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The Second International made a major contribution to the development of a socialist women's movement in Europe and in the USA. Whatever criticisms one has to make of the Second International's role, and there are many, we have to recognise the fact that the International and its organisations gave birth to a mass socialist women's movement with a coherent programme. forms of organisation and systematic agitation, and made this movement a decisive force in the struggles that were taking place amongst women from different social strata for emancipation from some of the most blatant aspects of oppression and repression under capitalism.
By the middle of the first decade of this century, all of the organisations which comprised the Second International had gone through very thorough debates over their programme to deal with women's oppression, and had reached a fairly common accord, which was reflected at the Congress of the International in 1907. This programme dealt with the question of suffrage, of the right of women to vote on a universally equal basis with men; the enactment of various measures of protection for female labour from the rigours of capitalist exploitation; and various other related social questions — such as education, child care, etc. Most of the organisations had also adopted fairly parallel forms of organisation in which the specific oppression of women and the need for specific forms of agitation among proletarian women around these questions was recognised. Special subcommittee structures, sub-divisions of the main party organisations, were created to organise this work, along with special organs for agitation among proletarian women, and specific posts inside the organisation responsible for this type of work. This was the outcome of a long period of political debate and political struggle, especially within the German party, waged by a number of prominent women socialists, the best known of whom was Clara Zetkin.
The main focus of my remarks will be the German party — partly because it's the party whose history is the most clearly documented, but also because the German party had a position of overriding dominance inside the Second International. Its decisions and its actions inevitably governed what took place in other sections of the International.
Two Main Questions There were two main questions which preoccupied the German Social Democrats and, to a greater or lesser degree, dominated the debates elsewhere inside the International. The first was the issue of the role of women in productive labour, and what programme had to be put forward to deal with this question. The second issue was that of the developing fight for women's suffrage, which in turn, in many countries, was associated with the more general struggle for the extension of the democratic rights of the working class. For example, in Germany universal male suffrage existed for the Imperial Reichstag, the parliamentary body of the entire Empire but it did not exist for all of the provincial parliaments, many of which, especially the Prussian Parliament, were extremely powerful and at the same time had an extremely restricted suffrage.
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To understand these debates it is necessary to look at the origins of German Social Democracy. The German Social Democratic Party which was born as a single united movement at the Gotha Conference of 1875 was a fusion of two different currents inside the German workers movement. These were represented on the one hand by the Lassalleans (followers of the early socialist thinker Ferdinand Lassalle), who based themselves on an eclectic fusion of certain ideas drawn from petty bourgeois utopian socialism, and an orientation to the emerging German working class and its newly formed organisations. On the other hand, there was the so-called Marxist wing, led by Bebel and Liebknecht, who looked to the ideas of Marx for their political (although they were far from being representatives of either a systematic Marxist analysis or of Marx and Engels' own political views).
Underneath the formal existence of two organisational and political traditions it is possible to see two currents in an ideological sense. The first is economism. It reflected an attempt of the working class to control its basic economic and material interests in the face of the rise of industrial capitalism in Germany. The second is radical democracy, which tried to continue the fight which both the urban petty bourgeoisie and the developing proletariat had launched in the 1848 revolutions, for the unification of Germany on the basis of a radical bourgeois democracy. This was a struggle which had been sold out by the middle and big bourgeoisie to the German landed aristocracy, laying the basis for the particular reactionary form of unification which took place under the aegis of Prussia, engineered by Bismarck in 1871. The economist trend is broadly identifiable with Lassalleanism, and the radical democratic trend with the "Marxism' of Bebel and Liebknecht.
That is, rather schematically, how the political composition of Social Democracy can be characterised, and I believe this division had a reflection in the debate over women's oppression.
Women In The Productive Process In the debate over productive labour, what was basically at stake was whether or not one was in favour of introducing and extending the participation of women in the productive process. This was tied up with the global view of social development one - whether one saw the political objectives and aspirations of the proletariat emerging out of the dynamic growth productive forces, setting in motion increasingly broader and broader layers of society (the Marxist view); or whether one had a narrow view of defending the working class from the terrible disruptions of its life being brought about by developing industrialism (the view of petty bourgeois socialism). Not surprisingly, the Lassalleans took the latter position. From an early stage they made it clear that they were opposed to the introduction of women into the workforce, because they felt it was destructive of working class family life (which they thought represented the best elements of working class existence), and because it only benefited the bourgeoisie. This was a view which both Marx and Engels attacked sharply at various times — Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme around which German Social Democracy was unified, and Engels later on in The Origin of the Family. They based their view on the understanding of the labour process as the most basic process of socialisation - that is, the process whereby various social layers were broken out of their narrow, restrictive and fragmented positions and integrated into a broader social whole in the form of the modern proletariat, which was actually capable of transforming society in its own interests and organising a higher form of society.
