© Springer Nature B.V. 2021 Mortimer Sellers and Stephan Kirste Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_948-1 Clara Zetkin (1857–1933) Ankica Čakardić 1 (1)Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia Ankica Čakardić Introduction Clara Josephine Zetkin (neé Eißner) was born on July 5, 1857, in Wiederau, a small village in the Kingdom of Saxony, German Confederation. She was the eldest of three children of Gottfried Eißner, a local schoolteacher and a devout Protestant, and Josephine Vitale, a highly educated daughter of a middle-class family from Leipzig of French roots (Götze 1982 , 5–6). Zetkin’s family moved to Leipzig in 1872, where Clara Zetkin studied to be a teacher at the Leipzig Teacher’s College for Women (Dornemann 1957 , 23). Having graduated at the top of her class in 1878, the young Clara Zetkin would probably have continued her education at the university level were it not for the fact that women were not allowed to study at German universities at the time (Honeycutt 1976 , 132). In 1878, at age of 21, Zetkin joined the German Socialist Workers’ Party (Taber and Riddell 2017 , 6). This was the year in which Otto von Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws were enacted in Germany. Following this, Zetkin became involved in the illegal activities of the party and was soon forced into exile for several years. She spent the first year and a half of her exile in Austria, where she was employed as a private tutor in the home of a wealthy factory owner (Götze 1982 , 12). In the spring of 1882, she moved to Zürich, only to relocate to Paris in November of the same year. While in exile, she met her partner, the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin (1850–1889). Although they never married, she took his name, and together they had two sons, Maxim Zetkin (1883–1965) and Kostja Zetkin (1885–1980). After Ossip’s death, she married the painter and socialist Georg Friedrich Zundel, who she ultimately divorced in 1927. Early Career and the Socialist Women’s Movement At the founding congress of the Second International, held in Paris in July 1889, Clara Zetkin delivered a speech in which she demanded the integration of women workers into the Labour Movement. From then onward, for a period of 25 years, she held the most prominent position in the German and international socialist women’s movement. When the Anti-Socialist Law was finally lifted in 1890, Zetkin returned to Germany to live in Stuttgart. She joined the newly founded Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and became one of its leading activists. In 1891, she became an editor of Die Gleichheit: Zeitschrift für die Interessen der Arbeiterinnen ( Equality: Journal for the Interests of Working Women), a biweekly SPD newspaper for women, a post she held until 1917 (Dornemann 1957 , 437).