Clara Zetkin

Clara Zetkin is widely credited with proposing the establishment of an International Women's Day at the International Socialist Women's Conference in Copenhagen in 1910, which led to the first observances in 1911. The idea built on earlier National Women's Day organizing in the United States. International Women's Day was eventually fixed on March 8 and became recognized globally, with Zetkin's role as its originator remembered in socialist and feminist history.

Clara Zetkin was initially a prominent member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), where she led the women's movement and edited the socialist women's newspaper 'Die Gleichheit' (Equality). During World War I she broke with the SPD over its support for war funding and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and later the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). She remained a committed communist until her death in 1933.

Clara Zetkin was born in 1857 in Wiederau, Saxony, and died in 1933 in Moscow, shortly after being elected to the Reichstag as the oldest delegate at age 75. Her life spanned the unification of Germany, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the rise of the Nazi Party. She died in exile in the Soviet Union just months after Hitler came to power, having fled Germany due to her communist activism.

Zetkin campaigned tirelessly for women's suffrage, equal pay, and working women's protections as part of the broader socialist movement, arguing that women's liberation was inseparable from the class struggle. She organized the Socialist Women's International and used 'Die Gleichheit' to mobilize working-class women across Europe. While her approach tied women's rights to revolutionary socialism rather than liberal feminism, her practical organizing laid groundwork for the 20th-century women's movement.