Description

A rare WWII underground pamphlet in Slovenian language includes a report by the German feminist Clara Zetkin on Lenin’s opinion on the role of emancipated women in the Soviet Union.

Clara Zetkin was a German politician and fighter for women’s rights. She met Vladimir Ilych Lenin in 1907, when they formed a life long friendship.

The pamphlet was translated and mimeographed by an Agit-Prop department of the Communist Party of Slovenia, which controlled the underground Partisan resistance furing WWII.

The introduction projects the Lenin’s opinion of the important role of the emancipated women to the underground resistance of partisans during WWII. The women partisans were equal to their male colleagues during the war. The pamphlet points out the surpressed role of the females in the Fascist society, which is obvious in the occupied cities, especially in cases of the brothels, which the Fascists and Nazis opened in the newly conquered cities. The brothels on the other hand dissapeared from the Soviet union, according to the introduction.

The text points out, that putting women on the same level as men, with education and work, raises the productivity of the society, and most of all gives women dignity and consequentaly also to the men.

The pamphlet was printed by an underfround press in the woods of the Polhov Gradec Dolomiti area –  a woody area on the outskirts of Ljubljana, Slovenia, during WWII.

In Yugoslav Partisan underground printing the text was printed in 6 different versions by varous presses, all of them in Slovenian language (see Bibliografija 1964, 8222-8227). Only one example of each version survived in Yugoslav libraries after the war.

Today we could not find any recorded surviving examples of this version nor any others in libraries worldwide.

References: Bibliografija 1964, no. 8222.