BOOKS
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Rosa seems to have regarded the whole question of being a woman
with a humorousness that might have masked a theoretical insecurity;
or perhaps she was never troubled by the question, eager only to attain
suffrage rights for proletarian women whom she felt would surely vote
to
overthrow the oppressive capitalist regimes of Europe. Later in life,
she urged her women friends to have independent opinions, but never
seems to have felt threatened herself. Her cockiness even went so far as
to
have allowed her once to claim jokingly that she and Clara were the
only "men" left in the Party.
Rosa could be playful only because she had such a sure sense of
herself as a woman needing a man and needing to live with him. In her
acceptance of her own personal needs, there is a refreshing quality, a
lack of psychological turbulence and terminology. While on the one
hand she assumed that a woman could do anything a man could, she
also delighted in cultivating those eccentricities strictly characterizing
her sex. Hannah Arendt was not particularly interested in Rosa's
womanhood, but she does stress, in her essay in the
New York Review
of Books
(October 6, 1966), how oddly confident this revolutionary felt
in the high echelons of German political life despite the fact that she
was a foreigner and a Jew, thanks to the assumptions and precepts of
the exquisitely educated Eastern European "peer group" Rosa be–
longed
to
in her native Poland.
If
Arendt is right, this background may
have contributed to making her feel comfortable' as a woman, as well.
However, it is more likely that Rosa's own brand of Marxist theory
influenced her in this matter.
It
must have seemed obvious to her that
women were just as powerful and intelligent as men, just as naturally
leaders. Like the masses, they had only to be given the barest chance to
express themselves and they would take over their rightful roles in the
universe. Indeed, the Jewish background may have contributed some of
the more conventional and limiting elements in her vision-the
intensely
burgerlich
conception of family life ("settl[ing] down in a
truly middle class fashion," as she puts it.) At one point Rosa even
remarked to Leo, with a certain feigned bitterness, how envious she was
of other women in their circle who dominated their husbands and were
treated so well by them.
But if there was a touch of the Jewish princess in Rosa, she also
had the correct perception that time was extremely limited, happiness
quite hazardously meted out, and events increasingly dramatic and
perilous. Were they, she 'must have wondered,
to
have anything at all,
ever
to
be together? Indeed, she and Leo were reunited in 1902 but only
for a few years during which time she traveled all over Europe and even
spent three months in prison. The Russian Revolution of 1905 sent