There was a further division within the Lassalleans. Some were actually opposed to all forms of female labour and thought women's place was in the home, reflecting their petty bourgeois conception of socialism and their attachment to defence of the family. Another wing felt that female labour was all right in its place: as long as it was not in direct competition with male labour. This current exhibited a narrow, economistic trade union view, unfettered by more general petty bourgeois socialist notions. In general until the 1870s it was the first view - opposition to all forms of female labour -which dominated amongst the Lassalleans. This was demonstrated at several public meetings organised by the Lassalleans, where a vote was taken amongst the broad, male working audience, revealing a big majority in favour of the total exclusion of female labour from the workforce.
The position of the 'Marxist' current tended to be ambiguous. There were various pronouncements by the German Section of the First International which came very close to sharing the Lassallean view, and it is certainly the case that even these so-called Marxists were heavily influenced by Lassallean ideas, which were overwhelmingly predominant within the German socialist workers movement of this period. But Bebel himself had a different position. In general the radical democratic current inside German Social Democracy was brought towards the Marxist view by the fact that they represented a general "enlightened' view in favour of the emancipation of women from the varous constraints imposed on them. They recognised that institutions such as bourgeois marriage and the objectively, at least under the specific conditions of capitalism, imposed such constraints, and they saw productive labour, in a similar way to Marx, as a liberating force. So while they were in favour of the political emancipation of women, they also accepted that productive labour had a positive role to play in this.
"Restriction Of Female Labour' But they tended to operate with rather cautious formulae. The most common phrase used by the Marxists - known as the Eisenachers after the site of the founding congress of their organisation — was 'restriction of female labour". This was ambiguous: it could mean preventing competition with male workers, but it was generally interpreted to mean protective To a large degree, this was a debate not resolved through theoretical argument, but by history. As early as the 1848 revolution, women workers had begun to develop forms of organisation and political articulation — many women took part on the barricades of the revolution in the most developed areas. But in 1848 there were only half a million workers in Germany — many in domestic service. By the time of Gotha, in 1875, the number had doubled to a million. In the following decade, the peak decade of German industrialisation following unification, the number increased to in excess of five million. Over the Under these circumstances it became clear that the force of German industrialisation, which was not a force against which the working class could hope to defend primitive artisan methods of labour, was systematically creating greater and greater numbers of proletarian women. It became more and more impossible to stand for the position of keeping women out of industry. So while the Gotha Conference represented — as Marx acknowledged — a victory for the Lassallean viewpoint on a whole series of important programmatic questions, on this question of women and productive labour it was the view of the for the "restriction of female and child labour' was incorporated into the programme of Social Democracy. Marx himself was not satisfied with this. In his critique of this programme, he said: we need to be clear what we mean by restriction of female labour; what we mean is the hours which they are employed, the specific conditions under which they are employed, this type of thing. But despite its ambiguities, this position made it possible for the Social Democrats to develop a positive programme corresponding to the particular problems and needs of women in industry, and to have a serious organisational and political orientation towards the developing army of women workers.
Compromise On Question Of Suffrage On the question of suffrage matters were not so clear. The basic plank around which Lassalle had built his whole utopian schema of socialism was that of universal manhood suffrage. He did not raise the question of female suffrage. At the 1875 Gotha Congress the proposal put forward by the Lassalleans was again for universal manhood suffrage. The final decision of the Congress was, once more, a compromise. The position of the Lassalleans, which would have cut the Social Democrats off from any kind of agitation in favour of female suffrage, was rejected. Instead a vague position was adopted: Social Democracy was in favour of the extension of suffrage to all adult citizens without
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restriction, in both national and local elections. One could then argue endlessly about whether or not women were "citizens". It meant that German Social Democracy had a position that was not opposed to female suffrage, but also one that made it impossible to develop agitation around the question in a systematic way.
