Woman under socialism

The moment woman acquires equal rights with man, the sense of her duties will be quickened. Called upon to cast her ballot, she will ask, What for? Whom for? Immediately, emulation in many directions will set in between man and woman that, so far from injuring, will materially improve their mutual relations. The less posted woman will naturally turn to the better posted man. Interchange of ideas and mutual instruction follows, – a condition of things until now found most rarely between husband and wife: it will impart a fresh charm to life. The unhappy differences in education and view-points between the two sexes, – differences, that so frequently lead to dissensions between husband and wife, that place the husband at variance with his many-sided duties, and that injure the well-being of all, will be wiped out. Instead of a clog, the husband will gain a supporter in a compatible wife; whenever prevented by other duties from personal participation, she will spur her husband to fulfil his own. She will find it legitimate that a fraction of his earnings be spent in a newspaper, for agitational purposes, because the paper serves to educate and entertain her also, and because she realizes the necessity of the sacrifice, a sacrifice that helps to conquer that which she, her husband and her children lack, – an existence worthy of human beings.

Thus, the joining of hands by husband and wife for the common weal, so closely connected with the weal of the individual, will exert a most ennobling influence. The very reverse is called into life of that which is claimed by near-sighted people, or by the foes of a commonwealth based upon the equality of all. Nor would it end there. The relation between the two sexes would be beautiful in the measure that the social institutions will liberate husband and wife from material cares and from excessive work. Practice and education will, here as in all other cases, give further aid. If I go not in the water, I shall never learn to swim; if I study no foreign language and do not practice it, I shall never learn to speak it. Everyone finds that natural; and yet many fail to realize that the same holds good in the affairs of government and society. Are our women unfitter than the far lower negroes, to whom full political equality was conceded in North America? And shall a highly intellectual woman be vested with lesser rights than the rudest, least cultured man, – an ignorant day-laborer of the backwoods of Pomerania, or an ultramontane canalman, for instance, and all because accident let these come into the world as men? The son has greater rights than his mother, from whom, perchance, he derives his best qualities, the very qualities that alone make him what he is. Truly wonderful!

Moreover, we in Germany would no longer be running the risk of being the first to take the leap in the dark and the unknown. The United States, England and other countries have opened the way. In the State of Wyoming in the United States, woman suffrage has been tested since 1869. On November 12, 1872, writing from Laramie City, Wyo., on the subject, Judge Kingman says in the Chicago "Women's Journal":

"Three years ago to-day women obtained the right of electing and of being elected to office in our Territory, in the same manner as the other electors. During this period they have voted and have been voted for; they have exercised the functions of jurors and arbiters; they have taken part in large numbers at our elections, and although I believe that some among us oppose the admission of women from motives of principle, no one, I think, can refuse to recognize that their influence on the elections has been an elevating one. It caused them to be conducted in a more peaceable and orderly manner, and at the same time enabled our courts of justice to discover and punish various kinds of crime that had until then remained unpunished.

"For instance, when the Territory was first organized, there was scarcely a man who did not carry a revolver and make use of it in the slightest dispute. I cannot remember a single case in which a jury composed of men brought in a verdict of guilty against one of those who had shot with a revolver, but when two or three women were among them, they have invariably attended to the instructions of the Court."

In what esteem woman suffrage was held in Wyoming twenty-five years after its introduction, may be gathered from the address issued on November 12, 1894, to the Parliaments of the world by the Legislature of that State. It says:

"The possession and exercise of suffrage by the women in Wyoming for the past quarter of a century has wrought no harm and has done great good in many ways; it has largely aided in banishing crime, pauperism, and vice from this State, and that without any violent or oppressive legislation; it has secured peaceful and orderly elections, good government, and a remarkable degree of civilization and public order; and we point with pride to the facts that after nearly twenty-five years of Woman Suffrage not one county in Wyoming has a poorhouse, that our jails are almost empty, and crime, except that committed by strangers in the State, almost unknown; and as the result of experience we urge every civilized community on earth to enfranchise its women without delay."154

While giving fullest credit to the political activity of the women of Wyoming, we cannot go to the extreme, reached by the enthusiastic defenders of woman suffrage in the Legislature of that State, of ascribing exclusively to the ballot in woman's hands the enviable conditions, which, according to the account of the address, Wyoming rejoices in. A number of social causes of other nature contribute thereto. Nevertheless, the fact is unquestionable that female suffrage has been accompanied by the most beneficent results for that State, and without one disadvantage. That is the most brilliant justification of its introduction.

