SUFFRAGE***


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_PRICE ONE PENNY._


SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY AND WOMAN SUFFRAGE.


[Illustration]


A Paper Read by

CLARA ZETKIN

To the Conference of Women belonging to the Social-Democratic Party held
at Mannheim before the opening of the 1906 Annual Congress of the German
Social-Democracy






Twentieth Century Press, Limited (Trade Union and 48 hours), 37A,
Clerkenwell Green, E.C.


------------------------------------------------------------------------


SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY & WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

A Paper Read by

CLARA ZETKIN

To the Conference of Women belonging to the Social-Democratic Party held
at Mannheim, before the opening of the Annual Congress of the German
Social-Democracy.




Comrades,—The decision to discuss the question of Woman Suffrage at this
Congress was not arrived at from any theoretical considerations, or from
any wish to point out the advisability of such a measure. This
desirability has long been acknowledged by Social-Democrats, and by the
women who work with them for the attainment of their aims. We have been
much more interested in the tactics and in the historical events about
which I am now going to speak. There never was greater urgency than at
the present time for making the question of Woman Suffrage one of the
chief demands of our practical programme in politics. It is well for us,
therefore, to be clear that we are on the right lines, and in what
conditions and in what ways we should conduct the agitation, the action,
the struggle for Woman Suffrage so as to bring it before the public as a
question of intense practical activity for all. But we should not be
what we are, we should not be working-class women agitators who base
their demands on the ground of a Socialist demand, if we did not, when
seeking on the right lines, with all our strength, for this right, at
the same time show why we base our claim for this reform, and how we are
totally separated from those who only agitate for this from the point of
view of middle-class women. We take our stand from the point of view
that the demand for Woman Suffrage is in the first place a direct
consequence of the capitalist method of production. It may seem perhaps
to others somewhat unessential to say this so strongly, but not so to
us, because the middle-class demand for women’s rights up to the present
time still bases its claims on the old nationalistic doctrines of the
conception of rights. The middle-class women’s agitation movement still
demands Woman Suffrage to-day as a natural right, just as did the
speculative philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We,
on the contrary, basing our demand on the teachings of economics and of
history, advocate the suffrage for women as a social right, which is not
based on any natural right, but which rests on social, transient
conditions. Certainly in the camp of the Suffragettes it is also
understood that the revolution which the capitalist method of production
has caused in the position of women, has been of great importance in
causing many to agitate for their rights. But this is not given as the
most important reason, the tendency is to put this in the background,
and, as an illustration of this, I would refer, for example, to the
declaration of principles which the middle-class international
association for the attainment of Woman Suffrage formulated at its first
Congress in Berlin, in June, 1904, when the constitution of the society
was drawn up. In this declaration of principles there are stated
firstly, secondly, and thirdly, considerations from a purely
natural-right point of view, which were inspired from a sentimentalist
standpoint due to idealistic considerations, and it will need other
grounds of action, other considerations, other ideals if the masses are
ever to be reached. It was only when they came to the fourth clause,
after talking about the economic revolution of society, that they began
to think about the industrial activity of women. But in what connection?
There it was stated that Woman Suffrage is required, owing to the
increase of wealth, which has been attained by the labours of women.
Comrades, I declare that the strongest and greatest demand for women’s
rights is not due to the increase of wealth among women, but that it is
based on the poverty, on the need, on the misery of the great mass of
women. We must reject with all our might this middle-class agitation of
women, which is only a renewed idle prattling about national wealth. If
you simply argue from the point of view of natural rights, then we
should be justified in adapting the words which Shakespeare puts into
the mouth of Shylock. We might say, “Hath not a woman eyes? Hath not a
woman hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and
summer as a _man_ is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle
us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?” But, comrades,
though these questions might be of momentary use, yet in the struggle
for social rights they are like a weapon which breaks as soon as it is
used in fighting.

