Woman under socialism

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The individual is to develop himself fully. That must be the law of human association. Accordingly, the individual may not remain fettered to the soil on which the accident of birth first placed him. Men and the world should be known, not from books and papers only: personal observation, practical experience are also needed. Accordingly, future society must enable everyone to do what is now done by many, although in most instances it happens to-day under the whip that want cracks. The wish for change in all the relations of life is a craving strongly stamped in man. It springs from the instinct after perfection, inherent in all organic beings. The plant that stands in a dark room, stretches and strains, as though endowed with consciousness, towards the light that falls from some crevice. Just so with man. An instinct implanted in man, consequently a natural instinct, must be rationally gratified. The conditions of future society will not balk the instinct after change; on the contrary, they promote its gratification with all: it is facilitated by the highly developed system of intercommunication; it is demanded by international relations. In future days, infinitely more people will travel through the world, and for the most varied of purposes, than happens to-day.

In order to meet all demands, society furthermore requires an ample provision of all the necessaries of life. Society regulates its hours of work accordingly. It makes them longer or shorter, according as its needs or the season of the year may suggest. It may turn its strength at one season mainly to agriculture, at another mainly to industrial and similar production. It directs its labor forces as occasion may require. Through the combination of numerous forces, equipped with the best technical provisions, it can carry through with swiftness, aye, playingly, undertakings that to-day seem impossible.

As society assumes the care of its youth, so it does of its aged, sick or invalid members. It guards whoever, by whatever circumstance, has become unable to work. There is in this no question of charity, but of duty; not of an alms morsel, but of an assistance born of every possible consideration due him, who, during the time of his strength and ability to work, fulfilled his duties to the commonwealth. The setting sun of old age is beautiful with all that society can offer: everyone being buoyed up with the confidence that he will some day himself enjoy what now he affords to others. No longer are the aged now disturbed with the thought that others are awaiting their death in order to "inherit;" likewise has the fear vanished from the mind of man that, grown old and helpless, he will be cast off like a squeezed lemon. Man now feels himself left neither to the benevolence of his children, nor to the alms of the community. What the condition is in which most parents find themselves, who depend in old age upon the support of their children, is notorious. How demoralizing is not the effect of the hope of inheriting upon the children, and, in a still greater degree, upon relatives! What vile qualities are not awakened; and how many are not the crimes that such hopes have led to! – murder, forgery, perjury, extortion, etc. Capitalist society has no reason to be proud of its laws of inheritance; to them are ascribable part of the crimes that are committed every year; and yet the large majority of people have nothing to bequeath or to inherit.219

The moral and physical condition of future society; the nature of its work, homes, food, clothing, its social life – everything will greatly contribute to avoid accidents, sickness, debility. Natural death by the decline of the vigor of life will become the rule. The conviction that "heaven" is on earth, and that to be dead means to be ended, will cause people to lead rational lives.220 He enjoys most who enjoys longest. None know how to appreciate a long life better than the very clergy who prepare people for the "after world;" a life free from care makes it possible for these gentlemen to reach the highest age average.221

Life requires, first of all, food and drink. Friends of the so-called "natural way of living" often ask why is Socialism indifferent to vegetarianism. The question causes us to take up the subject in a few lines. Vegetarianism, that is, the doctrine that prescribes an exclusive vegetal diet, found its first supporters in such circles as are in the agreeable position of being able to choose between a vegetal and an animal diet. To the large majority of people there is no such choice: they are forced to live according to their means, the meagerness of which in many instances keeps them almost exclusively to a vegetal diet, and to the least nutritive, at that. With our working class population in Silesia, Saxony, Thuringen, etc., the potato is the principal nourishment; even bread comes in only secondarily; meat, and then only of poor quality, is hardly ever seen on the table. Even the largest part of the rural population, although they are the raisers of cattle, rarely partake of meat: they must sell the cattle in order to satisfy other pressing wants with the money obtained therefor.

For the innumerable people, who are compelled to live as vegetarians, an occasional solid beefsteak, or good leg of mutton, would be a decided improvement in the diet. When vegetarianism directs itself against the overrating of the nutrition contained in meat, it is right; it is wrong, however, when it combats the partaking of meat as harmful and fatal, mainly on sentimental grounds – such as "the nature of man forbids the killing of animals and to partake of a corpse." In order to live comfortably and undisturbed, we are compelled to declare war upon and destroy a large number of living beings in the shape of all manner of vermin; in order not to be ourselves eaten up, we must undertake the killing and extirpating of wild animals. The quiet toleration of those "good friends of man," the domestic animals, would increase the number of these "good friends" in a few decades so immensely that they would "devour" us by robbing us of food. Neither is the claim true that a vegetarian diet produces mildness of temperament. The "beast" was awakened even in the mild, vegetarian Hindoo when the severity of the Englishmen drove him to mutiny.