The example of Wyoming found followers. To-day there are a number of countries in which woman enjoys political rights to greater or less extent. In the United States, women obtained several years ago the ballot in Colorado, and in 1894 they elected a number of representatives; likewise in Arizona, and still more recently in Minnesota. In New Zealand, they took a lively part in the parliamentary elections of 1893, livelier, in fact, than the men, although they were only qualified to elect: only men were qualified to be elected. In March, 1894, the Prime Minister declared to a deputation of women that he would advocate their qualification to be elected. In 1893, there were twenty-two States in the North American Union where women were qualified both to elect and be elected for the School Boards. In Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Oregon, Arizona, Dakota, Idaho, Minnesota and Montana they are fully qualified electors for municipal officers, provided they are resident citizens. In Argonia, Kans., the wife of a physician was elected Mayor;155 the same thing happened in Onehunga, New Zealand. Since more than ten years ago, women in Sweden have the suffrage for departmental and municipal elections, under the same restrictions as men.

In England, the struggle, for woman's political rights has a regular history behind it. According to the old custom of the Middle Ages, women, seized of landed property, were also vested with the suffrage, and, as such also filled judicial functions. In the course of time they lost these rights. In the bill for Parliamentary Reform in 1832, the word "person" was used, a term that, according to English conceptions, includes the members of both sexes, men and women. This notwithstanding, the law was interpreted adversely to women and they were turned back wherever they made the effort to vote. In the electoral reform Act of 1867, the word "man" was substituted for the word "person." John Stuart Mill moved the re-insertion of "person" in place of "man," with the express purpose that women shall be vested with the suffrage under the same conditions as men. The motion was defeated by 196 votes against 83. Sixteen years later, 1883, the attempt was again made in the Lower House to grant women the suffrage. A motion to that effect was defeated by a majority of 16. A further attempt in 1884 was defeated in a fuller House by more than 136 votes. But the minority did not evacuate the field. In 1886 it succeeded in carrying to a second reading a motion to grant women the suffrage; but the dissolution of Parliament prevented a final vote being taken. Again, on April 27, 1892, the Lower House defeated with 175 votes against 152, the second reading of a motion on the subject presented by Sir A. Rollit, and which provided as follows:

"Every woman who in Great Britain is registered or entitled to be registered as an elector for a Town Council or County Council or who in Ireland is a rate payer entitled to vote in the election of Guardians of the Poor, shall be entitled to be registered as a Parliamentary elector, and when registered, to vote at any Parliamentary election for the county, borough, or division wherein the qualifying property is situate."

On November 29, 1888, Lord Salisbury held a speech in Edinburgh, in the course of which he said: "I earnestly hope that the day is not far distant when women also will bear their share in voting for members in the political world and in the determining the policy of the country." And Alfred Russell Wallace, celebrated as a naturalist and follower of Darwin, expressed himself upon the same question this wise: "When men and women shall have freedom to follow their best impulses, when both shall receive the best possible education, when no false restraints shall be imposed upon any human being by the reason of the accident of sex, and when public opinion shall be regulated by the wisest and best and shall be systematically impressed upon youth, then shall we find that a system of human selection will arise that is bound to have a reformed humanity for its result. So long as woman is compelled to regard marriage as a means by which to escape poverty and avoid neglect, she is and remains at a disadvantage with man. Hence, the first step in the emancipation of woman is the removal of all restraints that prevent her from competing with man on all the fields of industry and in all pursuits. But we must go further, and allow woman the exercise of her political rights. Many of the restraints, under which woman has suffered until now, would have been spared to her, had she had direct representation in Parliament."

