WHY WOMEN SHOULD BE SOCIALISTS
The Socialist Woman also stressed the special benefits that Socialism would bring women. Socialist women hoped that such an emphasis would recruit women and convince Socialist men that a large, untapped constituency eagerly awaited the Socialist message. Although the Socialist women believed that women were usually conservative, they also asserted that if properly approached, women would enter the Socialist party in large numbers. Women, they claimed, were natural Socialists, as was demonstrated by the large number of prominent feminists who were also socialists. In a leaflet which Anna Maley extolled as perfect for "the home-bound, church-bound woman," the Woman's National Committee published excerpts from Frances Willard's address at the National Convention of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1897. After expounding the theory of surplus value and advocating that "the entire plant of what we call civilization" be made "the common property of all the people," Willard exclaimed: "Oh, that I were young again, [socialism] would have my life! It is God's way out of the wilderness and into the promised land. It is the very marrow of Christ's gospel. It is Christianity applied." A similar pamphlet, "Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Socialism," quoted Stanton's denunciation of capitalism and praise for socialism as practical Christianity. Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of NAWSA's publication, The Woman's Journal, and Jessie Ashley, its financial agent, were socialists, as was celebrated novelist, economist, and journalist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Perhaps, The Socialist Woman suggested, the "antis" were correct that enfranchised women would inaugurate Socialism, for "one cannot exist without the other."[1] Conger-Kaneko, contemplating the incendiary tactics of English suffragists and ruminating on the cultural conservatism of many Socialist men, claimed that women, once mobilized, "are more revolutionary than men, who are often afraid to get away from precedent, even in their most radical moods. Women will ignore the laws set down by long-dead city or national fathers, step over them, break them--anything to go straight to the matter at hand, if it is sufficiently urgent."[2]
Many socialist women noted the similarity between the political demands of women's organizations and the immediate demands of the Socialist party, including the eight hour day for women, housing codes, municipal sanitation, pure food and milk, mothers' pensions, and the abolition of child labor. Conger-Kaneko enthused that "women are beginning to understand that politics reaches right down into the kitchen, and determines absolutely what they shall pay for bread and beefsteak." Many articles boasted of the progressive legislation enacted in the first suffrage states--legislation which benefitted everyone, not just women.[3] Barnet Braverman, a male editor of The Progressive Woman, said that in the eyes of women, "the right to live well and happily comes before profits. Manufacturers, business men and politicians know this is the shibboleth of the woman movement" and correctly equated feminism with social revolution. Braverman saw the women's movement as leading inevitably to Socialism in much the same way as conservative socialists believed that labor's gradual advance would inaugurate the Cooperative Commonwealth without violence or upheaval. "There isn't a municipal reform advocated by the party that has not had its origins in some woman's club.... These demands are being satisfied. The satisfaction of these demands is helping to create a new world. As soon as one demand is complied with, others take its place.... Some folks call this Socialism. That is what it is." The Socialist Woman therefore confidently proclaimed that many suffragists who had never heard of Karl Marx "are Socialists and do not know it."[4] Such women could be won for Socialism when they realized that they could not achieve their demands within the capitalist system.
Agnes Downing reminded feminists that they could achieve only token victories under capitalism. "The women movement is essentially a movement to bring the fullness of life to all mankind--to give to woman a fitting part in the shaping of our political destinies, that women and children, and men as well, may have a life as abundant as the advance of our civilization makes possible." Yet feminism alone could win merely the forms, not the realities, of the rights it sought. Women could theoretically own property, but few actually did; some enjoyed the vote, but women were imprisoned for dissident speech and radical political activity even in suffrage states; equal inheritance for boys and girls was meaningless when most had nothing to inherit. Freedom of love was a fine ideal, but "the rights of love and motherhood without economic protection would be an unbearable burden rather than a relief." Women had won the legal right to work at the trade of their choosing, but "a sad result of the right to enter any occupation" was more intensified and merciless exploitation. Women by themselves could not secure the fullness of life they demanded for themselves and all people because they could rely only on moral suasion. But the labor and socialist movements were backed by economic and political power. "The working class has the numbers, the skill, and the best interests of the race as a whole on its side. It must succeed. And when it does it will give to woman's demands living, soulful reality.... [including] new sex ideals that will make the shameful shambles of white slavery forever impossible and the neglected, fatherless children of the streets forever a thing of the past.... In short, the Socialist movement offers to the woman movement its opportunity [of] realizing itself."[5]
Some feminists argued that working women could transform the capitalist workplace into a repository of feminine virtues. Eleanor Hayes agreed with the assertion of a woman who had investigated working conditions that "business is business, remember that, whether you are a man or a woman; and if you get too busy shedding womanly influence, the chief finds it out." Hayes compared the capitalist social system to a raging river. Society threw men in, and watched with blithe unconcern as they were swept over the falls to their moral and physical deaths; it then cast women in after them in the delusory hope that the women would save both themselves and the men. However, not only could women not purify business; they were debased and degraded by it, and earned the leering contempt of the men with whom they worked. "As long as business life forces men to fight like wild beasts in a jungle for a chance to live, it will demoralize the men. And more, it will demoralize the women and children, and will eventually destroy society entirely."[6]
Parce likewise argued that a woman, cooperative rather than competitive by nature, could not influence an economy based upon capitalist and masculine principles without being "untrue to her character as a woman." She could not transform herself any more than she could revolutionize capitalist society. Women could never "succeed generally in competition against man in business, because they are always the mothers and their training and experience as mothers" stressed nurture and care rather than brutality and destruction. A social system based upon competition and selfishness inevitably debased all of its members, so women could not purify a politics controlled by capitalist imperatives and morals. Parce warned that women could win only minor reforms as long as "the property interest still overshadows the human interest." Parce warned her readers that as long as "masculinism" completely controlled the methods of production, "feminism" could not influence "any department of life.... Feminism in ideals cannot control life in opposition to masculinism in economics." According to Winnie Branstetter, therefore, only the Socialist woman's movement transcended the limits of both the labor and feminist movements and heralded the full emancipation of all people.[7]
Most Socialist women asserted that women suffered far more from the ravages of capitalism than did men, both on their own account and that of their children. Gertrude Hunt, a national organizer for the SP, asserted that "women need Socialism for the same reason that men need it, and for their own special reasons besides." Conger-Kaneko passionately argued that "women are all women under this system, and they are all subject to its tyranny.... Half of the wage earning class are women. A consciousness of their position in society is just as important to these women as it is to any man slave. An intensified class consciousness is almost necessary" because of "the triple enslavement, economic, political, and sexual," of women. Agnes Downing reminded her readers that any wife, no matter how well situated, could find herself catapulted into the abyss by the death of her husband, while a leader of the Chicago movement agreed that "the actual position of the most unfortunate and helpless woman, is the possible position of every woman."[8]