In our opinion Sonderegger hits the nail on the head when he says: "There is no order of rank in the matter of the different kinds of food; but there is an unalterable law in the matter of combining their several nutritious qualities." It is true that no one can nourish himself on an exclusively meat diet, but that he can on an exclusively vegetal diet, provided always he can select to suit; but neither would any one be satisfied with one vegetable, let it be the most nutritive. Beans, for instance, peas, lentils, in short, the leguminosae, are the most nutritive of all food. Nevertheless, to be forced to feed exclusively on them – which is said to be possible – were a torture. Karl Marx mentions in "Capital" that the Chilian mine-owners compel their workingmen to eat beans year in and year out, because the food imparts to them great strength and enables them to carry burdens that they could not carry with any other diet. Despite its nutrition, the workingmen turn against such food, but get none other, and are thus obliged to rest content therewith. Under no circumstances do the happiness and well-being of people depend upon a certain diet, as is claimed by the fanatics among the vegetarians. Climate, custom, individual tastes are the determining factors.

In the measure that civilization advances, a vegetal diet progressively takes the place of the exclusive meat diet, such as is indulged in by hunting and pastoral peoples. A many-sided agriculture is a sign of higher culture. On a given field, vegetal nutritive matter can be raised in larger quantities than could meat be obtained through cattle raising. This development imparts to vegetal nutrition an ever greater preponderance. The transportation of meat, that the modern vandalic economic system furnishes us with from foreign lands, especially from South America and Australia, has been very nearly exhausted within few decades. On the other hand, animals are raised, not merely for the sake of meat, but also for that of wool, hair, bristles, skin and hides, milk, eggs, etc., upon which many industries and human wants are dependent. Again offal of several kinds can be turned in no way to better advantage than through cattle raising. The seas will also in future be made to yield to man their wealth of animal food to a much larger extent than now. It will be in future a rare occurrence to see, as we do to-day, whole loads of fish turned to manure, because the facilities and costs of transportation, or the facilities of preservation prevent their being otherwise used. It follows that a purely vegetal diet is neither probable nor necessary in the future.

In the matter of food, quality rather than quantity is to be considered. Quantity is of little use if not good. Quality is greatly improved by the manner of preparation. The preparation of food must be conducted as scientifically as any other function, if it is to reach the highest point of utility possible. Knowledge and equipment are thereto requisite. That our women, upon whom to-day mainly devolves the preparation of food, do not and can not possess this knowledge, needs no proof. They lack all the necessary equipments therefor. As every well equipped hotel kitchen, the steam kitchen of barracks or of hospitals and especially the cooking expositions teach us, the cooking apparatuses, together with many technical arrangements for all manner of food preparation, have reached a high degree of perfection and have been contrived upon scientific principles. That will in the future be the rule. The object aimed at must be to obtain the best results with the smallest expenditure of power, time and material. The small private kitchen is, just like the workshop of the small master mechanic, a transition stage, an arrangement by which time, power and material are senselessly squandered and wasted. The preparation of food also will in future society be a social establishment, conducted on the most improved plane, in proper and advantageous manner. The private kitchen disappears, as it has now disappeared in the instance of those families who, although they generally provide themselves through their own kitchen, always resort to hotel kitchens or to those of caterers, the moment the question is to provide for banquets or to procure dishes a knowledge of which both they and their domestics lack.222

The Chicago Exposition of 1893 brought out a mass of interesting facts on the revolution that has taken place in the kitchen also, and in the preparation of food; – among other things a kitchen in which the heating and cooking was done wholly through electricity. Electricity not only furnished the light, but was also active in the washing of dishes, which thereupon required the aid of the human hand only in finishing up. In this kitchen of the future there was no hot air, no smoke, no vapors. Numberless apparatuses and subsidiary machinery performed a number of operations that until then had to be performed by human hands. This kitchen of the future resembled more a parlor than a kitchen that everyone who has nothing to do in, likes to stay away from. Work therein at the Chicago Exposition was pleasurable and free from all the unpleasantness that are features of the modern kitchen. Can a private kitchen be imagined even approximately equipped like that? And then, what a saving in all directions through such a central kitchen! Our women would seize the opportunity with both hands to exchange the present for the kitchen of the future.

The nutritive value of food is heightened by its facility of assimilation. This is a determining factor.223 A natural system of nourishment for all can be reached only by future society. Cato praises the Rome of before his days for having had experts in the art of healing, but, down to the sixth century of the city, no occupation for exclusive physicians. People lived so frugally and simply, that disease was rare, and death from old age was the usual form of decease. Not until gourmandizing and idleness – in short, license with some, want and excessive work with others – had permeated society, did matters change, and radically so. In future, gluttony and license will be impossible, and likewise want, misery and privation. There is enough, and an abundance, for all. More than fifty years ago Henrich Heine sang:

Why, there grows down here abundanceAnd a plentitude for all;Roses, myrtles, beauty and joy;Yes, and sugar beans withal —Aye, sugar beans in bursting podsFor everyone are here,But they're left to heaven's angelsAnd the sparrows of the air.

