Clara Zetkin and International Working Women's Day

Clara Eissner Zetkin (born 5 July 1857)

Clara Eissner, who would become an internationally known political activist (and tireless writer, speaker, and organizer), was born in the village of Wiederau (Germany), the daughter of a teacher, Gottfried Eissner, and his second wife, Josephine Vitale, the widow of a doctor.

Aside from his teaching, Gottfried is identified as a church organist and "devout Protestant," while Josephine Vitale Eissner was active in many of the causes that her daughter would later embrace: women's education, women's rights, and women's economic condition. Josephine Eissner also founded a frauenvereine, or women's club, in Wiederau, with the goal of raising women's awareness of the issue of economic equality.

Clara Eissner Zetkin, c. 1920

The family relocated from Wiederau to Leipzig in 1872; from 1875 until 1878 Clara attended one of the girls' schools established by the pioneering German feminists Ottilie von Steyber and Auguste Schmidt, who had also been among the founders of the Leipzig Women's Education Association.

While training to be a teacher, Clara Eissner became involved with the Leipzig Women's Education Association and with the National Association of German Women, but she also became involved with the socialist movement and began attending meetings of the Social Democratic Party, where she met Ossip Zetkin, a Russian Jew who had fled persecution in Odessa.

After the 1878 ban on socialist activity in Germany, Clara Eissner left the country and went, first, to Linz, Austria, where she taught factory workers. In 1879 she traveled to Russia; by 1882 she was in Zurich, where she wrote pamphlets for the SDP that would be smuggled back into Germany. After five months in Switzerland, she reunited with Ossip Zetkin in Paris (he had been arrested in Leipzig and had been forced to leave) and adopted Zetkin's name. The couple had two sons, Maxime (1883) and Konstantine (1885). Clara and Ossip did not marry so that she would not lose her German citizenship. (She would later marry Georg Friedrich Zundel.)

It was Zetkin who had introduced Clara to the Leipzig Worker's Education Society and to the revolutionary ideas of Marks and Engels. In Paris, her feminist and socialist interests united, though the extreme poverty in which the couple were living resulted in tuberculosis, and Clara returned to her family in Leipzig in 1886. Her activity did not cease, however--while recuperating, she gave her first public speech, on the topic of women and socialism, arguing that a class revolution would result in equality for women.  Three years later, in 1889, she returned to Paris, nursing Ossip until his death from tuberculosis.

During her time in Paris, she had helped to organize the Socialist International, an international association of socialist parties, and after Ossip Zetkin's death, she participated in the Second International Congress, scheduled on the centennial of Bastille Day (14 July 1889), delivering a speech that would be later published as Working Women and the Contemporary Woman Question. 

Clara Zetkin returned to Germany--to Stuttgart--after the anti-socialist laws expired in 1890. Beginning in 1892, she edited the SDP journal for women, Die Gleichheit (Equality). She was also an executive member of the party and, more interestingly, a member of the Bookbinders Union of the Tailors and Seamstresses Union, although it was illegal for women to be members of trade unions in Germany.

In 1907 she was a co-founder of the International Conference of Socialist Women (Stuttgart), and although women were given the right to join political parties in Germany in 1908, Zetkin thought that would dilute women's voices, so she maintained her focus on the 1910 International Conference (Copenhagen) and helped to establish the first International Women's Day (19 March 1911). Zetkin also organised the Socialist Women's Conference in March 1915. 

During the First World War, Zetkin and other influential members of the SPD rejected the party's policy of Burgfrieden, or compromise with the government during the war. Her position is articulated in a speech she gave in 1915, at a women's peace conference in Switzerland: 

Who profits from this war? Only a tiny minority in each nation: The manufacturers of rifles and cannons, of armor-plate and torpedo boats, the shipyard owners and the suppliers of the armed forces' needs. In the interests of their profits, they have fanned the hatred among the people, this contributing to the outbreak of the war. The workers have nothing to gain from this war, but they stand to lose everything that is dear to them.

Despite several arrests, she continued to organize, write, and protest throughout the war. In January of 1919, she joined the newly founded Communist Party in Germany, which she represented in the German Reichstag, or "imperial assembly," from 1920 to 1933. Her active role in the Communist Party meant that she spent considerable time in the Soviet Union during these years.