Socialist women appealed to women on the basis of their love of their children. The State Secretary of the Wisconsin SP said that only socialism could save any mother's son from wage slavery, "and her daughter from the more dreadful fate of the slave of a slave." Hunt also claimed that "women suffer even more acutely than men from all the evils of the present system.... [In a socialist society] children could not be exploited and their little lives ground into profit for some cotton mill king to throw to his dogs." A working-class mother's joy in her babies, another author asserted, was lessened by her knowledge of their probable fate. Socialist women, as many other activists of their time, argued for "social motherhood," the idea that every woman should concern herself with the welfare of all children, and the "maternal commonwealth," a society characterized by a mother's love and care for all people. Downing epitomized this approach in "A Plea to Mothers." Downing asserted that no mother could protect her own child if other children were endangered; disadvantaged children would infect the privileged with their diseases, bad habits, and sordid amusements. Helping one's own children while ignoring others was self-defeating. Sending any child into a contemporary city was "like pouring pure water into a mud hole. Our duty to our children is not in anything further we can do for them directly," but "in what we can do for the society into which we send them." Anna Maley admonished mothers that they failed their children if they consigned them to the world's "industrial and military slaughter pens." The Socialist Woman proclaimed that Socialism was "the only bright spot on the horizon of mother love today" because only Socialism could create a world fit for mothers and their children.[9]
Most importantly, the Socialist women proclaimed, Socialism would liberate women by giving them economic freedom and independence. Many socialist women claimed that only economic freedom and equality, in the home and on the job, could emancipate women, who required liberation from both their husbands and their employers. Maley summarized a common view when she said that "in demanding the ballot for women, we emphasize not sex lines but class lines. A majority of all women belong to the working class. It is not hard to make them see that economic dependence whether in the household or the shop, is the basis of the wrongs they suffer." Whitehead therefore claimed that Socialism "promised even more for woman than man." Conger-Kaneko agreed that "economic freedom for the wage slave and for the sex slave is offered in the Socialist program, and only in the Socialist program." Labor's and women's struggles both arose from the rise of capitalism and both could succeed only through Socialism. Conger-Kaneko averred that "in the United States no woman can be free until we have abolished wage slavery.... No woman living can secure her real freedom save through the victory of the working class." On another occasion she said that "the economic dependence of women, which, together with her ignorance, is the basis of her slavery, must be done away with. Socialism, which promises to give the means of life into the control of the people--all the people irrespective of sex--is the one hope for the economically dependent woman."[10]
Capitalism oppressed women in the home as well as in the factory because the capitalists mercilessly exploited women by denying them a living wage and subjecting them to hard and dangerous labor. Each woman therefore had to sell herself to a man, her husband, in order to live, and had no time or energy to nurture her children. Socialism, Conger-Kaneko said, would ensure that when a woman "goes out of the home to earn something for herself, she will be her own employer. She will then have the right to dictate, together with the whole people, the number of hours she shall work, and the amount of wages she shall receive." Most Socialist women agreed with Braverman that "sex slavery and economic servitude have always existed together" and that private property was the font of woman's oppression.[11] Most denied that the abolition of capitalism would automatically end woman's oppression, but did argue that Socialism was necessary for women's liberation. Socialism would provide meaningful employment outside the home for all women. In a socialist society, no capitalist would profit by dividing the workers against themselves, or threatening men with low-wage female labor. A cooperative society would ensure that every worker would enhance the common good, rather than threatening other workers with unemployment; this would eliminate male opposition to women's paid employment.
Socialist women perceived that the entire ethos of capitalism furthered the degradation of women. Capitalist values and assumptions infected all of society, making those who exploited others by controlling their labor and extracting surplus value the social ideal. Husbands exploited women at home just as capitalists oppressed working-class men at the factory. Patriarchal law, Parce said, "secures to the family or the husband all the product of the woman's toil, while she receives in return only enough of the necessities of life to keep her alive and working." Women were forced into the most dangerous, most difficult, and most degrading jobs outside the home, both replicating and reinforcing their role as unpaid drudge within the home. Eugene Debs made a similar point when he bitterly pointed out that capitalism "makes property the god that men worship, and says that woman shall have no property. Instead, she herself is counted as property."[12]
Capitalist values also ensured the under-valuation of women's work in the home. Women produced for use rather than for profit; and because capitalism apotheosized profit and denigrated production for use, women's labor was considered worthless by the capitalist standard of value. Although the wife performed more labor and produced more value than her husband, her labor remained unacknowledged because it was not sold on the market and did not enrich any capitalist exploiter. Instead, she turned raw materials (food, cloth) into finished products of direct use to her family. The housewife, Malkiel complained, "works the longest hours and gets the least renumeration.... The wages of the house drudge is death.... She never knows what slack or rest means, she never sees anything accomplished..... She goes through life without a ray of sunshine, without human sympathy.... She is the lowest on the ladder of exploitation." And just as the capitalist parasites falsely claimed that they benefitted workers by providing jobs, so the husband claimed that he supported his wife. "So long and so persistently has he assumed the air of benefactor, that she herself has come to consider him in that light."[13] The home, therefore, was capitalism in miniature, defined by the exploitation of labor, the hegemony of the oppressor over the oppressed, and a subterranean "sex struggle." Men, degraded by the capitalists on the job and in society, demanded a compensatory satisfaction in their lordship over women. "No matter how low a man sinks," one writer reminded her readers (in words equally applicable to race), "he has someone below him, a woman." The wage slave, Malkiel wryly remarked, "becomes the monarch of his small domain" when he returned from work. The Socialist Woman recognized that "giving up a car seat is a far easier thing than giving up the headship of a home."[14]
Furthering her argument that capitalism bolstered patriarchy, and that patriarchy provided essential support for capitalism, Conger-Kaneko anticipated theories propounded in the 1970s which perceived unpaid housework as a form of surplus value extracted by the capitalists. Many Socialist women argued that women's lower pay on the job strengthened capitalism by debasing the wages of men and destroying unions. Conger-Kaneko argued that the subordination of the women in the home similarly buttressed the capitalist system. "It has been said that the wife of a workingman is the slave of a slave," she thundered. "She is in reality the slave of the master for whom her husband works." Under chattel slavery, the master provided for the entire slave family, but capitalist masters paid the same wage to a married man with a family as to a single man. "The employer thus gets off a whole lot easier than he did when he owned slaves and was responsible for the physical welfare of the entire family." The married women, who worked without pay, was thus "the strongest bulwark to the present system, the factor that helps to pile up the riches in the hand of the capitalist employer. She is, indeed, one-half of a great class, whose toil costs the employer exactly nothing. Her husband receives the same amount after he marries her as he did before. He receives no more because children come."[15]