In most sections of England, married women have the same political rights as men in the elections for the School Boards and Guardians of the Poor, and in many places are themselves qualified for election. At the county elections, unmarried women have the right to vote under the same restrictions as men, but are not themselves qualified for election. Likewise did all independent tax-paying women obtain the right to vote by the Reform Act of 1869, but are not qualified for election. Married women are in virtue of a court decision, rendered in 1872, excluded from the suffrage, because in English law woman loses her independence by marriage– a decided encouragement for women to keep away from the legal formality of legitimate marriage. Seeing that also in other respects unmarried or divorced women in England and Scotland are clothed with rights denied to married women, the temptation is not slight for women to renounce legitimate unions. It is not exactly the part of wisdom for the male representatives of bourgeois society to degrade bourgeois marriage into a sort of slave status for woman.156

In Austria, women who are landed proprietors, or conduct a business, to which the suffrage is attached, have the right to exercise the privilege by attorney. This holds both for local and Reichstag elections. If the woman is proprietor of a mercantile or industrial establishment, which gives the right to vote for the Chamber of Commerce, her franchise must be exercised by a business manager. In France, on the contrary, a woman who conducts a business, has a right to vote at the election of members for the tribunals of commerce, but she cannot herself be elected. According to the law of 1891 of the old Prussian provinces, women have the suffrage, if the landed property that belongs to them conveys the right to vote, nevertheless they must exercise the privilege through a male representative, neither are they eligible themselves. Likewise according to the laws of Hanover, Brunswick, Schleswig-Holstein, Sachsen-Weimar, Hamburg and Luebeck. In Saxony, the law allows women the suffrage if they are landed proprietors and are unmarried. If married, the woman's vote goes to her husband. In all these cases, accordingly, the right of suffrage does not attach to persons but to property – quite a light upon existing political and legal morality: Man, thou art zero if moneyless or propertyless; knowledge, intellect are secondary matters. Property decides.

We see that the principle of denying woman the suffrage on the theory of her not being "of age" is broken through in fact; and yet objection is raised to granting her the right in full. It is said that to grant woman the suffrage is dangerous because she yields easily to religious prejudices, and is conservative. She is both only because she is ignorant. Let her be educated and taught where her interests lie. For the rest, the influence of religion on elections is exaggerated. Ultramontane agitation has hitherto been so successful in Germany only because it knew how to join social with religious interests. The ultramontane chaplains long vied with the Socialists in uncovering the social foulness. Hence their influence with the masses. With the close of the Kulturkampf, the influence of the Catholic clergymen upon the masses waned. The clergy is forced to discontinue its opposition to the Government; simultaneously therewith, the rising class struggle compels it to consider the Catholic capitalist class and Catholic nobility; it will, accordingly, be compelled to observe greater caution on the social field. Thus the clergy will forfeit its influence with the workingmen, especially at such critical junctures when considerations for the Government and the ruling classes drive it to approve of, or tolerate actions and laws directed against the interests of the working class. The same causes will, in the end, have their influence upon woman. When at public meetings, through newspapers and from personal observation she will have learned where her own interest lies, woman will emancipate herself from the clergy, the same as man has done. The fiercest opponent of female suffrage is the clergy, and it knows the reason why. Its rule and its domains are endangered.

That the movement for the political rights of woman has not been promptly crowned with greater success is no reason to withhold the ballot from her. What would the workingmen say if the Liberals proposed abolishing manhood suffrage – and the same is very inconvenient to them – on the ground that it benefits the Socialists in particular? A good law does not become bad by reason of him who wields it not yet having learned its right use.

