| Offshoots of Liberalism - Feminism[This was originally intended as a chapter in TheConquest of Power, however due to the length of the two volume treatise,this had been edited out. We present it here as faithfully as possiblein its entirety.]Offshoots of Liberalism - Feminismby Albert WeisbordWe cannot leave the subject of Liberalism without analyzing at leasttwo connected subsidiary movements, namely, feminism and pacifism. In thischapter we shall deal with feminism.IIn the narrow sense of the term, feminism is a movement striving forequal political and social rights for women. The movement developed aroundthe question of women suffrage but took in also many other problems, suchas equal protection of the law, equal rights to property, equal opportunityfor education, better marriage relationship and the right to engage inprofessions, etc. In its broader sense, feminism means more than mere politicaland social equality with men; but it is designed to further the potentialitiesof womanhood to their highest point.Human history, as far as we know, starts out, in the period of primitivecommunism of the savage and the lower barbarian, with placing woman inan exceptional favored position. This is the period of the matriarchatewhere women were deified in religion and controlled the major portion ofthe social life of the tribe or gens.The reasons for this superior position of women are not hard to find.Dominated by nature, rather than controlling it, mankind in those daysrecognized at every step the unbreakable umbilical cord which tied himto mother earth. In the labor process which constituted his reaction tonature, to wring from it the things he needed and desired, it was not themeans of production that he knew how to manage, since his instruments wereas yet very poor. Only one productive factor remained distinctly withinhis control; that was labor itself. Women were important, therefore, asproducers of labor, generators of life. In his struggle against nature,mankind turned to the technique of the rabbit to make up with large numbersof progeny and mass fertility what he lacked in mechanical technique. Onlythus could the race be preserved from the dangerous vicissitudes of thestruggle for existence that exacted such a heavy toll of life under primitiveconditions. Women were worshipped, then, as mothers, not as women, as generatorsof life, much as the sun was worshipped for the same reason.The researches of Morgan and others have amply shown that sex life wasprincipally a matter of mating and fecundity. It was for this reason too,that at first the two sexes indiscriminately intermingled. Gradually, banswere established between fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons; latercame the bans preventing brothers and sisters from sexual intercourse.With the appearance of private property, sex regulations took on not merelya negative character but a positive one, marriage implying not so mucha negation of promiscuity, a prohibition taken for granted, as signifyingthe creation of an important social status with its burdens and obligations.Laws of fertility on the one hand, and such mores as infanticide, patricide,cannibalism and other forms of destruction of the human members of thetribe, on the other, eloquently testify to the bitter struggle merely tosurvive in primitive society. Under such primitive conditions there couldbe no thought of individual love as idealized by the Liberal.As society emerged to higher levels with the domestication of animalsand the development of the rudiments of agriculture, productivity was developedsufficiently to permit the labor of one person to support more than himself.From this time on slavery was possible and private property is in evidence.Simultaneously society evolved from a period where war was practicallyunknown to a period of incessant warfare. As mans control over the meansof production grew, the necessity to produce large numbers of offspringin order to survive became lessened. Under these new circumstances women,physically weaker and inferior in the use of arms and at the same timeno longer so much needed for the survival of the race, was reduced to theposition of a piece of property and became a slave to the male head ofthe family. Matriarchy changed to patriarchy; the worship of woman as thesource of fertility changed to the worship of the phallus.In this period, so well demonstrated in the ancient societies of Romeand of Greece, women as well as children were held important chiefly becausethey now labored as slaves and they could reproduce more slaves, that is,further elements of property. Here, too, the Liberal's ideal of individuallove was unknown. The child may be mated to another in mere infancy. Thewill of the father and head of the household was in all cases completelydecisive. Marriage was a family affair entirely, just as before it wasa tribal affair.The formation of the city-state in ancient society, coincident withthe growth of trade and money, gave new desires to that portion of societyreleased from care by the labor of the slaves. Supported by the luxuryloving master class, certain women, the heterae, were able to rise farabove the average and to give a glamorous foretaste of the intellectualpossibilities of womanhood. It was under the stimulus of the heterae thatart and poetry and science were developed in classic Greece.* * * *The breakdown of ancient slave society and the substitution of feudalismplaced new conditions upon women. The incessant warfare for landed propertyin which the stronger mercilessly beat down the weaker and rendered thelatter serfs placed the women, who had just emerged from the equality andsuperior status of the primitive communism of the barbarian tribes, ina particularly inferior position. With brutal physical force as a preponderantelement of ethics, one could enlarge one's standing only through conquestor amalgamation of family connections.Among the upper classes in feudalism, concatenated with the transmissionof property only through the male line, women's rights were completelymerged with those of the husband and father, women becoming perpetual wardsand infants. However, with the breaking down of feudalism and the beginningsof trade, property was allowed to be willed; women were able to inheritrealty as well as personalty. Because of the growing influence of womenas holders of property and vast landed estates, because marriage to certainwomen in dominating families was the way to consolidation of estates andeven kingdoms and thus was the course to develop political economy, thewomen of the upper class became endowed with specially privileged positions,and the age of chivalry was inaugurated. Marriage and love, however, werestill strictly "state affairs" and had very little to do with ideals ofLiberalism. Modern individual