Clara Zetkin

Selected Writings

by Clara Zetkin Edited by Philip S. Foner Foreword by Rosalyn Baxandall Introduction by Angela Y. Davis

$19.95 $11.97 40% off

Description

Here is an essential collection of essays and speeches from 1889 to 1933, long unavailable in the United States, on women's equality, labor, peace and socialism. Zetkin broke new ground by exploring the intersections of gender and class. In these writings, she describes the political process that ultimately allowed for socialized reproductionnamely the establishment by the Soviet revolutionary government of communal kitchens, laundries and child care facilities.

Author Bios

Clara Zetkin was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and advocate for women's rights. In 1911, she organized the first International Women's Day.

Philip S. Foner (1910–1994) was a prolific people's historian, whose many works include Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981, The Black Panthers Speak, Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, and The Letters of Joe Hill, all published in new editions by Haymarket Books.

Rosalyn Baxandall was a Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Old Westbury and taught at the Bard Prison Project, and the CUNY Labor School. Baxandall is the author of Words on Fire, the Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, l987), the co-author of Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, (New York: Basic Books 2000), the coeditor ofAmerica’s Working Women, An Anthology of Women’s Work, 1620-1970, (New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1995) and (New York: Random House l976), and coeditor of Dear Sisters, Dispatches From Women Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 2000), as well as the author of almost 50 articles, book reviews, on day care, working women, sexuality, reproductive rights and class, race and gender in suburbia, l945- 2000.

Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.

More Info

Publication date: July 14, 2015

Table of Contents

Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
Introduction by Philip S. Foner

1889 For the Liberation of Women
1893 Women's Work and the Trade Unions
1895 The Women's Rights Petition and a Reply
1896 Only with the Proletarian Woman
1902 Protect Our Children
1903 What the Women Owe to Karl Marx
1907 Women's Right to Vote
1910 International Women's Day
1914 Proletarian Women Be Prepared
1914 To the Socialist Women of All Countries
1914 Letter to Heleen Ankersmit
1915 Women of the Working People
1917 To the Socialist Women of All Countries
1917 The Battle for Power and Peace in Russia
1919 Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
1919 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
1926 In the Muslim Women's Club
1932 Save the Scottsboro Black Youths
1932 Fascism Must Be Defeated
1933 The Toilers Against War

Reviews

"Clara Zetkin's arguments in support of women workers contain a logic which can be effectively employed today in defense of strong affirmative action programs, not only for women but for the racially and nationally oppressed as well … [her] analysis of the relationship between the woman suffrage campaign and the struggle of working women … is significant not only because of its important historical value, but all .. with respect to the class nature of such contemporary women's struggles as the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States."
—From the Foreword to the 1984 edition by Angela Y. Davis

"In January, 1915, the British journal Labour Woman wrote of Clara Zetkin: 'She is Socialist in her very fibre, and she is a fighter ready to face death rather than give way in any issue of import in the people's struggle.' [Zetkin] displayed these qualities in leading the largest women's socialist movement in Europe, in editing the most important woman's journal in Europe for over twenty-five years, in organizing working women into trade unions, in battling for women's suffrage and equal rights … in the battle against revisionism, and in her militant opposition to militarism, imperialism and the first World War…[She] was able to exert a powerful influence in the formation of socialist and communist policy on the woman question, and on the policy of a number of trade unions toward women workers…Clara Zetkin's writings and speeches are still too little known in the United States. With the publication of the present volume, there will finally be available a representative selection of the thoughts of the leading woman of European socialism."
—From the introduction by Philip Foner
"Clara Zetkin's arguments in support of women workers contain a logic which can be effectively employed today in defense of strong affirmative action programs, not only for women but for the racially and nationally oppressed as well [her] analysis of the relationship between the woman suffrage campaign and the struggle of working women is significant not only because of its important historical value, but all .. with respect to the class nature of such contemporary women's struggles as the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States."
From the Foreword to the 1984 edition by Angela Y. Davis

"In January, 1915, the British journal Labour Woman wrote of Clara Zetkin: 'She is Socialist in her very fibre, and she is a fighter ready to face death rather than give way in any issue of import in the people's struggle.' [Zetkin] displayed these qualities in leading the largest women's socialist movement in Europe, in editing the most important woman's journal in Europe for over twenty-five years, in organizing working women into trade unions, in battling for women's suffrage and equal rights in the battle against revisionism, and in her militant opposition to militarism, imperialism and the first World War[She] was able to exert a powerful influence in the formation of socialist and communist policy on the woman question, and on the policy of a number of trade unions toward women workersClara Zetkin's writings and speeches are still too little known in the United States. With the publication of the present volume, there will finally be available a representative selection of the thoughts of the leading woman of European socialism."
From the introduction by Philip Foner

Search

Clara Zetkin

Reviews

Other books by the authors

Women and the American Labor Movement

Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981

Fighting Fascism

The Letters of Joe Hill

Black Panthers Speak