How the Proletarian Women’s Movement Resisted Anti-Feminism
- Robert Dale
The early German socialist movement was a largely male affair, with widespread sexist attitudes compounding a state ban on women taking part in politics. But by the 1900s, a proletarian women's movement had forced working-class women's demands onto the agenda — insisting that they didn't need fathers and husbands, or bourgeois ladies, to speak on their behalf.
Proletarian women’s movement leader Clara Zetkin (third from left) sits with Friedrich Engels (fourth from left), August Bebel (fourth from right), and others in the garden of the tavern Zum Loewen in Bendlikon, Germany, during the Zurich Socialist and Labor Congress of 1893. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)
Speaking at a Social Democratic Party (SPD) party conference in Halle in 1890, Emma Ihrer told her male counterparts in no uncertain terms: “We have the right to be treated as fully equal comrades.” This was the first legal party conference after the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890) in the recently unified German Reich. But while men were now again able to organize legally in workers’ associations, Prussian law continued to prohibit women from joining political organizations or participating in political gatherings until 1908.
That did not prevent women like Emma Ihrer, Helma Steinbach, or Clara Zetkin from finding ways to organize within the party — but first they had to overcome male resistance within the workers’ organizations. Complaints about sexist behavior and a lack of support were commonplace. At the Gotha SPD conference in 1896, Luise Kähler from Hamburg protested: “Many male comrades treat the women’s question so facetiously that we must wonder whether they really support equal rights at all.”
In comparison to the workers’ movement, the proletarian women’s movement was still a relatively new phenomenon in the early 1890s. Women had begun organizing in trade unions in the 1880s; for example, the Society for the Protection of Women Workers’ Interests and the Trade Association for Berlin Coat Seamstresses were both founded in 1885. The shared experience of criminalization, persecution, and exile under the Anti-Socialist Laws brought the two movements closer together.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.