love begins with adultery under feudalism.The Catholic Church itself opened the way for women to important positions.The convents in the Middle Ages were not only feudal castles, but alsocolleges and industrial establishments. In these convents women not infrequentlyruled as abbesses, not only in purely female institutions, but even inmixed convents, as in Whitby in England, Fontaeburt in France, Wadstenain Switzerland, etc.As for the serf, he wanted a woman not from the point of view of beautyor even goodness, but from the point of view of physical endurance andfertility. Essentially, this remains the point of view of the farmer evenof today. The average farm cannot be worked by one person, or even two,effectively. It can be worked only by a family, and it is the women's jobto produce and take care of that family. It is this that demands that everyfarmer get a wife for himself at the risk of economic failure. Under feudalism,the serf needed the permission of the lord to marry; and since marriagehad nothing necessarily to do with love, and since its stability, on theother hand, was vital to land tenure, it was no wonder that the moral codeof the times as expressed by the Catholic Church permitted no divorce forany reason whatever.It was only with the rise of capitalism that women began to play animportant political role in society. With the development of cities, ofcommerce and finance, of art and science and luxury, a wealthy class emergedwhich transferred its activities from outdoors to indoors, and substitutedthe palatial mansion for the rough feudal castle. If the feudalists stilllived in the realm of rude necessity, the capitalists dwelt in the kingdomof luxury. Immovable real property made way for movable personal property.The affluence and influence of the ruling classes were now demonstratednot by the amount of lands possessed but by the amount of luxury that couldbe lavished on the home. Women, as the leading factor in the home, risein importance. The wealth of the husband was put to use in the adornmentof the wife. The ladies of the day were called upon to exaggerate preciselythose secondary sexual characteristics which distinguish them from themale, and to nurse carefully all the traits that the approbation of theday considered beautiful. The women of the wealthy moneyed class had theleisure to act their parts and to become veritable objects of art.As the wealthy city patricians struggled for power in the State, theirpalatial mansions were turned into political salons where it was the womenwho presided and graciously dominated the scene. Among the upper classes,therefore, a considerable number of women were enabled to develop theircapacities to an exceedingly high level. "When the lady reached her heydayof supremacy in the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, her class gaveto the world many women of marked intellectual power and of special giftsin many lines." (*1) Carried away with the feminist enthusiasm of the times,a Cornelius Agrippa, soldier and scholar, can write a book of thirty chapterson "The Superior Excellence of Women Over Men", or a Peter Paul Riberacan publish "The Immortal Triumphs and Heroic Enterprise of 845 Women",etc.It is only in this period of the Renaissance that modern individuallove advanced. Among the wealthy classes, women were no longer needed merelyas laborers or slaves or as producers of children. They now became nota means to an end, but an end and object of affection in and of themselves.The period of the Reformation, coinciding roughly with the transformationof money into capital through the rise of the factory system, witnesseda further change in the position of women. Slowly but surely the womanwas being dragged into the factory to work side by side with the men. Gangsof mixed men and women would be sent out in the countryside as agriculturallaborers. The systematic education which women had been able to obtainin certain convents disappeared with the suppression of religious orders.The protection of women, of the weak and helpless, which theoreticallyhad been under the care of the Church, now broke down. In the cities, too,a new type of relationship appeared with the storekeepers wife and helperwho pooled her little property with that of her husband and who toiledfrom early to late together with him. Thus the old subdivision of laborbetween men and women was being broken down and a certain equalizationestablished.The period of the Reformation laid the basis for a theory of individualism.The extreme Protestant sects, such as the Quakers, who had decided thatGod resides in the bosom of each person, could not deny that women toowas a person and that God equally resided in her. So, among the Quakers,women were allowed to have equal rights with men in being the embodimentof the holiness of God and having the power to preach. The Quakers weredestined to take a leading part in the Liberal feminist movement that sprungup later. However, even among the Quakers in the United States it was notuntil 1878 that they voted full equality to their women in managing propertyof the Society. (*2)The struggle of the capitalists against the old order forced them intothe rationale in which they expounded as fundamental the doctrine of theinalienable Rights of Man which he possessed as a human and which no onecould take away. These theories could easily be embraced by the awakeningof self-conscious women and become the basis for a Declaration of the Rightsof Women.* * * *The industrial revolution came down like an avalanche to destroy thehome. The Renaissance had witnessed the establishment of the home in thecities, the modern industrial capitalism began to break it up. Before theindustrial revolution, women had played an important independent positionin the prevailing social subdivision of labor. In their own field theywere expert handicraftsmen. On the farm, where the family was a unit ofproduction, the woman not only had to breed and rear her children, buthad to spin and dye the yarn, weave the cloth, sew the clothes, knit thesocks, make the carpets, take care of the garden, make and preserve thefood, cure the meat, do the milking, churn the butter, make the cheese,manufacture the candles, etc.The industrial revolution had terrific consequences on these home crafts,destroying them completely. Hitherto, the independent farmer and familyunit had been able to subsist because of two factors: first, the use ofthe common lands in the village and town, and second, the existence ofhome industries under the control of the women. These two factors werenow eliminated. The common lands were seized by the lords and ruling groupsof the towns, villages and burroughs. Home industry went next under thebatterings of factory machine production. Thus was the independence ofthe yeoman and farmer