The right to Woman Suffrage is based for us in the variation of social
life which has come about through the capitalist methods of production,
and more especially through the fact of women working for their living,
and in the greatest degree through the enrolment of working women in the
army of industry. This has given the greatest impetus to the movement. I
agree that there are facts which appear to go against this movement. It
is a fact that the agitation for Woman Suffrage, though in a weakened
form, already existed in many countries before capitalist production had
become more important than anything else, before it had reached its
highest point, and had been able to attain its greatest development
owing to the exploitation of women’s labour. In Russia, in the village
communes, women were able to take an equal share with men, in certain
cases, in the government of the communes. This is an old custom, which
has been duly recognised by Russian law. But this right is due to the
fact that in Russia the old customs of the rights of mothers have lasted
for a longer time than in the West of Europe, and that there women enjoy
this right not as persons or as individuals, but as guardians of the
household, and of the common property which has lasted longer there. In
many other States, as well as in many provinces, of Prussia, there is
still a species of woman suffrage. In the seven eastern provinces, as
well as in Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein, the women in the country
districts have votes for the local bodies. But under what conditions?
Not every woman has the right of voting, but it is restricted to those
who own land and pay taxes. The same rule obtains not only in the
country but also in the towns, in part of the Palatinate, and in other
places. In Austria, too, the women in the country districts have the
right of voting for the members of the local district authorities, but
only in so far as they are owners of land and inasmuch as they are
taxpayers, and it is thought that they will soon be able to vote for the
election of members of the local diets and of the Reichsrath. And the
consequence is that, in many Crown lands of Austria there are women who
are indirectly electors for the Reichsrath, because they are allowed to
vote for the delegates who choose the representatives for that body. In
Sweden women who fulfil the same conditions of property are also allowed
to vote in the elections for local bodies. But when we carefully
consider all these cases, we find that women do not vote because they
are women; they do not enjoy, so to speak, a personal vote, but they
only have this right because they are owners of property and taxpayers.
That is not the kind of Woman Suffrage which we demand; it is not the
right we desire to give a woman, as a burgess of the State, it is only a
privilege of property. In reality, all these and similar schemes stand
out in marked contrast to the demand for Woman Suffrage which we
advocate. In England we find, too, that women may take part in elections
for local bodies; but this again is only under conditions of owning a
certain amount of property or paying a certain sum in taxes.

But when we demand Woman Suffrage, we can only do so on the ground, not
that it should be a right attached to the possession of a certain amount
of property, but that it should be inherent in the woman herself. This
insistence of the personal right of woman to exercise her own influence
in the affairs of the town and the State has received no small measure
of support, owing to the large increase in the capitalist methods of
production. You all know that already in the beginning of the capitalist
development these thoughts found their first exponents among members of
the middle-class democracy. There is no need for the middle-class to be
ashamed of this, that they—in the time of their youth—still dreamed
their dreams, and that their more advanced members were brave fighters
in the struggle for women’s rights. We see, moreover, people in England
arguing in favour of Woman Suffrage as a personal right. We see them
also striving like the French middle-class, which achieved their
political emancipation over the body of Louis Capet.

We see that they fought with great energy during the struggle in North
America for the abolition of slavery. Briefly, in all those periods in
which the middle-class agitated for the complete attainment of
democratic principles as a means of effecting its own political
emancipation and securing power, it also fought for the recognition of
equal rights for women. But with whatever zeal and whatever trouble and
whatever energy this question of the rights of women was demanded by the
middle-class, yet it was not till the advent of Socialism that the
struggle began in earnest. Already in 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft, in her
celebrated work, “The Claims of Woman,” already in 1787, Condorcet, in
his Letters from a Citizen of Newhaven,[1] had claimed equal rights for
women; and the cause also received an impetus from the French
Revolution. The demand for Woman’s Suffrage was inscribed among the list
of reforms desired by some electors at the French Revolution, and a
petition asking for it was also presented to the National Assembly. But
this body contented itself by issuing a platonic declaration that it
relegated the question to the consideration of mothers and daughters.
But in 1793 the Committee of Public Safety, on the motion of Amar,
dissolved all the women’s organisations, and forbade their meetings.
Then the French middle-classes gave up the struggle for Woman Suffrage;
and the first Socialists—the Utopians—Saint Simon and Fourier, and their
disciples, took up the cause. In 1848 Victor Considérant, in 1851 Pierre
Leroux, agitated concerning this question. But they received no
encouragement, and their arguments were received with scorn and
derision. In the English Parliament in 1866 a numerously signed petition
in favour of Woman Suffrage was first presented by John Stuart Mill, one
of the most enlightened minds of the democratic middle-class.

Footnote 1:

  “Letters from a Citizen of Newhaven to a Citizen of Virginia on the
  Uselessness of Dividing the Legislative Power in Several Bodies.”

