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Women and Socialism in Imperial Germany: The Sources and Their Problems

The Social Democratic movement in Imperial Germany has long been the subject of intensive study by historians, political scientists and sociologists. From their various points of view, students of the movement have often commented on the fact that it took an advanced theoretical position on the emancipation of women, actively encouraged the recruitment of women to its ranks, and contained a vigorous and flourishing women's section within its organizational structure. The enthusiasm of the party for the recruitment of women has been seen as part of its effort to create a total social environment for its members, an 'alternative society' within, but as far as possible separate from, the social structure of Germany as a whole. The SPD's official insistence on the need to emancipate women, and its consistent support for universal male and female suffrage, has been regarded by some as a reflection, or indeed as an integral part of, its ideological devotion to social revolution. Its wide range of detailed demands to improve the social and economic lot of working women has been taken by others as an indication of its fundamental pragmatism. The fact that its women's section not only exercised considerable independence within the movement, but was also for a long time one of the most radical, left-wing sections of the party, dominated for many years by the revolutionary spirit of Clara Zetkin, who was later to join the Spartakusbund and the KPD, has also attracted the attention of a wide range of commentators. Finally, since the student movement of the late 1960's and the emergence of the new feminism in both Germany and America, many younger historians influenced by the ideas of Women's Liberation have seen in the pre-1914 SPD women's movement a precursor whose problems and theories still have a great deal of relevance today. The already availability of printed source material provided a stimulus to researchers as far back as the 1920's, when the bourgeois feminist Hilde Lion devoted approximately half her book Zur Soziologie der Frauenbewegung (Berlin, 1926) to a simple, but basically sound account of the SPD women's movement. In 1958, Werner Thonnessen completed a Ph.D. dissertation which was devoted entirely to the movement, and has now been published in an English translation as The Emancipation of Women. The Rise and Decline of the Women's Movement in German Social Democracy 1863-1933 (London, 1973). Written from a Left-wing Social Democratic point of view, this book seeks to show that the SPD women's movement adhered to a revolutionary socialist theory of female emancipation until Clara Zetkin was dismissed from its leadership by the revisionist, antifeminist Party Executive in 1917. This interpretation has been followed by many recent German publications on the subject. The most useful of these, which, in common with a number of its fellows, originated in a Staatsexamensarbeit, is perhaps Gundula Bolke's Die Wandlung der Frauenemanzipationstheorie von Marx bis zur R'dtebewegung (Berlin/Munich/ Zurich, c. 1970); the author begins with the remark that she is in agreement with Thonnessen on all major issues. While Thonnessen's interpretation has held the field in Germany, a rather different view emerged in the United States in the form of Jacqueline Strain's Feminism and Political Radicalism in the German Social Democratic Women's Movement 1890-1914 (University of California Ph.D., 1964). This work, which has remained largely unknown, is more extensive, more