destroyed and the home broken up. Later on the womenwere to lose their ability not only to make clothes but to cook. No furtherexcuse could now exist for the maintenance of the old family as the socialunit.The introduction of machinery did away with all the old crafts whichhitherto the men had monopolized in the factory. With the new machinery,women and children poured into the factories, at first, to meet the growingdemands for goods, later, to displace the men from their jobs.This new situation meant a terrific dislocation of the old social relations.The former mutual aid associations were broken up. Machinery deprived thecraftsmen of their former standards of living. A new and far more helplessgroup, the women and children, dominated the working force of many factories.The pay of the men was reduced so that often the whole family receivedwhat he alone used to get before.The entrance of women into industry made men take a different attitudetowards women. No longer to the same extent the household slave of thehusband, subject to his full control over her material circumstances andher life, she first appeared as a menace to the craftsmen whose job hadbeen taken away. At the start, the organizations of the workers tried toadopt a policy of driving the women out of employment. In the United States,for example, at the Convention of the National Trades Union in 1836 a reportwas submitted on women labor declaring it an injury to women and a competitivemenace to men, and urging laws prohibiting female labor. (*3) In 1850 theprinters, hotel workers, shoe makers and tailors organizations took stepsto rid themselves of the competition of women. Section 17 of the Constitutionof the Journeymen Cordwainers Union provided that no women should be allowedto work in any of the shops controlled by the Union, "except she be a memberswife or daughter." (*4)However, the old craftsmen could as little stop the influx of womeninto industry as they could stop the introduction of machinery. After theCivil War it became clear in the United States that women was in industryto stay. By 1867 the Labor Congress declared that in many trades womenwere qualified to fill the same positions formally occupied by men anddemanded that they should get the same pay. The Convention of the NationalLabor Union in 1868 recognized the right of working men to strike and thenecessity for their organization. The Knights of Labor welcomed women,some trade assemblies being entirely composed of women, one local assemblyhaving fifteen hundred such members. Thus, in order to save their standardsand preserve their own solidarity, the unions were forced to take womeninto their ranks and to treat them as equal in every respect. It is inthe labor movement that political and social equality becomes first clearlypracticed.The industrial revolution provided the material circumstances and socialconditions compelling the formation of a regular feminist movement. Withthe breaking up of home life, the woman was released from the idiocy ofthe kitchen, from the cow-like status of nursing children. She was nowforced to enter into a new world of experiences, to stand on her own feetand to take care of herself. This meant a broadening of the character ofwomen and an increase of her financial and material independence. Thusnow, in contracting the marriage relation, more and more women of all classescould insist on being loved in their own right and not as a means to someother end. The same applied to the man. Not the family, nor the State,nor the feudal lord, nor the tribe could dictate any further women's choice;this choice was now her own.It must not be imagined that the life of the working woman is a rosyone under capitalism. Far from it. The host of factory laws that were enactedtestify most eloquently to the ferocious exploitation in the factory andthe degraded life in the slums that, unprecedented in history is woman'slot even today.Nor have the horrors of the new life by any means overthrown the burdensof the old. The married woman has the triple burden of the home cares andchild-bearing as well as factory work. What awful consequences to societydoes capitalist progress entail!With the new division of labor set up in one section of the country,regions predominantly male (mining towns, lumber camps, etc.) arise; inother parts "female towns" (textile, etc.) appear. Thus the old harmoniousrelations between men and women in society are completely shattered. Inother places capitalist pressure becomes too great to maintain the structureof the family. Mass abandonment of responsibilities of family life occurseven more frequently on the part of the male. The female cannot abdicateso easily and is generally left "holding the bag." Such action is stimulatedby the turmoil of periodic unemployment and compulsory immigration so commonplacein our civilization.This situation is particularly true among Negroes in the United States.The Negro woman is frequently the actual head of the family. Incidentally,this has tended to breed in her a great strength and ability to take careof herself that is quaintly illustrated in homicide statistics. "Negrowomen, it seems, are far more frequently slain with firearms than are whitewomen. This may be because Negro women are more likely to injure or slaytheir assailants. Anyone, then, who plans to attack a Negro woman willprefer to use a firearm in order to avoid risk of a successful counter-attack."(*5)Such general conditions, as well as the helpless position of the womenlaboring population in the factory, have led to widespread prostitution,vice, adultery, etc. the old moral life is gone, no longer to return. Womenare left to shift for themselves. Among the workers, Liberal individuallove tends to turn into Radical free love. Among the bourgeois, marriagetends to be followed quickly by divorce. The love nest becomes a psychopathicward. Here is the finest flower of industrialist individualism.2It may be said that America was the cradle of the Women's Rights Movementas a mass political organization. It is true that under the spur of theFrench Revolution there had already appeared both in England and in Germanybooks dealing with the discrimination against women and calling for equalrights for women. In 1792 in England, Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of WilliamGodwin, put out her book on "Vindication of the Rights of Women". In Germany,in the same year, Theodore von Hippel wrote his treatise on "The CivilImprovement of Women". But these books did not give rise to any organizedmovement. They were rather the individual expressions of the deep seatedsocial transformations then taking place.It is also true that in the French Revolution women played an extremelyimportant role. The Liberals like Condorcet and Madam Roland came out forthe equal