This was a serious political weakness which was not actually remedied until the adoption of the Erfurt Programme in 1891.
This programme, drafted by Karl Kautsky, was widely considered to be an historic eradication of the Lassallean notions which had played such a dominant role in the early political history of the party. Most of its theoretical formulae adopted positions which were largely consistent with Marxism regarding the dynamics of the capitalist system. It also took a clear position in favour of the vote for women, and in favour of the removal of all legal restrictions on the position of women. This meant it was now possible for Social Democracy to start serious agitation on this question, although there were no attempts to do so for a year.
The typical way German Social Democracy carried out its agitation was through the legislative procedures of the Reichstag:
they would draft a Bill which they would then publicise widely, through its various organs, among the working class, and under certain circumstances organise mass mobilisations around the Bill, but that was relatively rare. Accordingly in 1895 a Bill on female suffrage was introduced in the Reichstag, indicating that by the 1890s the German Social Democracy had completed the process of laying the programmatic basis for a serious orientation towards working women and the struggle for women's emancipation.
Special Sub-Committees Set Up This was rapidly reflected in their organisational structures, responsibility for agitation among women, the creation of a with the creation of special sub-committees charged with political organ for women workers, and the development of representatives of the women's sections inside the various executive bodies of the organisation, and at the congress of the party.
As a direct result of this the ability of Social Democracy to draw into its ranks the most class conscious militants from the female working class was immensely enhanced. The female membership of the Social Democratic Party (or its associated groups) shot up from 4,000 in 1900 to 150,000 in 1913. (Before 1908 it was illegal under the Combination Laws for women to belong to the Social Democratic Party; but this restriction had largely been by-passed by the creation of distinct women's associations.)
Despite these impressive results, grave weaknesses remained in this work, the most serious of which was a powerful trend towards the 'ghettoisation' of women's agitation. We have to understand that the policy of the leadership of Social Democracy to encourage independent, autonomous forms of women's organisation did not flow from particularly positive factors. One important element in their thinking was the fact that for a whole period it would have been illegal to organise women directly under the auspices of the party. And legalism was very deeply ingrained in the SP, even among some of its supposedly more 'radical" leaders. Here for example is one leader of the SDP speaking in the Reichstag: *We are going to observe the law for an obvious reason. Our party is a reform party in the strongest sense of the word. It is not a party that wants to make a violent revolution. That would be unthinkable. I deny most emphatically that our efforts are directed towards the overthrow of the existing social and political order.' That was Wilhelm Liebknecht, speaking in the Reichstag on the eve of the adoption of the Anti-Socialist Law, which made the SP and all activities, with the exception of those directly connected with parliamentary elections, totally illegal.
Another factor was an attitude on the part of the leadership that women's agitation was really not that crucial. There were certain militants in the party who wanted to take up this issue, so the casiest way to deal with the situation was to give them the freedom they wanted and let them get on with the job and see what they could make of it. Ignaz Auer, a leading Social Democratic member of the Reichstag, at the 1900 Party Congress (a real turning point in the Social Democrats' efforts to organise women), said: *Of course the nervous excitement of our women is, regrettably, easy enough to understand, if we remember that Marx criticised the ambigulty of the Social Democrats' demand for restriction of female labour' —he emphasised that it must apply only to hours, conditions, etc.
despite years of exhausting work they have had minimal success. The trouble is that there are too few women comrades in the party. I wish there were many more. The few who have to do all the work are overloaded and thus prone to become bad tempered. So it comes about that they sometimes make life miserable for us, even though we are not to blame.' This exemplifies how the SDP leadership used its policy to neutralise critics who accused them of not doing systematic agitation on the question of women.
The third factor which shaped the SP leadership's position was a deep fear of the efforts of various conservative groups to find a base inside the working class. There was, for example, quite a large trade union organisation, the Hirsch-Duncker workers on the basis of overt collaboration with the employers, unions (the so-called "yellow" trade unions), that organised and had for many years extensive influence among Catholic workers. The SDP leadership was clearly afraid that the bourgeois feminist movement, if the Social Democrats offered no alternative, could become a successful venture in this direction. So, as a defensive measure, they were prepared to encourage a significant amount of work among working women to forestall this threat.
