Helene Overlach explains a women’s rights bill she was championing. A leader of the Roter Frauen und Mädchenbund, the women’s Red Front Fighters, and a Communist member of the Reichstag from Dusseldorf and chair the Party’s Women’s Committee, she was among the most prominent of Communist women in Europe.

‘Communist Bill in Reichstag Demands Full Protection for Working Class Women’ by Lene Overlach from working Woman. Vol. 2 No. 12. December, 1931.

Equal Pay for Equal Work Chief Demand For the Women in the Industries

The Communist Reichstag fraction has brought in a bill for the protection of working women. The complete economic, social, cultural and political equality of women is demanded as a matter of principle.

For the working women the old trade union demand for equal pay for equal work is of chief importance. The social-fascist trade unions have long since dropped this demand, so that, for instance, the employers in the Lower Rhine district are attempting to put through the following wage cuts: for the men five per cent, for the women twenty-five per cent, and for young workers thirty-five per cent. As a matter of fact, in the past year, which was marked by a tremendously intensified employers’ offensive, the disparity between the men’s and women’s wages has considerably increased.

In face of the fact that the married working women, clerks and officials, with the approval of the trade union bureaucracy, are the first to be thrown on the street by the employers and authorities, the motion demands complete equality for the working women in all professions.

The main demand for unemployed women is that they be given the legal right to full unemployment benefit without being submitted to any mean test and without regard to the income of other members of the family who are legally compelled to support them.

Today, as a result of the emergency orders, the benefits payable to women are greatly reduced or she is deprived of benefit altogether if the husband is working or in receipt of unemployment benefit.

Maternity Insurance Demands

As in former motions tabled by the Communists, there is demanded that women shall be allowed a leave of absence with full pay 8 weeks before and 8 weeks after confinement. Further, it shall be forbidden to discharge pregnant women until twelve months after their confinement. Nursing mothers shall be allowed a break twice during the working hours to suckle their children, without any deduction from their pay.

The following maternity benefits are demanded: medical assistance at confinement and a maternity bonus of one hundred and fifty marks. Suckling mothers to be paid an allowance amounting to half of the sick benefit for the period of at least nine months. The unemployed pregnant woman, in addition to full unemployment benefit, shall receive an allowance of ten marks a week. This demand also applies to the pregnant wife of the unemployed worker.

Free maternity homes and clinic creches, kindergartens, etc., are indispensable demands for the working women.

Demand Repeal of Par. 218

Of special importance is the demand for the repeal of anti-abortion paragraph 218, especially in view of the fact that at present, as a result of the fascist policy in Germany, a tremendous number of women and doctors are being prosecuted for violating this paragraph. An immediate amnesty for all persons who have been sentenced under the anti-abortion law is demanded.

The demand for complete legal equality of women is concretely expressed in the proposed marriage law. On entering into marriage the woman shall retain her independent right of decision in legal and personal questions. She will have the same parental authority over the children as the man. She shall be free to maintain her maiden name if she so wishes. Today, according to the marriage law of the German Republic, the man is even free to beat his wife.

Finally, there is demanded the abolition of all differential treatment of the unmarried mother, and the complete equality of the illegitimate child with the child born in wedlock.

The Communist Party of Germany is mobilizing all sections of the women for these important fundamental demands. These demands are the basis for the fights of the women for complete equality and emancipation. They are to be made the object of mass actions. These demands will be propagated at the Congresses of working women, in the preparations for the 3rd National Congress of Women and International Women’s Day on the 8th of March.

The Working Woman, ‘A Paper for Working Women, Farm Women, and Working-Class Housewives,’ was first published monthly by the Communist Party USA Central Committee Women’s Department from 1929 to 1935, continuing until 1937. It was the first official English-language paper of a Socialist or Communist Party specifically for women (there had been many independent such papers). At first a newspaper and very much an exponent of ‘Third Period’ politics, it played particular attention to Black women, long invisible in the left press. In addition, the magazine covered home-life, women’s health and women’s history, trade union and unemployment struggles, Party activities, as well poems and short stories. The newspaper became a magazine in 1933, and in late 1935 it was folded into The Woman Today which sought to compete with bourgeois women’s magazines in the Popular Front era. The Woman today published until 1937. During its run editors included Isobel Walker Soule, Elinor Curtis, and Margaret Cowl among others.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/wt/v2n12-dec-1931-WW-R7414.pdf