treatment of women and there was even presented to the NationalAssembly a Declaration of the Rights of Women on behalf of the women'sclubs organized in France. However, this special women's movement was,but momentary and did not sufficiently reflect the material conditionsof agrarian France. If the women fought in the French Revolution --- andfight most heroically they did --- it was simply to protect their homesand lives and not for special feminist demands. When a revolutionary movementbecomes deep-seated enough to threaten the breakup of the home, when civilwar is the order of the day and members of the family are ranged up eachagainst the other, house against house, street against street, villageagainst village, under such circumstances women are naturally going tofight and, when once aroused, they can fight far more furiously than themen. None the less, their struggles are, after all, struggles of theirclass rather than of their sex.In America, however, circumstances converged to precipitate earlierthan elsewhere a definitely organized political movement of feminism. Afterall, where else was woman treated more nearly equally than in America;where else had she been forced to stand on her own feet, divorced fromall the old customs and traditions of ancient Europe?Americans have never been home builders in the European sense. The Frenchman,for example, seldom invites any but the closest friends or relatives tohis home. In America, privacy of the home is little respected; there isgenerally open house to which the most casual acquaintance may be invited.The family in the United States appears to be built on the "club" plan,a sort of temporary arrangement where each comes and goes at will. It isnot exaggerated to say that the American's home, with its wide verandasand rocking chairs, has occupied much the same place that the cafe doesfor the Frenchman. And during Prohibition times this home frequently literallyresembled a cafe, that is, a "speak-easy." In America each member of thefamily, having friends often totally unknown to the others, makes freeto invite them to his home, that is, to his "private club," so to speak.In the beginning of American colonization immigrants were mostly men.To obtain women, England often had to clean her streets of prostitutesand empty the jails, whence they were shipped to America to become thewives of the settlers. In many cases the death of the husband would leavethe womenfolk absolutely without any other support but their own labor.The hectic periods of immigration, with their heavy death toll, and thedifficulties of life in the New World, unsolvable by the Old-World mannerof living, impelled many women to strike out for themselves.Since the heavy preponderance of the male population made women greatlyin demand, they were welcomed everywhere and much sought after. The treatmentof women in America was far more favorable than in the Old World. Theywere not allowed to do the very heavy work in the field, and only amongthe Pennsylvania Dutch and German migration could there be found womenwho actually worked in the fields with their husbands.Everywhere on the posts of danger women were to be found. They wentshoulder to shoulder with their husbands, pioneers, backwoodsmen, frontiersmenof all kinds. They shouldered the gun to fight off the Indians. They developeda hardy independence and self-reliance that has been unsurpassed.The exceptional position to which women were able to attain in Americaallowed them also intellectual opportunities early in life. Many of thewomen were well versed in the Bible and had for times a tolerably goodschooling. Indeed, often the children's education depended not upon theschoolhouse but upon their mother. Women quickly took to journalism andbecame well-known writers, poets, and people of note in the literary world.Such women could not long be content with specializing in literature.They insisted upon broadening out to the general sciences and, althoughoften limited to an elementary school teaching, a considerable number managedto acquire the knowledge of expert professionals. It is in America wherefirst the struggle was made for women to enter the professions and to berecognized there. The first medical school for women was established inMassachusetts in 1848, and Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman topractice medicine, in 1865 establishing her own medical school in New York.Other medical colleges were opened in Philadelphia, in Chicago, and elsewhereabout the same time. Sooner or later professional women were bound to askwhy they should not be treated politically as the equal of men.With the development of industry in America, women were plunged directlyinto the mills. Already by 1850 in the cotton factories of twenty-fivestates, over sixty-two thousand women were employed, or sixty-four percent of the total number of workers. Thus even before the Civil War womenwere coming into their own, not only as nurses, teachers, domestics, andto some extent as professionals, but, most important, as factory workersas well. The extraordinary demand for labor in America accelerated theprocess of drawing women into all sorts of occupations and giving thema prominent place in many industries.Significantly enough, the Women's Rights Movement started as a branchof the Abolitionists. In 1833 a Men's Anti-Slavery Society had been formedin Philadelphia, followed immediately afterward by a women's branch calledthe Female Anti-Slavery Society. The women of the independent middle classin their strivings to be considered as humans in their own right, couldnot avoid becoming closely attached to Abolitionism. The freeing of theslaves went hand in hand with a general democratic tendency to considerevery being, including women, as worthy of equal treatment.In the course of their agitation for the freeing of the slave, theseadvanced women soon came into violent conflict with prevailing prejudices.Lucy Stone, attending a church meeting on the Negro question, found hervote not counted with the argument that women have no rights accordingto the Bible. The Grimke sisters found themselves hooted and stoned whenthey appeared in public and finally had the roof of their hall torn downalmost over their very heads. On all sides churches and halls were closedto women's meetings and mobs attacked them.The women persisted, however, and in 1839 the National Society, of Anti-SlaveryWomen, which had grown out of the old Female Anti-Slavery Society, appliedto join the National Society of Anti-Slavery Men. Harassed by this questionof permitting women to take part in political affairs as equals, the men'sgroup split into two parts, one siding with the women. It was this lattergroup which sent men and women delegates to London to the first InternationalConference for the Abolition of Slavery.In London, the American delegates found that the women were barred fromthe Conference and were ordered to sit in the gallery. As a protest, twoof the men delegates joined hands with the women and also retired to thegallery, where there was born the idea of forming a Women's Party.In 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York, there was held, under the leadershipof Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the first National Conventionof the Women's Rights Movement. From that time on until the freeing ofthe slaves the Women's Rights and Abolitionist Movements closely intertwinedand the Abolitionist Paper, "The Liberator", became open to articles byfeminists in which not merely chattel slavery but the slavery of womenalso was the subject of attack.