Clara Zetkin (née Eißner, 1857-1933) was one of the leading socialist feminists in Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Zetkin stands out among her contemporaries for her parallel commitment to the women’s movement and the worker’s movement. She argues that any effort to separate the two is misguided because the success of one is inextricably connected to the success of the other. Accordingly, women’s emancipation cannot only be about suffrage, employment, or even wage equality.

Rather, women’s emancipation is tied to the emancipation of the worker because employment itself can be a form of slavery. Moreover, Zetkin emphasizes the historicity of women’s rights, as women began to think about and demand modern rights and suffrage when they left the household for the workforce. Zetkin’s views reverberates with feminists who argue that the structure of women’s oppression cannot be understood in isolation from economic, racial, and social questions.

In her attempt to join the women’s movement with the socialist movement, Zetkin’s thought remains relevant for us today, as we too attempt to understand the connections between different forms of oppression and the struggles that they demand.