Married women, Conger-Kaneko continued, must look after themselves and their children "without the expenditure of an extra dollar on the part of the employer, or the state." The housewife kept her husband in working condition, allowing him to work long hours for low pay, so that the capitalist could confiscate most of his earnings. The housewife also bore and raised children for the capitalist slaughter-pens without costing the employers anything. Conger-Kaneko, like Malkiel, discerned similarities in the ideological distortions that buttressed capitalism and patriarchy. Capitalist ideology inverted reality by claiming that the capitalist parasites supported the workers by providing them with jobs. Similarly, patriarchal ideology propounded the lie that men supported their wives, when wives drudged at hard jobs for far longer than paid servants, and for less pay. Servants received some time off, and had money in their pockets at the end of the week, whereas the wife, who never finished her work, received (if she were lucky) a bare subsistence.[16]
Conger-Kaneko hoped that this argument would convince women and men that patriarchy was an essential underpinning of capitalism, and that the liberation of women would undermine capitalism. But she sometimes spoke directly to women in terms that incited "sex conflict" within the Socialist home. "You work all hours, at board wages," she told working-class wives. "That is, you get part of the food you cook, and live in the house you keep, and you can have a dress occasionally that you make. For working endless hours that your husband may be an efficient worker for his employer." Under the present system, "the married women of the working class must stand as the unpaid drudge of the wage slave, and the capitalist draws his millions in profits out of their debasement." The working-class wife toiled endlessly without pay so that the capitalist's wife could ride in an automobile without working at all; she risked death bearing more children than her family could raise, thus providing a reserve army of the unemployed and cannon fodder for the capitalists. "It is a very nice arrangement--for the employer. Not so very nice for your husband, and a slave's life for you." Wives must learn these lessons for themselves, she concluded; husbands' "ignorance and stupidity in some things is appalling."[17]
Socialist women not only related women's subordination in the home and their exploitation outside the home, but perceived that a woman's desperate need to attract a man warped her entire life and personality. In particular, capitalist patriarchy forced women to cultivate their sexuality at the expense of every other aspect of themselves. Women thus became mere sex objects. Marriage, like capitalism, was a competitive institution which pitted one victim against another for access to the means of sustenance--in this case, husbands. "So long as men prefer women who are a cross between a doll and an idiot," Conger-Kaneko indignantly declared, "the women who care most to retain the favor of men will try to be that cross and nothing more. Further, so long as women must depend on a sex relation for support, there will be the effort on their part to please men, to compete with each other for men's favor, no matter to what extremes of foolishness this competition may lead them."[18]
Parce similarly complained that although women did not create the system of sex relations, their lives depended upon their participation. "Let one try to withdraw from it and see what will happen to her. She will neither be asked to dance, nor spoken to at dinner and she will have to go home from prayer meeting alone." This was serious only because women depended on men for their survival. "When a woman is earning her own living by her human activities, it is a matter of comparatively little importance whether she is asked to dance or spoken to by men at dinner." Women's economic dependence on men reduced them to virtual slaves and playthings. "The ideal of self-effacement is taught to women from the cradle.... She will become the physical property of this other person, and render unlimited service to him, for no stated compensation," and considered this her glory. Whenever a man--potential husband or white slaver--asked for her, "she is found conveniently negative, passive, without any object of her own in life, without any interest outside of sex. All the man has to do is to carry her off." Socialist women complained that because women were assumed to have a man to support them, they received starvation wages for their work; because their pay was so low, they must attach themselves to a male breadwinner. Women were therefore not trained, either psychologically or vocationally, for careers, despite the fact that many women supported not only themselves but their children and their disabled husbands. Malkiel, sadly observing that women placed romantic relationships at the center of their lives, advised that every woman become "the real sovereign of her own being" and "part of the universe"; she should repudiate "the chivalry which worshipped her in poetry and degraded her in life."[19]
Socialist women further complained that even while men reduced women to sex objects, they polluted sex by lust, rape, and the veil of shame they cast over it. Men identified women exclusively with sex, and then degraded sex by declaring it unclean. Elsa Untermann declared that "man introduced the first conception of uncleanliness into sex matters" in order to dethrone women, who ruled by virtue of their sex. Eleanor Wentworth concurred: men declared the mere discussion of sexual matters illegal because open discussion would disgrace men and their habits. "We are afraid to discuss the reproductive powers, the most vital of the race--because we have used them unnaturally, which means immorally." When women again controlled sexual relations, the entire meaning of sexuality would change. "Instead of being ashamed of these powers and treating them like family skeletons, we will stand erect and proud in the knowledge that we control them and direct them in a manner productive of a strong race, physically, morally, and intellectually."[20]
So terribly had men debased sex and marriage that many Socialist women and their male sympathizers compared "respectable" women to their despised and unfortunate sisters, the prostitutes. Ben Hanford, the SP's candidate for Vice-President in 1904 and 1908, reiterated a common belief when he asserted that even relatively privileged women were "forced to sell themselves in the marriage market even as their prostitute sisters sell themselves in the public market." Braverman reminded women that socialism and feminism both championed the right of women to live well from the fruits of their own labor "at or away from home." Socialism did not envision "a world wherein woman would be forced to marry for a home or compelled by poverty to stay in it if she be mistreated." Women, Braverman lamented, were forced by economic necessity and the hypocritical double standard to abdicate their sense of morality within their own families. Their inability to earn a living wage was itself a form of violence, which reinforced violence within the home; but "socialism declares that both men and women should be economically independent." Both feminism and socialism aimed to "abolish sex slavery in the marriage relation, industrial slavery, political slavery." Socialism, another writer agreed, would make women "neither his slave nor his doll, but his comrade; not the housekeeper for him, but the home-builder with him."[21]
The Socialist women declared that socialism would ameliorate most of the evils which afflicted their sex. Conger-Kaneko admitted that some men could achieve their goals individually, without the transformation of society, but asserted that "women have immediate personal needs that can only be solved through Socialism. The very root and fiber of their needs run deep into the working-class movement. For this reason women, once aroused, are intensely class conscious and make the best workers in the movement." Professional women likewise might achieve some personal freedom under capitalism, but working-class women found that employment outside the home merely intensified their oppression. The double burden of maintaining a home and working outside of it was "a killing and demoralizing" task. Conger-Kaneko averred that although "marriage and motherhood may be a blessing and a delight to the economically free woman, to her who is a small wage earner they are too frequently a curse. The health destroying and soul killing pace that she must keep up renders her unfit for wifehood or motherhood."[22] Socialist women asserted that slave women made bad mothers; care for the future could not be safely left to slaves. Echoing arguments originating in the era of "Republican Motherhood" in the Revolutionary era, Socialist women declared that mothers must themselves be full, vibrant persons if they were to educate their children for democratic self-government, citizenship, and socially cooperative endeavor. The entire quality of civilization depended upon the quality of the mothers of the race.
