eleanor Marx for example was acutely aware of the bitter fact that, in a certain sense, “Women are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised tyranny of idlers...”. Lenin acknowledged that it was Rosa who first posed the question of full freedom of divorce, the lack of which was an added oppression of the already oppressed sex. On another occasion he remarked, “Rosa acted and felt as a communist when in an article she championed the cause of the prostitutes who were imprisoned for any transgression of police regulations in carrying on their dreary trade.”

Luxemburg was among the first to draw attention to unpaid domestic labour put in by women. In the wage system under capitalist rule, she pointed out, “only that kind of work is considered productive which... creates capitalist profit or surplus value.” From this standpoint, the “music-hall dancer whose legs sweep profit into her employer’s pocket is a productive worker, whereas all the toil of the proletarian women and mothers in the four walls of their homes is considered unproductive. This sounds brutal and insane, but corresponds exactly to the brutality  and insanity of our present capitalist economy. And seeing this brutal reality clearly and sharply is the proletarian woman’s first task. For, exactly from this point of view, the proletarian women’s claim to equal political rights is anchored in firm economic ground.”

Women’s suffrage is the goal. But the mass movement to bring it about is not a job for women alone, but is a common class concern for women and men of the proletariat....A hundred years ago, the Frenchman Charles Fourier, one of the first great prophets of socialist ideals, wrote these memorable words: In any society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. This is completely true for our present society. The current mass struggle for women’s political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletariat’s general struggle for liberation. In this lies its strength and its future. ... Fighting for women’s suffrage, we will also hasten the coming of the hour when the present society falls in ruins under the hammer strokes of the revolutionary proletariat.”

— Luxembourg (Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle — speech at the Second Social Democratic Women’s Rally, Stuttgart, Germany, May 12, 1912)

Thus, women communists always considered the gender question from a strictly scientific class viewpoint and as an inseparable part of the general proletarian movement. As Luxembourg observed, “proletarian consciousness transcended national and racial differences, so did it transcend sexual ones as well”. Zetkin had friendly relations with a number of bourgeois women’s rightsers and was quite willing to unite forces with the bourgeois women for common objectives, but not to subordinate the working women’s movement to the aims and style of the latter.