Harriet Davis of the U.S. Working Women’s Delegation to the Soviet Union records the words of the 76-year-old Zetkin to her visitors.

‘Clara Zetkin’s Message to American Women’ by Harriet Davis from The Daily Worker. Vol. 5 No. 58. March 9, 1928.

THE visiting delegation of American working women to the Soviet Union for the Tenth Anniversary met with Clara Zetkin in her room at the Kremlin. To see Clara Zetkin is to feel her power, her revolutionary ardor. A long life of service in the cause of oppressed workers the world over has left its imprint on her face and bearing. Standing erect, in spite of a sick body, one sees a tender, humorous woman, a brave fighter, undaunted, steadfast, devoted, Clara Zetkin, 76 years young! The same immense confidence in the power of the workers to overthrow Capitalism, the same intense desire of her youth to fight to the end to help in the great conflicts ahead. Clara Zetkin’s daring spirit will live in the hearts of the American working women as an inspiration to do their share in the struggle, to follow the course of Lenin, realizing as he said that “No nation can be free when half of its population is enslaved in the kitchen.”

During the coming days, Comrade Zetkin said, there will be more difficulties in all countries for the working class and more obstacles in the way of making the working class conscious, but in spite of this the work must be performed. “The whole position of the working class teaches us in a very clear way the necessity of class consciousness. In the United States, in what is called a democratic state, there are the same class antagonisms which we find elsewhere and although you have a very high development of industry, this is only profitable to very small numbers of workers. For the masses of men and women there is only misery, and a very low level of culture–unculture. The real state of culture in the United States has been shown in a very clear way recently by the evolution trial in Tennessee.

“The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti shows the working class what cruelty to expect.

“In the present international situation women must use their influence to try to prevent material power of the United States being employed to oppress other nationalities. It is a shame for the United States to join with the English, French and other people against China, to bombard the peaceful Chinese towns and villages with American bombs and to inflame a war against Nicaragua, against Mexico. Pan-Americanism is nothing but a form to disguise a policy of exploitation by Wall Street, which now controls the world. And you know the kind of pacifism which they always use, the beautiful phrases, while at the same time they manufacture the poison gas and battleships.

“The women of America should use their influence to fight against imperialism and in favor of the peoples who are striving and battling for something better, as the workers are doing in Soviet Russia. In the world today there is a conflict between two ideas of the state. On the one side you have imperialism and the greatest imperialist states are Great Britain and the United States. On the other hand you have their antagonist–the Soviet Union which is also a United States of the working class, altogether different from the United States of imperialism. The idea of all imperialist states is to maintain oppression by a few over the great majority. In the imperialist states, you have a class domination of the possessing class, while on the contrary, in the United States of the Soviets, the aim is to abolish all forms of exploitation of man by man. American working women can organize their great influence against imperialism and gain friendship, solidarity and support for the Soviet Union among the working class, and fight to prevent imperialist war against the First Workers’ Republic. The bourgeois order is condemned by its own evolution. It will go down, and Socialism will come for all the workers of the world. I am very glad that in the United States your propaganda among the working women in the shops and factories, and also among the housewives is growing. The influence of women during strikes is enormous. Think what a glorious example the miners’ wives were in Great Britain. They were all heroes. Of course in the first place we must have the industrial women but it would be a very great fault if we were to neglect the housewives. And of course for the next generation to build up a new society and new regime we must have the help and activity of all the women, housewives and industrial women. This is the question Lenin very well understood, that we really cannot have a social revolution without having the great masses of women with us. I am very glad that you have told me all about the women’s movement in America. We must employ every opportunity to spread our influence in the midst of the working women, and of the housewives, and also as far as it is possible we must influence the little peasant wives, the farmers’ wives you call them, because they have the hardest drudgery of the whole world.”

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1928/1928-ny/v05-n058-NY-mar-09-1928-DW-LOC.pdf