The Socialist women also declared that the Socialist party offered immediate and concrete benefits to women in the present, before the advent of socialism. Socialist women asserted that the SP was the only party which demanded full rights for women. Moreover, Socialist women said, women could exercise political power within the SP in the present; they could hold party office, run for office on the SP ticket, help formulate party policies, and participate in party affairs on terms of equality with men. Stern told women that "the Socialist parties of all countries form the greatest suffrage organization of the world; the greatest power for women's equality." Maud Thompson, in a rare article asserting that the SP was a class-based party offering nothing to women qua women, nevertheless reiterated a common theme when she said that in the Socialist party women fought alongside of men, "not against them, for our emancipation.... [We] fight for our emancipation while fighting for the greater freedom.... In the Socialist party we women strike a blow for human freedom with every blow we strike for our own enfranchisement."[23] Mary Garbutt claimed that Socialism could immediately transform the lives of its adherents, before its victory at the polls. Socialism would vivify the life of the housewife, fostering hope and self-expression, transmuting drudgery into meaningful work, enlarging her horizons, and encouraging her to mingle with her neighbors. A Socialist housewife spent fewer hours on inessential housework because she devoted her heart and soul to spreading Socialism, whose message flooded her heart with new values and purpose and expanded her sense of life's possibilities. Garbutt described the psychological liberation that accompanied conversion to Socialism in terms of religious ecstasy.
She is no longer a household drudge. Life is no longer purposeless. It is rich with meaning. She is master where before she was enslaved. The conditions of her work-a-day world have completely changed.... Listen to the message that will eventually lead to your emancipation, and while working for its realization, will so transform your being from within that you will lose the sense of drudgery in your devotion to a great human cause that will do away with all drudgery.[24]
In addition to these general considerations, Socialist women analyzed in detail the specific issues which particularly concerned women--prostitution, the industrial mass murder of women and children, drunkenness, and militarism and war. In discussing each of these problems, Socialist women highlighted their particular salience to women, asserted the impossibility of solving them within the confines of capitalism, and pointed to Socialism as the only permanent solution.
The Socialist Woman, in conclusion, propounded a convincing array of reasons why women of all classes should be Socialists. Women and children suffered more even than men under capitalism, as was reflected in the similarities between the demands of women's organizations and those of the SP. The home, indeed, was capitalism in miniature--the locus of oppression of wives who were exploited by both their husbands and the capitalists. Capitalism victimized women and children on the job as well, and its exploitation further endangered women because oppressed men displaced their anger at their bosses unto their families. In winning women for Socialism, the Socialist women attacked mainly capitalism and class society; of necessity, however, they somewhat reluctantly assailed men as a gender as well.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] The Willard and Stanton pamphlets were printed in The Socialist Woman in December and April 1908. For the others, see the editorial in the February 1912 PW. Editorials, PW April 1910; Anna Maley, "Work of Women in the West," PW, July 1911.
[2] JCK, Editorials, PW January 1910.
[3] JCK, "In This Our World," PW December 1912; "In Wyoming" and "Equal Suffrage in Colorado," PW May 1910; "Facts Stronger than Theory," PW September 1910. The benefits for women included ownership of her own wages, equal pay for equal work (especially for teachers), equality in inheritance, greater professional opportunities, equal guardianship of children, and juvenile courts and probation officers. Surprisingly, they also included "the American flag on schoolhouses" and the prohibition of indecent exhibitions.
[4] Barnet Braverman, "Things in the Making," CN March 1914; Braverman, "Things in the Making," CN April 1914; "Are We To Be Long and Talk and Short on Action," PW April 1913. JCK brought in Barnet Braverman, a strongly feminist man, as associate editor late in the career of The Progressive Woman. He then became editor of The Coming Nation (JCK remained publisher). Floyd Dell also became literary editor of The Progressive Woman until he left Chicago. JCK may have intended this increased male presence to deflect male Socialist criticism of the magazine's strident feminism, or she may have wanted to make her publication a more general interest magazine.
[5] Downing, "The Message of Socialism to the Woman Movement," CN March 1914. I have corrected a grammatical error.
[6] Haynes, "The Influence of Women on Business," SW January 1908.
[7] Parce, "Woman's Place in Politics: Its Basis," parts I and II, PW January and February 1912; Parce, "The Dangers of Excessive Masculinism," SW July 1908; Branstetter, "For Socialist Locals," PW November 1911.
[8] Hunt, "Socialist Women in the Garrick Theatre," SW June 1908; JCK, "Socialist Women and Class Consciousness," SW June 1908; Downing, "A Plea to Mothers," SW November 1908; Corinne Brown, "Votes for Women," SW February 1908; JCK, "A Capitalist Crime Against Womankind," SW June 1907.
[9] E.H. Thomas and Hunt, "Why Women Should Be Socialists," SW June 1907; Downing, "A Plea to Mothers," SW November 1908; Maley, "Woman's Enfranchisement," PW February 1911; blurb, PW March 1911; Georgia Kotsch, "The Sanitary Baby," PW December 1910.
[10] Maley, "To the Women's Committees," PW April 1910; Whitehead, "Women's Socialist Union of San Francisco," PW January 1910; JCK, "The Progressive Woman," PW April 1910, "Socialist Women and Class Consciousness," SW June 1908, "Socialism and the Sex War," PW August 1909.
[11] JCK, "Sex Subjection," SW August 1907; Braverman, "Things in the Making," PW May 1913.
[12] Parce, "'From Status to Contract,'" SW March 1908; Debs, "Woman--Comrade and Equal," PW November 1909.
[13] Malkiel, "The Lowest Paid Workers," SW September 1908.
[14] Grace Brown, "Why Women Should Organize," SW July 1907; Malkiel, "The Lowest Paid Workers," SW September 1908.
[15] JCK, "The Woman Pays the Price," CN March 1914, "Does a Woman Support Her Husband's Employer?,' PW August 1913, and "Who Supports Who?," PW May 1913.
[16] JCK, "Who Supports Who?," PW May 1913 and "Does a Woman Support Her Husband's Employer?," PW August 1913.
[17] JCK, "Does a Woman Support Her Husband's Employer?," PW August 1913 and "Who Supports Who?," PW May 1913. Some passages in the first article are capitalized in the original for emphasis, and I have corrected a grammatical error in another passage.
[18] JCK, "Are Men or Women Most Enslaved?", SW July 1908.
[19] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW October 1909; Malkiel, "The Tragedy of Human Passion," PW July 1909.