But after the Reichstag fire on 17 February 1933, Zetkin went into permanent exile in the Soviet Union. (In 1933, after Hitler came to power, the Communist Party was banned.) This exile did not last long--she died on 20 June 1933. 

There are many informative essays on Clara Zetkin's political activities and writing online, so I will note a couple of the more interesting here: Elizabeth Schulte's "Clara Zetkin, Socialism, and Women's Liberation" (click here), the Clara Zetkin entry in Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia (click here), and the brief entry on Clara Zetkin in the Encyclopedia Britannica (click here). 

A new edition of Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, with an introduction by Angela Davis, has just been published.

You can also read an English translation of Zetkin's interview with Karl Marx on "the woman question" by clicking here.

Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto

Valerie Solanas (born 9 April 1936)

If she had lived, Valerie Solanas would have been seventy-nine years old today, two years younger than Gloria Steinem, who is still vigorous, active, and involved, an iconic--and beloved--figure in the second-wave feminist movement. But Solanas died in 1988, at age fifty-two. She is not a revered figure whose life and work are celebrated. No major universities have endowed academic chairs in her name. A polarizing figure, at best, Solanas is still the subject of scorn and vitriol, nearly thirty years after her death.

Many people despise her--I am not one of them.

Solanas was a provocateur, radical and volatile. She was angry, confrontational, and violent--and while I do not excuse her acts of violence, neither do I believe her to be a depraved monster. 

In the past, I have compared Valerie Solanas to a woman whom I have already profiled in this blog, Arcangela Tarabotti.* And in many ways, it is hard to say which is more shocking today, Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny or Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. I've taught both texts to classes full of college students, and my sense is that they find Tarabotti's work every bit as challenging and upsetting as Solanas's.

I was in college when the Women’s Liberation movement was born, when the newly formed National Organization of Women celebrated Mother’s Day by demanding “Rights, Not Roses,” when a group of New York feminists protested by burying a dummy of “Traditional Womanhood” at a peace rally in Washington D. C., when Angela Davis was on the FBI’s list of the “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives,” and when a group of lesbian radicals began publishing The Furies, a “lesbian/feminist monthly.”

In the midst of all of this, in early 1967, Valerie Solanas began selling mimeographed copies of her SCUM Manifesto on the streets of New York. Even though I know the context out of which she wrote, I still take a deep breath before I open up my slim copy of Solanas’s work. I know what to expect, but she still takes my breath away. 

Solanas is very clear not only about the genre but about the purpose of her work: 

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.

For a long time, Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto were largely written out of feminist history. Robin Morgan did include selections from the Manifesto in her 1970 Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (misspelling Solanas’s name as “Solanis”), and Germaine Greer wrote incisively and sympathetically about the manifesto in The Female Eunuch, published the same year.

But as second-wave feminism became less radical and more mainstream, Solanas tended to disappear. Now-classic references like Yale’s 1990 The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (1203 pages) and Bloomsbury Publishing’s 1992 Guide to Women’s Literature throughout the World: From Sappho to Atwood, Women’s Writing through the Ages (more than 5,000 entries) ignored Solanas as they helped to shape an emerging canon of “women writers.” Even today, the self-proclaimed “landmark” American National Biography, which “offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women—from all eras and walks of life—whose lives have shaped the nation” mentions Solanas only in its entry on Andy Warhol and describes her only as an “aspiring actress.”

As for me, now that I have reread Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto before writing this post, I am struck at the visceral responses it still evokes, nearly fifty years after Solanas wrote it. While critical reassessment of Solanas’s Manifesto has begun, too many readers respond not to Solanas’s work but to her life. She is reduced to the events of 3 June 1968, when she shot Andy Warhol, and the SCUM Manifesto is read as if it were the mad ramblings of a female jihadist rather than a carefully crafted text. 

More than one careful reader has compared Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal--I have made this comparison myself, in fact. The savage satire of Swift’s “proposal” is shocking and provocative, yet this eighteenth-century text is a staple of the literature classroom—I first read it in high school, and it was assigned reading in several of my undergraduate and graduate literature courses.