Fear Of Party Leadership It should be emphasised that these views were those of the SDP leadership, and not of the leading women militants in the party, such as Clara Zetkin, who for the most part were partisans of the party's left wing and held quite different positions. That is where one contemporary chronicler of the Social Democratic women's movement — Alexandra Kollontai — tended to go wrong in her interpretation. She based her judgement on the views of Zetkin and her co-workers, and not that of the party leadership (who, of course, ultimately determined its policy).
This situation appears to have had serious consequences. A
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tremendous rise in agitation around the question of the highly restrictive suffrage in Prussia started in 1910 and continued right up until the very eve of the war. This was such a powerful and emotive issue that it brought Prussia to the verge of a pre-revolutionary crisis. At one time there were half a million workers demonstrating on the streets of Berlin, and widespread physical confrontations with the Prussian army and police — something virtually unknown in the history of German Social Democracy.
It would appear that this agitation was not integrated, however, with the struggle for female suffrage. At about this time there were organised a series of demonstrations on female suffrage; but they took place under the auspices of the women's section of the party, not the main party organs, and were organised on a pan-German basis, both of which must have served to divorce them from the upsurge that was breaking out over the restrictive Prussian suffrage.
We have to say that despite the undoubtedly valuable and important work done under the auspices of German Social Democracy, it remained seriously flawed by this failure to integrate agitation among women into the class struggle as a whole. This weakened the struggle for the emancipation of women, because it cut the women's movement off from the most powerful sections of the proletariat, who were beginning to make important gains and headway in this period. But it also weakened the workers' struggle as a class, becuase it removed from that struggle the fervour and energy of one force who were among the most systematically oppressed and discriminated against, and whose grievances could have represented a crucial weak-point in the structure of the German absolutist state.
Conservative Outlook On Family Intertwined with this ambiguous and often conservative attitude towards political issues on the part of the Social Democratic leadership was an even more conservative outlook on issues such as the family and the various social correlates of women's oppression. This reflected itself in even the more radical quarters. If, for example, you take Bebel's highly influential book Women and Socialism, which, when it was published in the late 1870s, represented a very advanced and enlightened view in Social Democracy, it remains conservative on many questions. One illuminating example is Bebel's critique of 'bourgeois marriage'. He only criticises the legal restrictions to which women were subjected by virtue of marriage, not the social implications of marriage and the family. When he refers to the problem of child care, he says that under socialism women will not have to be burdened with this: they can turn for assistance to 'nurses, teachers, female friends, and the rising female generation' (my emphasis). Even in this most enlightened view there is no prejudices of bourgeois ideology. The right was having none of In conclusion, it is instructive to contrast the attitude of German Social Democracy with that of the American Socialist Party. The American SP had the advantage of organising within a working class that had been uprooted from its traditional social ties (at the turn of the century a majority of the American industrial working class were first-generation immigrants) and rapidly drawn into large scale industry. It was therefore relatively unencumbered by petty bourgeois pressures.
As a consequence the American SP had no reservations in taking up the issue of women's suffrage, and no fear of forging links with the petty bourgeois feminist movement. When Eugene Debs ran for the Presidency in 1908 the demand for female suffrage was one of the main planks in his platform (compare this with the publication of Karl Kautsky's The Road to Power -a basic text of the German Social Democrats — the year before: its main emphasis was on the development of the working class vote as an instrument in the class struggle, but there is not one word about female suffrage!). The result was that feminism in the United States did not develop as a current in sharp opposition to socialism, but was a movement whose main leaders were on the periphery of the socialist movement and deeply influenced by its ideas.
Thus, for example, Margaret Sanger, a leading feminist of her day and internationally famous as a pioneer of birth control, was an active militant of the Socialist Party and for many years disseminated her ideas through a column on birth control and sexual advice in The Call, paper of the New York SP. (A small example which indicates what impact the partisanship of the SP for the cause of women could have in even the most alien circles was the involvement of the daughter of banker J.P. Morgan, herself a bourgeois feminist, in the SP's solidarity movement with a major strike of women textile workers.)
The fusion of the class struggle with the broad movement for women's emancipation in the United States was an example which, if it had been duplicated in a country like Germany, where the socialist movement had a deeper tradition and more powerful organisation, could have had immense political consequences for the class struggle as a whole.
Socialist Woman