[20] Untermann, "The Mitigator, II" PW June 1910; Wentworth, "The Modern Woman's Viewpoint," PW April 1912.
[21] Hanford, in "Socialist Women in the Garrick Theatre," SW June 1908; Braverman, "The Common Aim of Socialism and Feminism," PW March 1914; May Strickland, "Woman Suffrage a Means to an End," PW April 1909.
[22] JCK, "Socialist Women and Class Consciousness," SW June 1908 and "Machinery Makes New Woman with New Matrimonial Ideals," SW December 1907.
[23] Stern, "Women of Other Lands," PW May 1913; Maud Thompson, "Suffrage and Socialism," PW May 1913; Lewis, "The Socialist Party Organization," SW July 1911.
[24] Garbutt, "The Message of Socialism to the Household Drudge," PW May 1913. For a similar statement, see Hebe, "The Nameless Ones, January 1909, and TM, "My Sisters in Toil," SW, July 1908.
Many socialist women noted the similarity between the political demands of women's organizations and the immediate demands of the Socialist party, including the eight hour day for women, housing codes, municipal sanitation, pure food and milk, mothers' pensions, and the abolition of child labor. Conger-Kaneko enthused that "women are beginning to understand that politics reaches right down into the kitchen, and determines absolutely what they shall pay for bread and beefsteak." Many articles boasted of the progressive legislation enacted in the first suffrage states--legislation which benefitted everyone, not just women.[3] Barnet Braverman, a male editor of The Progressive Woman, said that in the eyes of women, "the right to live well and happily comes before profits. Manufacturers, business men and politicians know this is the shibboleth of the woman movement" and correctly equated feminism with social revolution. Braverman saw the women's movement as leading inevitably to Socialism in much the same way as conservative socialists believed that labor's gradual advance would inaugurate the Cooperative Commonwealth without violence or upheaval. "There isn't a municipal reform advocated by the party that has not had its origins in some woman's club.... These demands are being satisfied. The satisfaction of these demands is helping to create a new world. As soon as one demand is complied with, others take its place.... Some folks call this Socialism. That is what it is." The Socialist Woman therefore confidently proclaimed that many suffragists who had never heard of Karl Marx "are Socialists and do not know it."[4] Such women could be won for Socialism when they realized that they could not achieve their demands within the capitalist system.
Agnes Downing reminded feminists that they could achieve only token victories under capitalism. "The women movement is essentially a movement to bring the fullness of life to all mankind--to give to woman a fitting part in the shaping of our political destinies, that women and children, and men as well, may have a life as abundant as the advance of our civilization makes possible." Yet feminism alone could win merely the forms, not the realities, of the rights it sought. Women could theoretically own property, but few actually did; some enjoyed the vote, but women were imprisoned for dissident speech and radical political activity even in suffrage states; equal inheritance for boys and girls was meaningless when most had nothing to inherit. Freedom of love was a fine ideal, but "the rights of love and motherhood without economic protection would be an unbearable burden rather than a relief." Women had won the legal right to work at the trade of their choosing, but "a sad result of the right to enter any occupation" was more intensified and merciless exploitation. Women by themselves could not secure the fullness of life they demanded for themselves and all people because they could rely only on moral suasion. But the labor and socialist movements were backed by economic and political power. "The working class has the numbers, the skill, and the best interests of the race as a whole on its side. It must succeed. And when it does it will give to woman's demands living, soulful reality.... [including] new sex ideals that will make the shameful shambles of white slavery forever impossible and the neglected, fatherless children of the streets forever a thing of the past.... In short, the Socialist movement offers to the woman movement its opportunity [of] realizing itself."[5]
Some feminists argued that working women could transform the capitalist workplace into a repository of feminine virtues. Eleanor Hayes agreed with the assertion of a woman who had investigated working conditions that "business is business, remember that, whether you are a man or a woman; and if you get too busy shedding womanly influence, the chief finds it out." Hayes compared the capitalist social system to a raging river. Society threw men in, and watched with blithe unconcern as they were swept over the falls to their moral and physical deaths; it then cast women in after them in the delusory hope that the women would save both themselves and the men. However, not only could women not purify business; they were debased and degraded by it, and earned the leering contempt of the men with whom they worked. "As long as business life forces men to fight like wild beasts in a jungle for a chance to live, it will demoralize the men. And more, it will demoralize the women and children, and will eventually destroy society entirely."[6]
Parce likewise argued that a woman, cooperative rather than competitive by nature, could not influence an economy based upon capitalist and masculine principles without being "untrue to her character as a woman." She could not transform herself any more than she could revolutionize capitalist society. Women could never "succeed generally in competition against man in business, because they are always the mothers and their training and experience as mothers" stressed nurture and care rather than brutality and destruction. A social system based upon competition and selfishness inevitably debased all of its members, so women could not purify a politics controlled by capitalist imperatives and morals. Parce warned that women could win only minor reforms as long as "the property interest still overshadows the human interest." Parce warned her readers that as long as "masculinism" completely controlled the methods of production, "feminism" could not influence "any department of life.... Feminism in ideals cannot control life in opposition to masculinism in economics." According to Winnie Branstetter, therefore, only the Socialist woman's movement transcended the limits of both the labor and feminist movements and heralded the full emancipation of all people.[7]
Most Socialist women asserted that women suffered far more from the ravages of capitalism than did men, both on their own account and that of their children. Gertrude Hunt, a national organizer for the SP, asserted that "women need Socialism for the same reason that men need it, and for their own special reasons besides." Conger-Kaneko passionately argued that "women are all women under this system, and they are all subject to its tyranny.... Half of the wage earning class are women. A consciousness of their position in society is just as important to these women as it is to any man slave. An intensified class consciousness is almost necessary" because of "the triple enslavement, economic, political, and sexual," of women. Agnes Downing reminded her readers that any wife, no matter how well situated, could find herself catapulted into the abyss by the death of her husband, while a leader of the Chicago movement agreed that "the actual position of the most unfortunate and helpless woman, is the possible position of every woman."[8]
