The right to be lazy, and other studiesLafargue, Paul
Philosophy
The right to be lazy, and other studies
Lafargue, Paul
Hours of labor; Social problems; Socialism; Working class
etc., stated, discussed and solved the problems of the spiritualistic
philosophy and many others besides: yet the Hellenes of Asia Minor and
of Greece had emerged from barbarism only a few centuries before. Many
reasons may be cited to explain this arrest in human development, but
the principal one is the subjection of woman.
IV.
Capitalist production, which takes charge of most of the labors to
which woman devoted herself in the gentile house, has levied into its
army of wage-workers in factory, shop, office and schoolroom, the
wives and daughters of the working class and of the small bourgeoisie,
in order to procure cheap labor. Its pressing need of intellectual
capacities has set aside the venerable and venerated axiom of masculine
ethics: "to read, write and count ought to be all of a woman's
knowledge;" it has required that girls like boys be instructed in the
rudiments of the sciences. The first step once taken, they could not
be forbidden to enter the universities. They proved that the feminine
brain, which the intellectuals had declared a "child's brain," was as
capable as the masculine brain of receiving all scientific instruction.
The abstract sciences (mathematics, geometry, mechanics, etc.), the
first whose study had been accessible to woman, were also the first in
which they could give the measure of their intellectual capacities;
they are now attacking the experimental sciences (physiology, physics,
chemistry, applied mechanics, etc.), in America and Europe there arises
a throng of women who are marching on a level with men in spite of the
inferiority of the conditions of development in which they have lived
since their first infancy.
As Capitalism has not snatched woman from the domestic hearth and
launched her into social production to emancipate her, but to exploit
her more ferociously than man, so it has been careful not to overthrow
the economic, legal, political and moral barriers which had been raised
to seclude her in the marital dwelling. Woman, exploited by capital,
endures the miseries of the free laborer and bears in addition her
chains of the past. Her economic misery is aggravated; instead of being
supported by her father or husband, to whose rule she still submits,
she is obliged to earn her living; and under the pretext that she has
fewer necessities than man, her labor is paid less; and when her
daily toil in the shop, the office or school is ended, her labor in
the household begins. Motherhood, the sacred, the highest of social
functions, becomes in capitalistic society a cause of horrible misery,
economic and physiologic. The social and economic condition of woman is
a danger for the reproduction of the species.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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