* * * *If we analyze the Women's Rights Movement as a whole we can see thatit is a thoroughly bourgeois Liberal movement, entirely dissociated fromany but middle class elements. It starts as a general conception of humanrights; it later narrows down to an emphasis on women suffrage. Wealthywomen of property, as well as intellectual and professional women, feltthat it was intolerable that they should be considered lower than the Negroslave or the ignorant servant immigrant, and it was they who articulateda protest for an extension of democratic rights for women.It should be kept in mind that in colonial days certain women couldvote in a number of the colonies. Before 1783 in nine states the rightto vote was exercised by "free born citizens" or "taxpayers" and "headsin families" and these categories included many women as well.In the West the issue of suffrage did not come up until Jackson's timesince there the population generally did not find the ballot importantenough for use. However, once the men obtained a vote, the Western womenwho had struggled side by side with their menfolk on an equal plane inevery respect, who had educated and brought them up in many cases, andwho were esteemed and respected by all, refused to be denied what theirhusbands and sons had been able to secure. The frontiersmen and Westernpioneer owed too much to their women to be opposed to such a demand. Besides,the participation of women in politics could only increase the strengthof their own class. It was not until after the end of slavery, however,that the women members of the Western farmer elements could think of presentingtheir own claims. Prior to that only the women of the wealthier and intellectualcity classes had publicly voiced their demands.The unstable marital conditions that existed in America made it imperativethat women should own the property which came into their possession. Otherwise,as family life tended to be too transient and unstable, there was hardlya sufficient guarantee of protection for a woman. Thus, the question ofproperty rights was raised to a prominent position in the Liberal Women'sRights Movement, as was her claim to entrance into the professions andto economic security in her own right.The Women's Rights adherents early took the program of Liberalism anddeveloped it in their own interests. They first attempted to appeal tothe natural and inalienable rights of women, as being superior to the lawand by which the law should be guided, just as the early Liberals who formulatedthe Declaration of Independence had done. The women, however, found themselvesin the embarrassing position that whenever they appealed either to theBible or to Natural Law, or to some other eternal principle of morals hallowedby the past, the argument was stronger against them. Reference to the Bible,for example, could bring little solace to the women demanding equalityand soon enough the Women's Rights Movement had to pass a resolution "Thatwhatever any book may teach, the rights of no human being are dependentupon or modified thereby, but are equal, absolute, essential, inalienablein the person of every member of the human family, without regard to sex,race, or clime." (*6) Thus the women were forced to a position of Radicalismand to deny the Bible to which they opposed their ideas of inalienablerights. (*7)Nor did the doctrine of natural law and inalienable rights get womenvery far either. Women's Rights protagonists could always be informed thatfrom time immemorial, where supposedly brute force had prevailed, women'sposition had been far inferior to what it then was. In those days the researchesof Morgan and others relating to the favorable position of women in primitivesociety were as yet unknown. Natural law could hardly give what the Biblehad refused to yield.Thus women were forced to make their fight not only on religious oreven moral grounds, but on traditional political and social grounds. Thisbecame clear after the Civil War when the women's movement separated itselffrom Abolitionism, and put forth such slogans as "No taxation without representation,"and "No government except by the consent of the governed," etc., to persuadethe Liberal State to accept their demands.Soon all of these traditional arguments were brushed aside and womenboldly based their claim on American individualism, the right of each personfor complete development of personality. Women's suffrage was the meansby which women would be able better to protect themselves. It was un-Americanfor anyone to seek protection from another, to be the permanent child andward of some other person or group. In the name of each one's right andduty to take care of one's self, women suffragists tried to prove thatthereby not only would their own individuality develop but thus they couldalso become far more socially effective.After the Civil War, the National Women's Suffrage Association was formed,later becoming the American Women's Suffrage Association, with Henry WardBeecher as the first President. A concerted drive was initiated, in thecourse of which the women were compelled to move more and more to a radicalposition.In the late part of the nineteenth century, the principal economic demandof the women could be expressed in the slogan "the right to work," thatis, the opening up of professions and jobs to women as well as to men.The popularity of this demand was in direct proportion to the great needof American business men for an adequate labor supply. With the twentiethcentury, however, a different set of circumstances arose, driving a sectionof the Women's Rights Movement into entirely different channels. As theWomen's Rights Movement began in the question of chattel slavery, so didit end in the question of wage-slavery. The women problem was but one aspectof a larger social problem. Once women, for example, were put to work infactories, it was found that mechanical equality was disastrous for them.Theirs was not equal pay for equal work; nor did they have the strengthof the men whom they