Although women have gained many liberal freedoms in the past century, this has not changed their social status as the doubly exploited, even if the careers of certain individuals seem to contradict this. Clara Zetkin was one of the harshest critics of the bourgeois women’s movement: the attainment of rights for some never means their realisation for all in a society based on the exploitation of the majority for the creation of surplus value. “The integral human emancipation of all women depends on the social emancipation of labour”, proclaimed Zetkin in 1909. This was the programme of the proletarian women’s movement: To fully emancipate women, the opposition between reproductive and productive labour had to be overcome in an exploitation-free society. This new society would have to, on the one hand, socialize housework and, on the other, ensure women’s equal participation in the production process.

“The position of women does not arise from certain eternally ideas, from an unalterable destiny of the ‘natural profession of the eternally feminine’ invented by sentimental longing. It is rather a consequence of the social conditions of a given time based on the relations of production.”

Clara Zetkin, 1889

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Our work and research

Our working group analyses the effects that the changed economic conditions in the so-called “real socialist” states of the 20th century had on the situation of women.

What effects did the approaches to the socialisation of labour have? Which legal and social policies underpinned this process? What challenges remained unresolved? What do the cultural products of this time – literature, films, art – tell us about the changed role and persisting problems of women in socialist society? What impact did the socialist states’ women’s policy have on the international arena, for example in solidarity work or in the UN?

Publications