These struggles for the emancipation of women have indeed secured some
concessions, and many advantages have been gained; but the political
emancipation of the female sex to-day, and especially in industrial
lands, is as far off as ever, while the most stalwart exponents of
middle-class democracy for men, having attained most of their demands,
are no longer clamouring, as during the fight, for equal rights for
women. The preliminary condition for success is that there should be a
great increase in capitalist production. It stands in the closest
relation with the revolutionising of the household. With the increase of
industry, which in primitive conditions was carried on in the family,
and when that family carried out industrial operations as a whole in the
home, there was not then a demand for the emancipation of woman from the
family and the household, and women did not then, always living at home,
feel the need for political power. The same machinery which drove with
decisive power the home industries from the family, allowed woman to
become an active worker outside the home, and her advent on the labour
market produced not only new economic, but also new social, effects. The
destruction of the old middle-class woman’s world has created, of
necessity, a new moral purpose in women’s lives, in order to secure to
them new advantages. Therefore, the middle-class woman’s world was
compelled to recognise the necessity of advocating the political
emancipation of women as a precious and useful weapon, and with its help
to endeavour to procure changes in the law, so that man should no longer
enjoy a monopoly, and prevent women from earning their living. In the
proletarian women’s world the need, so far from being less, was indeed
much greater to obtain political power, and they advocated complete
political emancipation. Hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of women
workers have been exploited by capitalist methods. Statistics are there
to show how in all capitalist countries women are more and more going
into the labour market. In Germany, the last census (that of 1895) gives
the number of women working as 6,578,350, and of these the workers in
factories, etc., were no less than 5,293,277. In Austria, in 1890, there
were 6,245,073 women working, and of these there were 5,310,639 working
in factories; in France, in 1890, the numbers were 5,191,084 and
3,584,518; in the United States, in 1890, 3,914,571 and 2,864,818; in
England and Wales, in 1891, 4,016,571 and 3,113,256.

This I only give as an illustration, not only to show that women deserve
the suffrage, but also to show what importance the labour of women has
attained. It is evident that the question of woman’s rights must be
greatly influenced, owing to the fact of so many women being in the
labour market. Hundreds of thousands of working women who labour with
their brains are just as much exploited by the action of capitalists and
middle-men as the millions of women who work with their hands, because
the whole capitalist class hangs together, and defends its interests. By
this economic process, women have also been taught to think and act for
themselves. And they now demand Universal Suffrage as a social necessity
of life as the aim and means which will give them a stimulus to obtain
protection and improvement by obtaining an improvement in their economic
and moral interests. But when we place the demand for Woman Suffrage in
the front as a social necessity, we also argue that it should be granted
to us as a self-evident act of justice. Woman is not only now
emancipated from the family and the home, but she is determined to use
the activity of her brain and hand in order, just as man, to improve her
mental and social position, for the clear light which the furnace of
great factories has thrown on the path of woman has made her conscious
of the social worth of her activity, and has directed it into other
channels. It has taught her the great social importance and the great
social worth of her career as a mother and the educator of youth. For
the multitude of women who go to factories will generally become wives;
they then will become mothers and bear children, and they know that the
care which they give to their new-born children, the zeal with which
they discharge their duties in training children, shows that the service
rendered by the mother in the home is no private service simply to her
husband, but an activity which is of the highest social importance.

Because millions are condemned, not through their own fault, not through
a want of their motherly instinct, but owing to the pressure of
capitalist influence, to forego their bodily, spiritual, and moral good,
then, as a consequence, there is a great increase in infant mortality,
and children do not receive proper attention in their tender years. All
this proves the high social worth of labour which woman performs in the
producing and rearing of children. The demand for Woman Suffrage is only
a phase of the demand that their high social worth should be more
adequately recognised.

But they base this right also on the ground of the democratic principle
in its widest bearing, not only on the fact that the same duties demand
equal rights, but we also say that it would be criminal for the
democracy not to use all the strength which women have in order that by
their work of head and hand they may take part in the service of the
community.

We do not maintain, like certain advocates of women’s rights, that men
and women should have the same rights because they are alike. No; I am
of opinion that in bodily strength, in spiritual insight, and in
intellectual aims, we are very different. But to be different does not
necessarily imply inferiority, and if it be true that we think, act, and
feel differently, then we say that this is another reason which condemns
the action of men in the past, and a reason why we should try and
improve society.

From this point of view of history, we demand the political equality of
women and the right to vote as a recognition of the political rights due
to our sex. This is a question which applies to the whole of women
without exception. All women, whatever be their position, should demand
political equality as a means of a freer life, and one calculated to
yield rich blessings to society. Besides, in the women’s world, as well
as in the men’s world,