displaced. Besides, women were loaded with the tripleburden of factory work and toil at home, as well as the trials of motherhood.Capitalism in its rampages of individualism could wantonly destroy itsmale workers and thereby affect only the present generation. In its destructionof the lives and health of the women population, however, it threatenedthe future of the whole race. Night work for women, industrial hazards,general working and social conditions, were abuses crying aloud for remedyand social regulation.Under the impact of modern capitalism, the Women's Rights Movement inAmerica split into two divisions, especially marked after the women's votewas secured in 1920 by constitutional amendment. One division, made upof out-and-out bourgeois elements, such as the National Women's Party,insisted that women must be treated exactly as though equal to men, notin order to secure the welfare of women, but in order to permit the industrialiststo remain unhampered by any legislation in their ruthless crushing of thelives and potential development of their women employees. Should thereappear legislation calling for the abolition of night work for women? Thenwould the National Women's Party come forth in the name of "Women's Rights"to fight against such legislation protecting women workers, and would giveargument that this protection would make women wards of the governmentand brand them as inferior children. The National Women's Party, however,indignantly repudiated the charge that in their belated ardent advocacyof the doctrine of laissez-faire they were only the wards and childishtools of Big Business and the sweatshops themselves.On the other side, the Women's Rights Movement developed closer andcloser ties with the labor unions and the Socialists. (*8) To this secondgroup, women's suffrage was no end in itself; it was a means to obtainthe true development of womanhood. These women did not fear to ally themselveswith every movement that would protect them in the new conditions of recklessindustrialism.* * * *In America the feminist movement had been, in the main, merely a Liberaldemocratic one striving for the right to work and equal treatment of womenin realizing the opportunities they all had under capitalism to advance.Plenty of opportunities to get out of the working class seemed to be present.All that women needed was to be allowed to grasp them. In Europe, however,there was no such illusion on the part of the masses either of men or ofwomen that they could rise from their class station. How few opportunitieswere available for women to advance from their class could be seen by thefigures of education in 1914 in Prussia. While there were 540 high schoolspreparing boys for the university, there were only 43 schools of correspondinggrade for girls. The feminist movement of Europe, in the main, therefore,was not confined to mere bourgeois democratic demands for equal politicalrights of men and women. Only in England did the feminist movement haveany such character and militantly concentrate on political rights. In England,feminism could keep its connections with Liberalism, for by this time Liberalismhad broadened from the principles of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham to theWelfare-Liberalism of John Stuart Mill and Lloyd George.On the continent, particularly in Germany and Scandinavia, the feministmovement very soon linked itself up with the working class Socialist organizations.In countries where not even the head of the family and chief bread-winnerhad a right to vote and where the struggle for democracy was a mere by-productof the struggle for Socialism, naturally the women emphasized economicand social welfare rather than special rights of franchise. What womenfought for was not so much the right to work as the right to social protection.In Germany, vast numbers of women were thrown into the industries. Inthe years just prior to the War, there were about ten million women wageearners in all of the 207 occupations listed in the German industrial census,while in 25 of these occupations they were the majority. Of the thirty-onemillion women, one-quarter were at work, and of the approximately sevenmillion unmarried women over sixteen years of age, about six million labored,over two million toiling in industry; 22 per cent of women wage earnerswere married. (*9)For a time these women were excluded by law from unions and politicalactivity. Thus they were forced to organize underground. Naturally thesewomen turned to Revolutionary-Socialism. To counteract this trend and inorder to insure that the future children of Germany would be fit for theimperial army, the State, under Bismarck, began to make efforts for thesocial protection of women. This, however, did not in the least move working-classwomen to the support of Bismarck.In 1894, the German Federation of Women's Associations was formed andrapidly rose to over two million members. In 1891, the Socialist Partytook a strong stand on equality for women, one of the leaders of the Party,August Babel, writing a standard treatise on the subject, "Women UnderSocialism," in which vigorous effort was made to win the working womento the banner of the Socialist Party. At the same time, under the leadershipof Clara Zetkin and Frau Guillaume Schack, a women's paper, Die Arbeiterin,was put out in Hamburg and soon had a circulation of over eighty-five thousand.By 1907, the Socialist International Movement had developed its policyso far as to organize a Women's Congress at Stuttgart to which women delegatescame from many countries. Clara Zetkin became the International secretary.Faced with this pressure, the German government the following year removedthe ban from the organization of women. Two hundred thousand women flockedinto the Social Democratic Unions and the women's political organizationsmerged with the Socialist Party. (*10)From that time, too, working women played a very important role in internationalLabor and Socialist affairs. A new Women's International Congress was heldat Copenhagen in 1910, to which many women delegates came from all partsof the world. It was at the Women's International Conference meeting atBerne in March, 1915, that there first arose the cry of revolutionary struggleagainst the World War. This memorable meeting paved the way for the giganticsplit which soon occurred between the Socialist and the Communist movements.(*11)It was not only in Germany that the women's movement advanced. Elsewhere,too, steps forward were taken. In Scandinavia, for example, where, as inGermany, illegitimacy was exceedingly frequent, the divorce laws in Norwayand Sweden became very liberal. For the poor in Norway, divorce is practicallyfree and is easily obtained. As in Germany, various social legislationwas enacted to protect motherhood, illegitimate children, women at work,etc.