This is the great work of woman's emancipation; everything else compared
with it is non-essential. Through their failure to see this the present
representatives of women's rights are working against progress, though
they themselves apply the word reactionary to all who assert that the
only way by which the woman question as a whole can be solved is through
the social revolution. In this revolution protective legislation is an
important factor.
According to my method of thinking, and that of many others, not woman
but the mother is the most precious possession of the nation, so
precious that society advances its own highest well-being when it
protects the functions of the mother. These functions are not limited to
birth nor to the nourishment of the child; but they go on during the
whole time of its training. I believe that in the new society where all
women and men alike will be compelled to work (not children, not
invalids, and not the aged) people will regard the maternal function as
so important for the whole social order, that every mother under fixed
conditions, subject to certain control, during a certain period, and for
a certain number of children, will obtain from society an allowance for
education. She will receive this during the time in which her children
require all her care, while she herself is freed from work outside the
home. Naturally this does not exclude the case of mothers who from one
or another reason cannot devote themselves to the care and training of
their children; they can by their own productive work secure a
substitute. But for the majority of women, the proposal made above would
undoubtedly be the real solution of many problems which now seem
insoluble. I do not believe that social development will maintain the
old ideal of the father as the one who takes care of the family. I
hope, rather, that the new conception of having every individual look
after himself will gain more ground. The father will then be, in the
real sense of the word, the educator, when the care for the maintenance
of the family does not press him down to the ground. A woman will then,
as mother of the family, not be in dependence on the man,--a position
she feels as humiliating, if as a girl she earned her own living. People
are bound to return to this new form of matriarchy, when they begin to
consider care of the new generation, as the great business the mother
takes over for society. During its progress society must guarantee her
existence. In many cases, the answer of the married woman who works
outside the home would be as follows: That her happiness would consist
in quietly looking after her children, and in being able to keep house,
but that she must have an income that would make her independent of her
husband. A Swedish evening paper, the special organ of the feminist
movement, two years ago started an investigation on the productive work
of married women. The answers, contrary to the expectations of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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