In 1932, 75-year-old socialist #Clara #Zetkin stood in Germany’s Reichstag and, despite being so unsteady that she had to be carried into the building on a stretcher, managed to give a rousing speech lasting more than 40 minutes.
“The fight of the labouring masses,” she declared, is “the fight for their full liberation.” She wasn’t a fan of feminism (dismissing it as bourgeois), but it was Zetkin’s dream that women everywhere, especially the most deprived and marginalised, might one day be free of all forms of oppression.
The Nazis took power in Germany shortly after. Zetkin fled to Russia and died there.
On the day I went to see Zetkin’s former home north of Berlin in Brandenburg, now a museum, there were no other visitors.
Despite her iconic status in her own time, she has been largely lost to history.
Her bravery is remembered usually as a footnote to the fact that she helped found what we now know as International Women’s Day.
We can only guess at what Zetkin might have made of how pitifully watered-down International Women’s Day has become.
For all its revolutionary beginnings, today it’s more about empowerment brunches in corporate meeting rooms, or women on minimum wage serving pink cupcakes to women in expensive suits outraged at why the Barbie movie didn’t win more awards.
It’s mainstream. So mainstream that the Conservative party, while it calculates how to fly vulnerable refugees, many of them women, to Rwanda, wishes women everywhere a happy International Women’s Day.
Even the Labour party has sacrificed bold idealism for a don’t-rock-the-boat centre ground in which nothing really changes except for the tone.
As the cupcake icing melts in our mouths, we forget that women like Zetkin once believed that wholesale change was possible.
It’s a strange state we find ourselves in when we consider that most of human history has in fact been about social experimentation.
♦️As far back as we have records, people have been trying out different modes of living, testing out democracy and farming, knocking down powerful leaders when they became despotic, branching off to form new communities, sometimes across continents and oceans.
Sometimes these attempts have failed; other times, they’ve stuck.
But they all prove how remarkably versatile we are as a species, capable of inventing countless forms of social organisation.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/08/international-womens-day-barbie-change-patriarchy?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other