I will be writing a longer post about how women’s fight for equality intersects with other social struggles and my thoughts on the concept of patriarchy but on International Women’s Day I want simply to remember the woman whose idea it was, the German Communist Clara Zetkin (1857-1933).
Here she is on an East German postage stamp and also with her comrade Rosa Luxemburg.
These clever, brave and inspirational women believed firmly that the struggle for women’s rights could not be separated from the wider struggle of the working class, the fight, in other words, for socialism. I will look at this in my post but that’s for another day. We can have arguments, we can disagree about how we fight for our rights but today should be a day of sisterhood, of unity: a day when we say loud and clear that we are proud to be women, a day when we honour the memory of those who went before us in the struggle. .