Naturally, the right to be elected should go together with the right to elect. "A woman in the tribune of the Reichstag, that would be a spectacle!" we hear people exclaim. Our generation has grown accustomed to the sight of women in the speaker's tribune at their conventions and meetings; in the United States, also in the pulpit and the jury box – why not, then, also in the tribune of the Reichstag? The first woman elected to the Reichstag, would surely know how to impose respect. When the first workingmen entered the Reichstag it was also believed they could be laughed down, and it was claimed that the working class would soon realize the foolishness it had committed in electing such people. Its representatives, however, knew how to make themselves quickly respected; the fear to-day is lest there be too many of them. Frivolous witlings put in: "Just imagine a pregnant woman in the tribune of the Reichstag; how utterly unesthetic!" The identical gentlemen find it, however, quite in order that pregnant women work at the most unesthetic trades, at trades in which female dignity, health and decency are undermined. In the eyes of a Socialist, that man is a wretch who can crack jokes over a woman with child. The mere thought that his own mother once looked like that before she brought him into the world, should cause his cheeks to burn with shame; the thought that he, rude jester, expects from a similar condition on the part of his wife the fulfillment of his dearest wishes should cause him, furthermore, to hold his tongue in shame.

A woman who gives birth to children renders, at least, the same service to the commonwealth as the man who defends his country and his hearth with his life against a foe in search of conquests. Moreover, the life of a woman trembles in the scales at child-birth. All our mothers have looked death in the face at our births, and many succumbed. The number of women who die as a result of child-birth, or who as a consequence pine away in sickness, is greater than that of the men who fall on the field of battle, or are wounded. In Prussia, between 1816-1876, not less than 321,791 women fell a prey to child-birth fever – a yearly average of 5,363. This is by far a larger figure than that of the Prussians, who, during the same period, were killed in war or died of their wounds. Nor must, at the contemplation of this enormous number of women who died of child-birth fever, the still larger number of those be lost sight of, who, as a consequence of child-birth, are permanently crippled in health, and die prematurely.157 These are additional reasons for woman's equal rights with man – reasons to be held up especially to those, who play man's duty to defend the Fatherland as a decisive circumstance, entitling them to superior consideration to women. For the rest, in virtue of our military institutions, most men do not even fill this duty: to the majority of them it exists upon paper only.

All these superficial objections to the public activity of woman would be unimaginable were the relations of the two sexes a natural one, and were there not an antagonism, artificially raised side by side with the relation of master and servant between the two. From early youth the two are separated in social intercourse and education. Above all, it is the antagonism, for which Christianity is responsible, that keeps the sexes steadily apart and the one in ignorance about the other, and that hinders free social intercourse, mutual confidence, a mutual supplementing of traits of character.

One of the first and most important tasks of a rationally organized society must be to end this unhallowed split, and to reinstate Nature in its rights. The violence done to Nature starts at school: First, the separation of the sexes; next, mistaken, or no instruction whatever, in matters that concern the human being as a sexual entity. True enough, natural history is taught in every tolerably good school. The child learns that birds lay eggs and hatch them out: he also learns when the mating season begins: that males and females are needed: that both jointly assume the building of the nests, the hatching and the care of the young. He also learns that mammals bring forth live young: he learns about the rutting season and about the fights of the males for the females during the same: he learns the usual number of young, perhaps also the period of pregnancy. But on the subject of the origin and development of his own stock he remains in the dark; that is veiled in mystery. When, thereupon, the child seeks to satisfy his natural curiosity with questions addressed to his parents, to his mother in particular – he seldom ventures with them to his teacher – he is saddled with the silliest stories that cannot satisfy him, and that are all the more injurious when he some day does ascertain the truth. There are probably few children who have not made the discovery by the twelfth year of their age. In all small towns, in the country especially, children observe from earliest years the mating of birds, the copulation of domestic animals; they see this in closest proximity, in the yard, on the street, and when the cattle are turned loose. They see that the conditions under which the heat of the cattle is gratified, as well as the act of birth of the several domestic animals are made the subject of serious, thorough and undisguised discussion on the part of their parents, elder brothers and servants. All that awakens doubts in the child's mind on the accounts given him of his own entry into life. Finally the day of knowledge does come; but it comes in a way other than it would have come under a natural and rational education. The secret that the child discovers leads to estrangement between child and parents, particularly between child and mother. The reverse is obtained of that which was aimed at in folly and shortsightedness. He who recalls his own youth and that of his young companions knows what the results frequently are.