"He who eats little lives well" – that is, long, said the Italian Cornaro in the sixteenth century, as quoted by Niemeyer. In the end chemistry will be active in the preparation and improvement of nourishment to a degree thitherto unknown. To-day the science is greatly abused in the interest of adulterations and fraud. It is obvious that a chemically prepared food that has all the qualities of the natural product will accomplish the same purpose. The form of the preparation is of secondary importance, provided the product otherwise meets all requirements.

As in the kitchen, the revolution will be accomplished throughout domestic life: it will remove numberless details of work that must be attended to to-day. As in the future the domestic kitchen is rendered wholly superfluous by the central institutions for the preparation of food, so likewise are all the former troubles of keeping ranges, lamps, etc., in working order, removed by the central heating and electric apparatuses for lighting. Warm and cold water supplies place bathing within the reach of all at pleasure, and without the aid of any person. The central laundries assume the washing, drying, etc., of clothes; the central cleaning establishments see to the dusting, etc., of clothing and carpets. In Chicago, carpet-cleaning machines were exhibited that did the work in so short a time as to call forth the admiration of the ladies who visited the Exposition. The electric door opens at a slight pressure of the finger, and shuts of itself. Electric contrivances deliver letters and newspapers on all the floors of the houses; electric elevators save the climbing of stairs. The inside arrangement of the houses – floorings, garnishing of the walls, furnitures – will be contrived with an eye to the facility of cleaning and to the prevention of the gathering of dust and bacteria. Dust, sweepings and offal of all sorts will be carried by pipes out of the houses as water, that has been used, is carried off to-day. In the United States, in many a European city – Zurich, for instance – there are to-day tenements, exquisitely equipped, in which numerous affluent families – others could not bear the expense – live and enjoy a large part of the conveniences just sketched.

Here again we have an illustration of how capitalist society breaks the way in revolutionizing human affairs, in this instance in domestic life, – but only for its elect. Domestic life being thus radically transformed, the servant, this "slave of all the whims of the mistress," is no more, – and the mistress neither. "No servants, no culture!" cries the horrified Herr v. Treitschke with comic pathos. He can as little imagine society without servants as Aristotle could without slaves. The matter of surprise is that Herr v. Treitschke looks upon our servants as the "carriers of civilization." Treitschke, like Eugen Richter, is furthermore greatly worried by the shoe-polishing and clothes-dusting question, which neither is able to attend to personally. It so happens, however, that with nine-tenths of the people everyone sees to that himself, or the wife does for her husband, or a daughter or son for the family. We might answer that what the nine-tenths have hitherto done, the remnant tenth may also do. But there is another way out. Why should not in future society the youth of the land, without distinction of sex, be enlisted for such necessary work? Work does not dishonor, even if it consist in polishing boots. Many a member of the old nobility, and officers of the army at that, learned the lesson when, to escape their debts, they ran off to the United States, and there became servants, or shoe-polishers. Eugen Richter, in his pamphlets, goes even so far as to cause the downfall of the "Socialist Imperial Chancellor" on the "Shoe-polishing Question," and the consequent falling to pieces of the "Socialist State." The "Socialist Imperial Chancellor" refuses to polish his own shoes; hence his troubles. The bourgeoisie has hugely enjoyed this description of Richter, and it has thereby furnished evidence of the modesty of its demands upon a criticism of Socialism. But Eugen Richter lived to experience the sorrow of not only seeing one of his own party members in Nuerenberg invent a shoe-polishing machine soon after the appearance of that pamphlet, but of also learning that at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 an electric shoe-polishing machine was exhibited that did the work perfectly. Thus the principal objection, raised by Richter and Treitschke against Socialist society, has been practically thrown overboard by an invention made under the bourgeois social system itself.

The revolutionary transformation, that radically changes all the relations of man, especially the position of woman, is, as we see, going on now under our own eyes. It is only a question of time when society will take the process into its own hands and upon a large scale, thus quickening and perfecting the change and affording to all, without exception, the opportunity to share its innumerable advantages.

PART III

WOMAN IN THE FUTURE

This chapter can be condensed in few words. It only contains the conclusions that flow from what has been said, conclusions that the reader may draw for himself.

The woman of future society is socially and economically independent; she is no longer subject to even a vestige of dominion and exploitation; she is free, the peer of man, mistress of her lot. Her education is the same as that of man, with such exceptions as the difference of sex and sexual functions demand. Living under natural conditions, she is able to unfold and exercise her mental powers and faculties. She chooses her occupation on such field as corresponds with her wishes, inclinations and natural abilities, and she works under conditions identical with man's. Even if engaged as a practical working-woman on some field or other, at other times of the day she may be educator, teacher or nurse, at yet others she may exercise herself in art, or cultivate some branch of science, and at yet others may be filling some administrative function. She joins in studies, enjoyments or social intercourse with either her sisters or with men, – as she may please or occasion may serve.