* * * *The World War and its aftermath have caused tremendous changes in theconditions facing the women's movements throughout the world. The lastwar has initiated an entirely new phase of military history in which thewhole nation, both men and women, have been more or less completely mobilized.The distinction between front-line trench and the factory rear has tendedto become obliterated.During the War, women played an exceedingly and increasingly importantrole. In all belligerent countries special women's committees were immediatelyorganized by the governments. (*12) In Great Britain, for example, "Tothe call for labor power British women gave instant response. In munitionsa million were mobilized, in the Land Army there have been drafted andactually placed on the farms over three hundred thousand, and in the Women'sArmy Auxiliary Corps fourteen thousand women are working in direct connectionwith the fighting force, and an additional ten thousand are being calledout for service each month. In the clerical force of the government departments,some of which had never seen women before in their sacred precincts, onehundred ninety eight thousand are now working." (*13) Millions of womenare later mobilized as consumers. What occurred in England was far moredrastically accomplished on the European continent, particularly by Germanyand the Central Powers.In America, an immense apparatus was created on a national scale, usingthe prominent bourgeois women's organizations, which reached to the lastcorner of the country and attracted to the war not only the middle classwomen but the working women as well. Operating under the direct controlof the Federal Government, this women's war work systematically penetratedeven the colonial possessions.Fifteen days after war was declared on Germany, on April 21, 1917, themobilization was begun by the creation of a Women's Committee of the Councilof National Defense, organized by Act of Congress August, 1916, and consistingof the Secretaries of six State Departments plus an Advisory Committeeof seven. Nine women were put on the Committee, most of them heads of largebourgeois women's organizations, such as the General Federation of Women'sClubs, the National Council of Women, the National Women's Suffrage Association,and others. Later two other women were added, one of them President ofthe International Glove Workers Union.Within a few weeks the Women's Committee had formulated a plan of actionwhich was sent out to well-known patriotic women in forty-eight states,and national organization work commenced. Conferences were called consistingof the heads of women's organizations, recognition given to clubs, religiousdenominations, fraternal and philanthropic societies, paternal and protectiveassociations, etc. In every country, city, town, and village, local bodieswere formed on the basis of individual membership.Departments were established in all divisions for the following fieldsof work: registration, food production and home economics, food administration,women in industry, child welfare, maintenance of existing social serviceagencies, health and recreation, education, Liberty Loan, home and foreignrelief. Some of the committees, such as food administration, women in industry,and Liberty Loan worked directly with Washington. Women were used to alarge extent in recruiting campaigns where they had great significance,as they had also in the Liberty Loan and food conservation drives. In thepulpit, in press, in movie and school, in parade and mass meeting, thegovernment campaign went on to mobilize the very last women to supportthe cause.The actual concrete results of the campaign were of enormous help inconducting the war. After a few months of the campaign among women forthe saving of waste bread, for instance, the National Commercial EconomyBoard stated that enough bread had been saved each day to feed a millionpeople. Three hundred and fifty million dollars worth of crops were raisedby women in backyard gardens during 1917, and in the same year thirty-sixmillion dollars worth of garments made by women were sent to the troopsabroad, according to Mr. Davidson, head of the American Red Cross.Other organizations, too, were formed, such as the National League forWomen's Service and the Red Cross. The Red Cross Women's Bureau mobilizedthe women so well for its work that in six weeks in the fall of 1917 womenfurnished 3,700,000 surgical dressing, 1,500,000 pieces of hospital linen,125,000 articles of patients clothing, 302,000 articles of miscellaneoussupplies, 241,000 knitted articles, and a large amount of other material.It was not only at the rear that women played an indispensable role,but in the military forces at the front as well. In Russia in 1915 therewas organized the famous regiment known as the Woman's Battalion of Death,taking in thousands of women who fought at the front. All combatant armieshad women's auxiliary corps; many of them drove ambulances, tens of thousandswere nurses and physicians, many thousands more handled telephone and telegraphsets. In the laundry work, in the commissary and cooking departments, inveterinary hospitals, in all the Red Cross work and social services attachedto the army, women were absolutely invaluable. (*14)Under such conditions it was impossible any longer to preclude womenfrom active political participation and immediately during and after theWar, in the Liberal countries of England and America, women's suffragewas enacted; in America, on equal terms with male suffrage, in Englandat first under discriminatory conditions which later were abolished. (*15)In Germany, coinciding with the democratic revolution under the Socialists,women also were enfranchised.Thus, in many countries, with the gaining of women's suffrage, the oldLiberal feminist and Women's Rights movements passed into senility. Theycontinued either as a direct appendage of Big Business, as the NationalWomen's Party in the United States, or changed their character in linewith working class activity. The specific women's program was merged inthe general social problems of the working class.In the Latin countries, precisely because of lack of industrial development,the tardiness in the breaking up of the home and the strong power of agrarianism,the women's movement never strongly developed. The French movement is exceedinglyweak even today. In Spain it has been only during the course of the presentRevolution that women have been given the vote. Strangely enough, the veryRadicals and Socialists who have advocated women suffrage in Spain mournfullyconfess that their women often vote for their hangmen and side heavilywith the counter-revolution. There is no doubt but a similar result wouldbe obtained in France today and women's suffrage help greatly the Fascistforces.This