Suffrage Woman

In establishing the Socialist Women‘s International (SWI) within the Second International in 1907, Clara Zetkin sought to bring together delegates from the women’s socialist movement from around Europe and beyond. In the case of Britain, women from the Indepedent Labour Party (ILP), the Women’s Labour League (WLL) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) attended SWI conferences. But, although the SDP was relatively marginal in the British socialist women’s movement (the ILP prepoderated and the WLL represented many millions in the trade union movement), Zetkin’s patronage ensured Dora Montefiore, the leading socialist woman in the SDP, stood out on the international stage as the spokeperson for British socialist women.
Zetkin first came to Montefiore’s attention through her publications in the SDP’s journal, Justice (from 1899), and her initial meeting with Zetkin at the 1907 SWI conference in Stuttgart led to an ideological bond which lasted into the 1920s when both women joined their countries‘ respective Communist Parties. Indeed, Zetkin and Montefiore’s personal bond was so strikingly immediate that in 1909 the latter arranged an official visit to London by Zetkin, hosting Zetkin in her own home and arranging a series of events at which Zetkin was guest of honour. In 1910, when the second SWI conference occurred in Copenhagen, Montefiore was again welcomed by Zetkin, and again spoke on behalf of the British socialist women. Two years later, at the Extraordinary International Socialist Peace Congress in Basel, Montefiore attended as official reporter for the British Daily Herald, marching in the procession between Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, and writing of Zetkin’s leadership of the women’s contingent in her articles.
The favourtism shown to Montefiore at the 1907 and 1910 SWI conferences led to disputes (both personal and ideological) within the British socialist women’s movement (including an en masse conference walk-out by ILP delegates in 1910) and resulted in the SWI adopting policy with ‘official‘ British endorsement which did not represent the strength of feeling of British socialist women and, indeed, was disregarded by them when campaigning back home. (Such policies included calls for full universal suffrage – as against gradual democratisation in the suffrage – and the refusal of socialist women to collaboarate with ‘bourgeois feminists‘ in joint campaigns.) Indeed, although Montefiore retained Zetkin’s patronage during this period, she was marginalised from 1910 within the British socialist women’s movement precisely because she was seen as misrepresenting the British movement on the international stage!
This paper will discuss the relationship between Zetkin and Montefiore in the context of the latter’s position in the British socialist women’s movement. It will consider the British resistence to Zetkin’s patronage of Montefiore (and the policies which resulted from it at the SWI conferences) and discuss the coup which saw international socialist influence wrestled from Montefiore by socialist women in the ILP and WLL (two organisations with common ideological foundations). Ultimately, Montefiore became a noted socialist woman on the international stage whilst simultaneously losing her political voice in the British domestic movement – an ironic turn of events created largely by the distorting factor of Montefiore’s personal relationship with the SWI’s leader, Clara Zetkin.