Socialist women appealed to women on the basis of their love of their children. The State Secretary of the Wisconsin SP said that only socialism could save any mother's son from wage slavery, "and her daughter from the more dreadful fate of the slave of a slave." Hunt also claimed that "women suffer even more acutely than men from all the evils of the present system.... [In a socialist society] children could not be exploited and their little lives ground into profit for some cotton mill king to throw to his dogs." A working-class mother's joy in her babies, another author asserted, was lessened by her knowledge of their probable fate. Socialist women, as many other activists of their time, argued for "social motherhood," the idea that every woman should concern herself with the welfare of all children, and the "maternal commonwealth," a society characterized by a mother's love and care for all people. Downing epitomized this approach in "A Plea to Mothers." Downing asserted that no mother could protect her own child if other children were endangered; disadvantaged children would infect the privileged with their diseases, bad habits, and sordid amusements. Helping one's own children while ignoring others was self-defeating. Sending any child into a contemporary city was "like pouring pure water into a mud hole. Our duty to our children is not in anything further we can do for them directly," but "in what we can do for the society into which we send them." Anna Maley admonished mothers that they failed their children if they consigned them to the world's "industrial and military slaughter pens." The Socialist Woman proclaimed that Socialism was "the only bright spot on the horizon of mother love today" because only Socialism could create a world fit for mothers and their children.[9]
Most importantly, the Socialist women proclaimed, Socialism would liberate women by giving them economic freedom and independence. Many socialist women claimed that only economic freedom and equality, in the home and on the job, could emancipate women, who required liberation from both their husbands and their employers. Maley summarized a common view when she said that "in demanding the ballot for women, we emphasize not sex lines but class lines. A majority of all women belong to the working class. It is not hard to make them see that economic dependence whether in the household or the shop, is the basis of the wrongs they suffer." Whitehead therefore claimed that Socialism "promised even more for woman than man." Conger-Kaneko agreed that "economic freedom for the wage slave and for the sex slave is offered in the Socialist program, and only in the Socialist program." Labor's and women's struggles both arose from the rise of capitalism and both could succeed only through Socialism. Conger-Kaneko averred that "in the United States no woman can be free until we have abolished wage slavery.... No woman living can secure her real freedom save through the victory of the working class." On another occasion she said that "the economic dependence of women, which, together with her ignorance, is the basis of her slavery, must be done away with. Socialism, which promises to give the means of life into the control of the people--all the people irrespective of sex--is the one hope for the economically dependent woman."[10]
Capitalism oppressed women in the home as well as in the factory because the capitalists mercilessly exploited women by denying them a living wage and subjecting them to hard and dangerous labor. Each woman therefore had to sell herself to a man, her husband, in order to live, and had no time or energy to nurture her children. Socialism, Conger-Kaneko said, would ensure that when a woman "goes out of the home to earn something for herself, she will be her own employer. She will then have the right to dictate, together with the whole people, the number of hours she shall work, and the amount of wages she shall receive." Most Socialist women agreed with Braverman that "sex slavery and economic servitude have always existed together" and that private property was the font of woman's oppression.[11] Most denied that the abolition of capitalism would automatically end woman's oppression, but did argue that Socialism was necessary for women's liberation. Socialism would provide meaningful employment outside the home for all women. In a socialist society, no capitalist would profit by dividing the workers against themselves, or threatening men with low-wage female labor. A cooperative society would ensure that every worker would enhance the common good, rather than threatening other workers with unemployment; this would eliminate male opposition to women's paid employment.
Socialist women perceived that the entire ethos of capitalism furthered the degradation of women. Capitalist values and assumptions infected all of society, making those who exploited others by controlling their labor and extracting surplus value the social ideal. Husbands exploited women at home just as capitalists oppressed working-class men at the factory. Patriarchal law, Parce said, "secures to the family or the husband all the product of the woman's toil, while she receives in return only enough of the necessities of life to keep her alive and working." Women were forced into the most dangerous, most difficult, and most degrading jobs outside the home, both replicating and reinforcing their role as unpaid drudge within the home. Eugene Debs made a similar point when he bitterly pointed out that capitalism "makes property the god that men worship, and says that woman shall have no property. Instead, she herself is counted as property."[12]
Capitalist values also ensured the under-valuation of women's work in the home. Women produced for use rather than for profit; and because capitalism apotheosized profit and denigrated production for use, women's labor was considered worthless by the capitalist standard of value. Although the wife performed more labor and produced more value than her husband, her labor remained unacknowledged because it was not sold on the market and did not enrich any capitalist exploiter. Instead, she turned raw materials (food, cloth) into finished products of direct use to her family. The housewife, Malkiel complained, "works the longest hours and gets the least renumeration.... The wages of the house drudge is death.... She never knows what slack or rest means, she never sees anything accomplished..... She goes through life without a ray of sunshine, without human sympathy.... She is the lowest on the ladder of exploitation." And just as the capitalist parasites falsely claimed that they benefitted workers by providing jobs, so the husband claimed that he supported his wife. "So long and so persistently has he assumed the air of benefactor, that she herself has come to consider him in that light."[13] The home, therefore, was capitalism in miniature, defined by the exploitation of labor, the hegemony of the oppressor over the oppressed, and a subterranean "sex struggle." Men, degraded by the capitalists on the job and in society, demanded a compensatory satisfaction in their lordship over women. "No matter how low a man sinks," one writer reminded her readers (in words equally applicable to race), "he has someone below him, a woman." The wage slave, Malkiel wryly remarked, "becomes the monarch of his small domain" when he returned from work. The Socialist Woman recognized that "giving up a car seat is a far easier thing than giving up the headship of a home."[14]
Furthering her argument that capitalism bolstered patriarchy, and that patriarchy provided essential support for capitalism, Conger-Kaneko anticipated theories propounded in the 1970s which perceived unpaid housework as a form of surplus value extracted by the capitalists. Many Socialist women argued that women's lower pay on the job strengthened capitalism by debasing the wages of men and destroying unions. Conger-Kaneko argued that the subordination of the women in the home similarly buttressed the capitalist system. "It has been said that the wife of a workingman is the slave of a slave," she thundered. "She is in reality the slave of the master for whom her husband works." Under chattel slavery, the master provided for the entire slave family, but capitalist masters paid the same wage to a married man with a family as to a single man. "The employer thus gets off a whole lot easier than he did when he owned slaves and was responsible for the physical welfare of the entire family." The married women, who worked without pay, was thus "the strongest bulwark to the present system, the factor that helps to pile up the riches in the hand of the capitalist employer. She is, indeed, one-half of a great class, whose toil costs the employer exactly nothing. Her husband receives the same amount after he marries her as he did before. He receives no more because children come."[15]
Married women, Conger-Kaneko continued, must look after themselves and their children "without the expenditure of an extra dollar on the part of the employer, or the state." The housewife kept her husband in working condition, allowing him to work long hours for low pay, so that the capitalist could confiscate most of his earnings. The housewife also bore and raised children for the capitalist slaughter-pens without costing the employers anything. Conger-Kaneko, like Malkiel, discerned similarities in the ideological distortions that buttressed capitalism and patriarchy. Capitalist ideology inverted reality by claiming that the capitalist parasites supported the workers by providing them with jobs. Similarly, patriarchal ideology propounded the lie that men supported their wives, when wives drudged at hard jobs for far longer than paid servants, and for less pay. Servants received some time off, and had money in their pockets at the end of the week, whereas the wife, who never finished her work, received (if she were lucky) a bare subsistence.[16]
