Socialism; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women and socialism
Men who favor these endeavors of women within the scope of present
society, as well as the bourgeois women who are active in the
movement, consider complete civic equality of women the ultimate
goal. These men and women then differ radically from those who, in
their narrow-mindedness, oppose the movement. They differ radically
from those men who are actuated by petty motives of selfishness
and fear of competition, and therefore try to prevent women from
obtaining higher education and from gaining admission to the better
paid professions. But there is no difference of class between them,
such as exists between the worker and the capitalist.
If the bourgeois suffragists would achieve their aim and would bring
about equal rights for men and women, they would still fail to
abolish that sex slavery which marriage, in its present form, is to
countless numbers of women; they would fail to abolish prostitution;
they would fail to abolish the economic dependence of wives. To the
great majority of women it also remains a matter of indifference
whether a few thousand members of their sex, belonging to the more
favored classes of society, obtain higher learning and enter some
learned profession, or hold a public office. The general condition
of the sex as a whole is not altered thereby.
The female sex as such has a double yoke to bear. Firstly, women
suffer as a result of their social dependence upon men, and the
inferior position alloted to them in society; formal equality before
the law alleviates this condition, but does not remedy it. Secondly,
women suffer as a result of their economic dependence, which is the
lot of women in general, and especially of the proletarian women,
as it is of the proletarian men.
We see, then, that all women, regardless of their social position,
represent that sex which during the evolution of society has been
oppressed and wronged by the other sex, and therefore it is to the
common interest of all women to remove their disabilities by changing
the laws and institutions of the present state and social order.
But a great majority of women is furthermore deeply and personally
concerned in a complete reorganization of the present state and social
order which has for its purpose the abolition of wage-slavery, which
at present weighs most heavily upon the women of the proletariat, as
also the abolition of sex-slavery, which is closely connected with
our industrial conditions and our system of private ownership.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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