Swift’s The Modest Proposal is read and taught as a conscious literary effort, a brilliant example of Juvenalian satire, perhaps inspired by the second-century Christian Father of the Church, Tertullian, and his Apology in Defense of Christianity. In his “proposal,” Swift “advocates” infanticide and cannibalism—cooking and eating Irish babies—as the only logical means of curing deplorable social, political, and economic ills. Yet no one reads Swift’s A Modest Proposal literally—or, at least, they don’t read it literally for long, if the ridicule heaped on naïve high-school students in my 1967 high school classroom was typical. If you didn’t get it, you were an idiot. Although Swift’s life ended in debility, violence, and madness, that life—and his work—aren’t reduced to his debility, violence, and madness.

Swift’s legacy is his writing—A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels, chief among his literary achievements. But Solanas is reduced too often to “madness” and her act of violence. The SCUM Manifesto is read as the primary symptom of this madness and violence. Its craft—its satiric brilliance, its linguistic sparkle, its stylistic inventiveness (Solanas’s extravagant lists, for example, with their breathtaking juxtapositions)—is all too frequently ignored. 

But, against all odds and the many efforts to discredit her or to erase her altogether, Valerie Solanas managed to live on, despite the outrage and the efforts to make her--and her work--disappear. When she was interviewed in 1991, Solanas’s mother gave her daughter an identity that she was largely denied in her own lifetime—her daughter was a writer, Dorothy Moran insisted.

Today, there is the slick hardcover edition of the SCUM Manifesto with hot-pink endpapers and a more recent paperback (which, oddly, also uses hot pink in its design), but that radical identity Solanas dared to claim—writer—has survived in other ways, less pinkified and "girly," as witnessed by graffiti images captured by passersby and shared online.

One image, posted in December 2006 on Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website, is from a bathroom stall somewhere in New York City. On the grimy, mustard-yellow door (underneath "buns, not guns"), near the hinge, is scrawled, “Read the SCUM Manifesto.” Another photo, this one part of a series of “Ivy League” graffiti images, was posted online in 2008. It offers first a command, in large letters, “♀—read the SCUM MANIFESTO.” In smaller letters, below, the writer offers her rationale: “our justified rage can be hilarious!” And then there’s the photo of another piece of graffiti, found outside a sex shop in Gothenburg, Sweden, and posted in 2009. This image is in stark black and white, black italic script, slightly blurred, on a white stucco wall: “Valerie Was Right.”

Eva the Weaver's flikr image

In fact, I put together a visual presentation for my students in spring 2013, the last time I taught Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. I collected dozens of such graffiti images posted online, including photographs taken on the campus of Evergreen State College, in my home state of Washington, others from places as far away from one another as New Orleans and Barcelona, and  recent  stencil graffito found "earlier this year" on a wall in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

There are comic books, art school projects, blog posts (like this one), cartoons, and reimaginations posted on Facebook. And there are tons of products--jackets, "Valerie was right" barettes, t-shirts, even baby onesies. I love these memorials—testimony to the enduring nature of Solanas’s work as a writer and to the survival of her anger and her humor. 

More recently, Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto do seem to be making their way back into history. Solanas is included in both the 2004 Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (Harvard) and in the 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography. Breanne Fahs has just published the first biography of Solanas, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol), published by the Feminist Press. 

There are several print editions of the SCUM Manifesto available for sale on Amazon, but I first encountered the text in one of its many online iterations. For once, in the spirit of Solanas, who distributed her work on the streets of New York, I'll suggest reading it online--it's becoming increasingly difficult to find it there (free, as opposed to buying someone's version of Solanas)--but, for now, you can find the SCUM Manifesto by clicking this link. (It is a transcription done in 1994 by a writer who had a UK version of Solanas's text.)

*Parts of this post have been adapted from Reading Women's Worlds: Six Centuries of Writing by Women Imagining Rooms of Their Own. 

Angela Davis: Activist, Academic, Author

Angela Davis (born 26 January 1944)

Angela Davis in an iconic 1969 photo

Today is the birthday of Angela Davis, political activist, university professor, advocate for prison reform, lecturer, and cultural critic. Angela Davis has retired from her teaching position at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but she continues her efforts to reform what she has identified as the “prison industrial complex.”