Conger-Kaneko hoped that this argument would convince women and men that patriarchy was an essential underpinning of capitalism, and that the liberation of women would undermine capitalism. But she sometimes spoke directly to women in terms that incited "sex conflict" within the Socialist home. "You work all hours, at board wages," she told working-class wives. "That is, you get part of the food you cook, and live in the house you keep, and you can have a dress occasionally that you make. For working endless hours that your husband may be an efficient worker for his employer." Under the present system, "the married women of the working class must stand as the unpaid drudge of the wage slave, and the capitalist draws his millions in profits out of their debasement." The working-class wife toiled endlessly without pay so that the capitalist's wife could ride in an automobile without working at all; she risked death bearing more children than her family could raise, thus providing a reserve army of the unemployed and cannon fodder for the capitalists. "It is a very nice arrangement--for the employer. Not so very nice for your husband, and a slave's life for you." Wives must learn these lessons for themselves, she concluded; husbands' "ignorance and stupidity in some things is appalling."[17]
Socialist women not only related women's subordination in the home and their exploitation outside the home, but perceived that a woman's desperate need to attract a man warped her entire life and personality. In particular, capitalist patriarchy forced women to cultivate their sexuality at the expense of every other aspect of themselves. Women thus became mere sex objects. Marriage, like capitalism, was a competitive institution which pitted one victim against another for access to the means of sustenance--in this case, husbands. "So long as men prefer women who are a cross between a doll and an idiot," Conger-Kaneko indignantly declared, "the women who care most to retain the favor of men will try to be that cross and nothing more. Further, so long as women must depend on a sex relation for support, there will be the effort on their part to please men, to compete with each other for men's favor, no matter to what extremes of foolishness this competition may lead them."[18]
Parce similarly complained that although women did not create the system of sex relations, their lives depended upon their participation. "Let one try to withdraw from it and see what will happen to her. She will neither be asked to dance, nor spoken to at dinner and she will have to go home from prayer meeting alone." This was serious only because women depended on men for their survival. "When a woman is earning her own living by her human activities, it is a matter of comparatively little importance whether she is asked to dance or spoken to by men at dinner." Women's economic dependence on men reduced them to virtual slaves and playthings. "The ideal of self-effacement is taught to women from the cradle.... She will become the physical property of this other person, and render unlimited service to him, for no stated compensation," and considered this her glory. Whenever a man--potential husband or white slaver--asked for her, "she is found conveniently negative, passive, without any object of her own in life, without any interest outside of sex. All the man has to do is to carry her off." Socialist women complained that because women were assumed to have a man to support them, they received starvation wages for their work; because their pay was so low, they must attach themselves to a male breadwinner. Women were therefore not trained, either psychologically or vocationally, for careers, despite the fact that many women supported not only themselves but their children and their disabled husbands. Malkiel, sadly observing that women placed romantic relationships at the center of their lives, advised that every woman become "the real sovereign of her own being" and "part of the universe"; she should repudiate "the chivalry which worshipped her in poetry and degraded her in life."[19]
Socialist women further complained that even while men reduced women to sex objects, they polluted sex by lust, rape, and the veil of shame they cast over it. Men identified women exclusively with sex, and then degraded sex by declaring it unclean. Elsa Untermann declared that "man introduced the first conception of uncleanliness into sex matters" in order to dethrone women, who ruled by virtue of their sex. Eleanor Wentworth concurred: men declared the mere discussion of sexual matters illegal because open discussion would disgrace men and their habits. "We are afraid to discuss the reproductive powers, the most vital of the race--because we have used them unnaturally, which means immorally." When women again controlled sexual relations, the entire meaning of sexuality would change. "Instead of being ashamed of these powers and treating them like family skeletons, we will stand erect and proud in the knowledge that we control them and direct them in a manner productive of a strong race, physically, morally, and intellectually."[20]
So terribly had men debased sex and marriage that many Socialist women and their male sympathizers compared "respectable" women to their despised and unfortunate sisters, the prostitutes. Ben Hanford, the SP's candidate for Vice-President in 1904 and 1908, reiterated a common belief when he asserted that even relatively privileged women were "forced to sell themselves in the marriage market even as their prostitute sisters sell themselves in the public market." Braverman reminded women that socialism and feminism both championed the right of women to live well from the fruits of their own labor "at or away from home." Socialism did not envision "a world wherein woman would be forced to marry for a home or compelled by poverty to stay in it if she be mistreated." Women, Braverman lamented, were forced by economic necessity and the hypocritical double standard to abdicate their sense of morality within their own families. Their inability to earn a living wage was itself a form of violence, which reinforced violence within the home; but "socialism declares that both men and women should be economically independent." Both feminism and socialism aimed to "abolish sex slavery in the marriage relation, industrial slavery, political slavery." Socialism, another writer agreed, would make women "neither his slave nor his doll, but his comrade; not the housekeeper for him, but the home-builder with him."[21]
The Socialist women declared that socialism would ameliorate most of the evils which afflicted their sex. Conger-Kaneko admitted that some men could achieve their goals individually, without the transformation of society, but asserted that "women have immediate personal needs that can only be solved through Socialism. The very root and fiber of their needs run deep into the working-class movement. For this reason women, once aroused, are intensely class conscious and make the best workers in the movement." Professional women likewise might achieve some personal freedom under capitalism, but working-class women found that employment outside the home merely intensified their oppression. The double burden of maintaining a home and working outside of it was "a killing and demoralizing" task. Conger-Kaneko averred that although "marriage and motherhood may be a blessing and a delight to the economically free woman, to her who is a small wage earner they are too frequently a curse. The health destroying and soul killing pace that she must keep up renders her unfit for wifehood or motherhood."[22] Socialist women asserted that slave women made bad mothers; care for the future could not be safely left to slaves. Echoing arguments originating in the era of "Republican Motherhood" in the Revolutionary era, Socialist women declared that mothers must themselves be full, vibrant persons if they were to educate their children for democratic self-government, citizenship, and socially cooperative endeavor. The entire quality of civilization depended upon the quality of the mothers of the race.