paradoxical situation is not new. The following table (*16) givingthe women's vote in Germany in 1922, for example, shows that this trendtoward conservatism has been well known for some time. percentage of percentage of men women Communist 63 37 Independent Socialist (Left) 59 41 Majority Socialist 57 43 Democrats 53 47 Centrists 41 59 Peoples Party 49 51 Nationalists 44 56Several reasons explain this difference between the voting trends amongmen and women. In the first place, the women of the property classes havemore faith in parliamentary action, and are thoroughly awake to their politicalinterest. Among the lower classes, however, in the past women have engagedin political action only when deeply stirred and then the action tendedto be direct and physical rather than through the ballot. Besides, thewomen of the poorest sections of the population are often too exhaustedand overworked to go to the polls.The basic explanation is, however, that the pressure of capitalism worksunevenly upon different elements of the same class. In France and Spain(particularly in Spain) where industry is not predominant and the homelife has been traditionally stable to a greater extent than in other countries,the women stay at home while the men work. Entirely different materialworking conditions and cultural attainments prevail for the man than forthe women. The politically awakened class-conscious worker must pay forthe fact that he has not been able to make his wife partner in his socialdevelopment. The Royalist, Clerical, and Fascist elements play upon thegreater enslavement to habit and superstition that is women's lot. Theyemphasize the need for maintaining the stability of the home, endangeredby the activity of the husband, father, or son. Left to herself and broodingover the fact that political activity has apparently alienated the affectionsof her menfolk, the women then turns her own affections to those reactionistswho can console her. Nor is this true only in agrarian countries. The figuresgiven in the table above show that even in highly industrialized Germanywomen have not been drawn sufficiently into the mainstream of social movementsas to work as consciously as the men for their own class interests.Understanding this uneven pressure of capitalism, the revolutionaryCommunists have taken alarm at this condition which at times may be decisiveagainst them in a given struggle. They point out that it is folly to waituntil capitalism should emancipate the women equally with the man, sincecapitalism can never entirely complete the tasks it historically sets outto perform. Indeed, the mass of discrimination against women, far fromdecreasing, is steadily augmenting under the blows of Fascism.Such Communists urge the necessity to close the gap by paying the greatestattention to the needs of women. Special women's movements are createdthat wipe out the disabilities incurred in isolated home life. They engagein organizing the housewife against evictions, against the high cost ofliving, against slum conditions of vice, disease, etc. They interest themother in the actions of school authorities and child welfare. They demanddrastic enactment's to secure motherhood and to obtain a protective systemof pensions for housewives. A whole special literature for women is createdin which there is repeated the cardinal principle that the revolution willbe lost without the women.The Communists need not worry too much. Once the revolutionary situationgives way to the actual uprising, the women will fight far more fiercelythan the men in defense of their homes and families. Women are harder toarouse but when once aflame burn hotter.Impending social convulsions, such as devastating wars, mass unemploymentand cataclysmic revolutions, must tend to throw the women still furtherinto political action. Future wars will close further the gap between frontand rear and distinctions between men and women. The social revolutionswill be of such a nature as to throw the women into the fray even moreferociously than the men. In both cases, individualism and Welfare-Liberalismvanish. The feminist movement becomes merely a subdivision of the classstruggle.Footnotes1. Anna G. Spencer: Woman's Share in Social Culture, p. 542. See, T. V. Smith: The American Philosophy of Equality, p.121, footnote; See also Stanton, Anthony and Gage: History of WomanSuffrage, I, 783 (1881 edition)3. Commons: History of Labor in the United States, I, 436-437.Women laborers were urged to cooperate with the unions and the latter tochange their rules as to admit women.4. The same, I, 5955. H. C. Brearley: Homicide in the United States, p. 109.6. See Stanton, Anthony and Gage: History of Women's Suffrage,I, p. 383. (1881 edition)7. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton actually put out a paperin 1868 which they called Revolution.8. In the U.S. in the early 1870's, two women, Victoria Woodhull andTennessee Claflin, put out a weekly magazine which advocated women's suffrageand at the same time represented a leading American section in the UnitedStates of the First International. They were later expelled for their fractiousvagaries.9. See Katherine Anthony: Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia,pp. 172, 188, 196.10. In 1914 there were 472,000 women trade union members in Great Britain.In 1918 the number was 1,224,000. In 1922 in the U.S. the National Women'sTrade Union League had 600,000 members. (G. S. Watkins: An Introductionto the Study of Labor Problems, p. 361.)11. In 1921, Reformist trade unions organized a new International Federationof Working Women, denouncing Communist membership.12. For England, for example, see Edith Abbott: "The War and Women'sWork in England," The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. XXV, pp.641-678. (July, 1917)13. Harriot Stanton Blatch: Mobilizing Woman Power, pp. 37-38.14. See, for example, Ruth W. Kauffman: "The Woman Ambulance-driverin France," The Outlook, vol. 117 pp. 170-172; Elizabeth S. Chesser:"The Women's Army in France," Contemporary Review, vol. 113, pp. 680-684.(June, 1918)15. Before 1928, in England, the qualifications for a woman to votewere that she must be thirty years of age and must either be an occupantof premises of the yearly value of five pounds, or the wife of a man entitledto be registered as a local government elector. Men over twenty-one hadonly residence qualifications to meet, although in local elections evenmen renting furnished rooms could vote. As a result however, of the "EqualFranchise" Act in 1928 women, at the present time, exercise the parliamentaryvote on exactly the same terms as men voters. (See Maud I. Crofts: WomenUnder the English Law, pp. 4-8.[second edition] )16. H. Puckett: Germany's Women Go Forward, p. 248 |
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