In the choice of love, she is, like man, free and unhampered. She woos or is wooed, and closes the bond from no considerations other than her own inclinations. This bond is a private contract, celebrated without the intervention of any functionary – just as marriage was a private contract until deep in the Middle Ages. Socialism creates in this nothing new: it merely restores, at a higher level of civilization and under new social forms, that which prevailed at a more primitive social stage, and before private property began to rule society.

Under the proviso that he inflict injury upon none, the individual shall himself oversee the satisfaction of his own instincts. The satisfaction of the sexual instinct is as much a private concern as the satisfaction of any other natural instinct. None is therefor accountable to others, and no unsolicited judge may interfere. How I shall eat, how I shall drink, how I shall sleep, how I shall clothe myself, is my private affair, – exactly so my intercourse with a person of the opposite sex. Intelligence and culture, perfect individual freedom – qualities that become normal through the education and the conditions of future society – will guard everyone against the commission of acts that will redound to his injury. Self-training and the knowledge of their own being are possessions of the men and the women of future society to a degree much above the present. The simple circumstance that all bashful prudery and affectation of secrecy regarding natural matters will have vanished is a guarantee of a more natural intercourse of the sexes than that which prevails to-day. If incompatibility, disenchantment, or repulsion set in between two persons that have come together, morality commands that the unnatural, and therefore immoral, bond be dissolved. Seeing, moreover, that all the circumstances and conditions, which until then condemned large numbers of women to celibacy and to prostitution, will have vanished, man can no longer superimpose himself. On the other hand, the completely changed social conditions will have removed the numerous inconveniences that to-day affect married life, that often prevent its favorable unfolding, or that even render it wholly impossible.

The contradictions in and the unnatural features of the present position of woman are realized with ever increasing force in wide social circles. The sentiment finds lively utterance in the literature of the Social Question as well as in works of fiction, – often, it must be confessed, in wrongful manner. That the present form of marriage corresponds ever less with its purpose, no thinking person any longer denies. Thus is seen the phenomenon of the demand for freedom in the choice of love, and for the untrammeled dissolution of the marriage bond, when necessary, made by people who refuse to draw the requisite conclusions for the change of the present social system. They believe that the freedom of sexual intercourse must be asserted only in behalf of the privileged classes. In a polemic against Fanny Lewald's efforts in behalf of the emancipation of woman, Mathilde Reichhardt-Stromberg expresses herself this wise:

"If you (Fanny Lewald) claim the complete equality of woman with man in social and political life, George Sand also must be right in her struggles for emancipation, which aim no further than at what man has long been in undisputed possession of. Indeed, there is no reasonable ground for admitting the head and not the heart of woman to this equality, to give and to take as freely as man. On the contrary, if woman has by nature the right, and, consequently, also the duty – for we should not bury the talent bestowed upon us – of exerting her brain tissue to the utmost in the race with the intellectual Titans of the opposite sex, she must then have precisely the same right to preserve her equilibrium by quickening the circulation of her heart's blood in whatever way it may seem good to her. Do we not all read without the slightest moral indignation how Goethe – to begin with the greatest as an illustration – again and again wasted the warmth of his heart and the enthusiasm of his great soul on a different woman? Reasonable people regard this as perfectly natural by the very reason of the greatness of his soul, and the difficulty of satisfying it. Only the narrow-minded moralist stops to condemn his conduct. Why, then, deride the 'great souls' among women!.. Let us suppose that the whole female sex consisted of great souls like George Sand, that every woman were a Lucretia Floriani, whose children are all children of love and who brought up all these children with true motherly love and devotion, as well as with intelligence and good sense. What would become of the world? There can be no doubt that it could continue to exist and to progress, just as it does now; it might even feel exceptionally comfortable under the arrangement."224

Accordingly, Mathilde Reichhardt-Stromberg is of the opinion that, if every woman were a Lucretia Floriani, that is, a great soul like George Sand, who draws her own picture in Lucretia Floriani, they should be free for the "preservation of their equilibrium to quicken the circulation of their heart's blood in whatever way it may seem good to them." But why should that be the privilege of the "great souls" only, and not of the others also, who are no "great souls," and can be none? No such difference exists to us. If a Goethe and a George Sand – to take these two from the many who have acted and are acting like them – live according to the inclinations of their hearts – and about Goethe's love affairs whole libraries are published that are devoured by his male and female admirers in wrapt ecstasy – why condemn in others that, which done by a Goethe or a George Sand, becomes the subject of ecstatic admiration?