An American woman says, among other things in a work written by her, that wishing to answer the repeated questions of her eight-year-old son on his origin, and unwilling to saddle him with nursery tales, she disclosed the truth to him. The child listened to her with great attention, and, from the day that he learned what cares and pains he had caused his mother, he clung to her with a tenderness and reverence not noticed in him before, and showed the same reverence toward other women also.158 The authoress proceeds from the correct premises that only by means of a natural education can any real improvement – more respect and self-control on the part of the male toward the female sex – be expected. He who reasons free from prejudice will arrive at no other conclusion.

Whatever be the point of departure in the critique of our social conditions, the conclusion is ever the same – their radical transformation; thereby a radical transformation in the position of the sexes is inevitable. Woman, in order to arrive all the quicker at the goal, must look for allies whom, in the very nature of things, the movement of the working class steers in her direction. Since long has the class-conscious proletariat begun the storming of the fortress, the Class-State, which also upholds the present domination of one sex by the other. That fortress must be surrounded on all sides with trenches, and assailed to the point of surrender with artillery of all calibre. The besieging army finds its officers and munitions on all sides. Social and natural science, jointly with historical research, pedagogy, hygiene and statistics are advancing from all directions, and furnish ammunition and weapons to the movement. Nor does philosophy lag behind. In Mainlaender's "The Philosophy of Redemption,"159 it announces the near-at-hand realization of the "Ideal State."

The ultimate conquest of the Class-State and its transformation is rendered all the easier to us through the divisions in the ranks of its defenders, who, despite the oneness of their interests against the common enemy, are perpetually at war with one another in the strife for plunder. Further aid comes to us from the daily-growing mutiny in the ranks of the enemies, whose forces to a great extent are bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh – elements that, out of misunderstanding and misled, have hitherto fought against us and thus against themselves, but are gradually becoming clearsighted, and pass over to us. Finally we are aided by the desertion of the honorable elements from the ranks of the hitherto hostile men of thought, who have perceived the truth, and whose higher knowledge spurs them to leap their low class interests, and, following their ideal aspirations after justice, join the masses that are thirsting for freedom.

Many do not yet realize the stage of dissolution that State and Society are in. Hence, and although the dark blotches have been frequently pointed out in the preceding chapters, a separate treatment of the subject is requisite.

CHAPTER VI.

THE STATE AND SOCIETY

During the last few decades and in all countries of civilization, the economic life of society has assumed an uncommonly rapid pace of development, a development that every progress on any field of human activity adds swing to. Our social relations have thereby been thrown into a state of unrest, fermentation and dissolution never known before. The ruling classes no longer feel the ground safe under them, nor do existing institutions any longer possess the firmness requisite to breast the storm, that is approaching from all sides. A feeling of uneasiness, of insecurity and of dissatisfaction has seized upon all circles, high and low. The paroxysmal efforts put forth by the ruling classes to end this unbearable state of things by means of tinkering at the body social prove themselves vain and inadequate. The general sense of increasing insecurity, that comes from these failures, increases their uneasiness and discomfort. Hardly have they inserted a beam in the shape of some law into the rickety structure, than they discover ten other places where shoring is still more urgent. All along they are at perpetual strife among themselves and deeply rent by differences of opinion. What one set deems necessary, in order somewhat to calm and reconcile the increasingly discontented masses, the other considers as going too far, and unpardonable weakness and pliancy, only calculated to prick the longing after greater concessions. Striking evidences thereof are the debates in the 1894-5 sessions of the Reichstag, both on the floor of the house and in committee, on the so-called "revolutionary bill," as well as numerous other discussions in all parliaments. Within the ruling classes themselves there exist unbridgeable contrasts, and they sharpen the social conflicts.