The Socialist women also declared that the Socialist party offered immediate and concrete benefits to women in the present, before the advent of socialism. Socialist women asserted that the SP was the only party which demanded full rights for women. Moreover, Socialist women said, women could exercise political power within the SP in the present; they could hold party office, run for office on the SP ticket, help formulate party policies, and participate in party affairs on terms of equality with men. Stern told women that "the Socialist parties of all countries form the greatest suffrage organization of the world; the greatest power for women's equality." Maud Thompson, in a rare article asserting that the SP was a class-based party offering nothing to women qua women, nevertheless reiterated a common theme when she said that in the Socialist party women fought alongside of men, "not against them, for our emancipation.... [We] fight for our emancipation while fighting for the greater freedom.... In the Socialist party we women strike a blow for human freedom with every blow we strike for our own enfranchisement."[23] Mary Garbutt claimed that Socialism could immediately transform the lives of its adherents, before its victory at the polls. Socialism would vivify the life of the housewife, fostering hope and self-expression, transmuting drudgery into meaningful work, enlarging her horizons, and encouraging her to mingle with her neighbors. A Socialist housewife spent fewer hours on inessential housework because she devoted her heart and soul to spreading Socialism, whose message flooded her heart with new values and purpose and expanded her sense of life's possibilities. Garbutt described the psychological liberation that accompanied conversion to Socialism in terms of religious ecstasy.
She is no longer a household drudge. Life is no longer purposeless. It is rich with meaning. She is master where before she was enslaved. The conditions of her work-a-day world have completely changed.... Listen to the message that will eventually lead to your emancipation, and while working for its realization, will so transform your being from within that you will lose the sense of drudgery in your devotion to a great human cause that will do away with all drudgery.[24]
In addition to these general considerations, Socialist women analyzed in detail the specific issues which particularly concerned women--prostitution, the industrial mass murder of women and children, drunkenness, and militarism and war. In discussing each of these problems, Socialist women highlighted their particular salience to women, asserted the impossibility of solving them within the confines of capitalism, and pointed to Socialism as the only permanent solution.
The Socialist Woman, in conclusion, propounded a convincing array of reasons why women of all classes should be Socialists. Women and children suffered more even than men under capitalism, as was reflected in the similarities between the demands of women's organizations and those of the SP. The home, indeed, was capitalism in miniature--the locus of oppression of wives who were exploited by both their husbands and the capitalists. Capitalism victimized women and children on the job as well, and its exploitation further endangered women because oppressed men displaced their anger at their bosses unto their families. In winning women for Socialism, the Socialist women attacked mainly capitalism and class society; of necessity, however, they somewhat reluctantly assailed men as a gender as well.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] The Willard and Stanton pamphlets were printed in The Socialist Woman in December and April 1908. For the others, see the editorial in the February 1912 PW. Editorials, PW April 1910; Anna Maley, "Work of Women in the West," PW, July 1911.
[2] JCK, Editorials, PW January 1910.
[3] JCK, "In This Our World," PW December 1912; "In Wyoming" and "Equal Suffrage in Colorado," PW May 1910; "Facts Stronger than Theory," PW September 1910. The benefits for women included ownership of her own wages, equal pay for equal work (especially for teachers), equality in inheritance, greater professional opportunities, equal guardianship of children, and juvenile courts and probation officers. Surprisingly, they also included "the American flag on schoolhouses" and the prohibition of indecent exhibitions.
[4] Barnet Braverman, "Things in the Making," CN March 1914; Braverman, "Things in the Making," CN April 1914; "Are We To Be Long and Talk and Short on Action," PW April 1913. JCK brought in Barnet Braverman, a strongly feminist man, as associate editor late in the career of The Progressive Woman. He then became editor of The Coming Nation (JCK remained publisher). Floyd Dell also became literary editor of The Progressive Woman until he left Chicago. JCK may have intended this increased male presence to deflect male Socialist criticism of the magazine's strident feminism, or she may have wanted to make her publication a more general interest magazine.
[5] Downing, "The Message of Socialism to the Woman Movement," CN March 1914. I have corrected a grammatical error.
[6] Haynes, "The Influence of Women on Business," SW January 1908.
[7] Parce, "Woman's Place in Politics: Its Basis," parts I and II, PW January and February 1912; Parce, "The Dangers of Excessive Masculinism," SW July 1908; Branstetter, "For Socialist Locals," PW November 1911.
[8] Hunt, "Socialist Women in the Garrick Theatre," SW June 1908; JCK, "Socialist Women and Class Consciousness," SW June 1908; Downing, "A Plea to Mothers," SW November 1908; Corinne Brown, "Votes for Women," SW February 1908; JCK, "A Capitalist Crime Against Womankind," SW June 1907.
[9] E.H. Thomas and Hunt, "Why Women Should Be Socialists," SW June 1907; Downing, "A Plea to Mothers," SW November 1908; Maley, "Woman's Enfranchisement," PW February 1911; blurb, PW March 1911; Georgia Kotsch, "The Sanitary Baby," PW December 1910.
[10] Maley, "To the Women's Committees," PW April 1910; Whitehead, "Women's Socialist Union of San Francisco," PW January 1910; JCK, "The Progressive Woman," PW April 1910, "Socialist Women and Class Consciousness," SW June 1908, "Socialism and the Sex War," PW August 1909.
[11] JCK, "Sex Subjection," SW August 1907; Braverman, "Things in the Making," PW May 1913.
[12] Parce, "'From Status to Contract,'" SW March 1908; Debs, "Woman--Comrade and Equal," PW November 1909.
[13] Malkiel, "The Lowest Paid Workers," SW September 1908.
[14] Grace Brown, "Why Women Should Organize," SW July 1907; Malkiel, "The Lowest Paid Workers," SW September 1908.
[15] JCK, "The Woman Pays the Price," CN March 1914, "Does a Woman Support Her Husband's Employer?,' PW August 1913, and "Who Supports Who?," PW May 1913.
[16] JCK, "Who Supports Who?," PW May 1913 and "Does a Woman Support Her Husband's Employer?," PW August 1913.
[17] JCK, "Does a Woman Support Her Husband's Employer?," PW August 1913 and "Who Supports Who?," PW May 1913. Some passages in the first article are capitalized in the original for emphasis, and I have corrected a grammatical error in another passage.
[18] JCK, "Are Men or Women Most Enslaved?", SW July 1908.
[19] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW October 1909; Malkiel, "The Tragedy of Human Passion," PW July 1909.
[20] Untermann, "The Mitigator, II" PW June 1910; Wentworth, "The Modern Woman's Viewpoint," PW April 1912.
[21] Hanford, in "Socialist Women in the Garrick Theatre," SW June 1908; Braverman, "The Common Aim of Socialism and Feminism," PW March 1914; May Strickland, "Woman Suffrage a Means to an End," PW April 1909.
[22] JCK, "Socialist Women and Class Consciousness," SW June 1908 and "Machinery Makes New Woman with New Matrimonial Ideals," SW December 1907.
[23] Stern, "Women of Other Lands," PW May 1913; Maud Thompson, "Suffrage and Socialism," PW May 1913; Lewis, "The Socialist Party Organization," SW July 1911.
[24] Garbutt, "The Message of Socialism to the Household Drudge," PW May 1913. For a similar statement, see Hebe, "The Nameless Ones, January 1909, and TM, "My Sisters in Toil," SW, July 1908.