WHY MALE SOCIALISTS SHOULD BE FEMINISTS
The Socialist women confronted a task in some ways more daunting than converting mainstream feminists to socialism: convincing skeptical SP members (overwhelmingly male) that The Socialist Woman and the WNC were necessary institutions. Many SP males asserted that a focus on women's rights was at best a bourgeois distraction from the class struggle, at worst a capitalist plot to defeat socialism by enfranchising a naturally reactionary group. Many men asserted (in an argument paralleling common SP attitudes on racial injustice) that because socialism would automatically liberate women, no distinct women's struggle was necessary.[1] This argument drew its resonance from the classic Marxist position that the introduction of private property initially caused the subordination of women; the Socialist collectivization of property would therefore liberate women along with men.
Socialist women's assertions that women were a natural SP constituency were in part addressed to these male Socialists. Who could argue with the goal of a half million female SP votes and a party membership that would be half women by 1916?[2] Yet The Socialist Women also promised male SP members that an organized, institutional voice for women within the party, and a strong focus on women's issues, would materially advance the struggle for Socialism.
Socialist women debunked the argument that women's issues were minor distractions, and women's goals mere trifles, compared to the overwhelming importance of the class struggle and the necessity of socialism. Many writers pointed out that the SP fought shoulder to shoulder with labor unions, including the anti-socialist AFL, for relatively minor reforms such as the eight hour day, higher wages and improved conditions. The party did not enter these fights out of any illusions that such reforms would solve the real problems of workers. Rather, Socialists confidently expected that, in the course of struggle, the workers would learn that only socialism could really emancipate them. Workers would also see that Socialists were their firmest allies. The SP should heartily cooperate with NAWSA, Parce argued, for similar reasons: most suffragists did not understand the class struggle, but would encounter it as they attacked child labor and other evils of particular concern to women. The SP did not ask that male workers await the advent of socialism before the SP addressed their immediate problems, but used those specific grievances as springboards for the discussion of larger issues. Parce was angry when the International Socialist Women's Conference in 1910, bowing to party orthodoxy, condemned a partial suffrage bill that would have enfranchised English women on the same terms as English men, thereby excluding most workers. Parce asserted that the Conference "was in favor of working for installments of Socialism" but in effect demanded that no women vote until all men did. "One is compelled to ask why it did not denounce every partial measure of Socialism and declare for nothing less than the complete revolution in a lump."[3]
Whitehead compared the male assertion that Socialism would eventually enfranchise women with religion's deferral of bliss to a distant and uncertain future. If the SP claimed that women's emancipation must await the advent of socialism, she asked, then "how much better are we than the religionists whom we hold up to scorn and ridicule when they prate of a heaven" and preach contentment in the here-and-now? Women would not accept such a callous deferral of their claims. Stern said that women would not wait until socialism liberated them because they would not "go forth into the cooperative commonwealth as a fettered and oppressed womanhood, to be liberated only as a sort of tail-end of the day's work by the good grace of our Socialist brethren. It is poor comfort indeed to the women of today that the Socialist state will grant their offspring the full rights of citizenship. No one would ever dare to put off the urgent demands of men with a similar promise."[4]
Conger-Kaneko similarly debunked the standard masculine claim that women were automatically included in every appeal made by the party. "Women are tired of being 'included,' tired of being taken for granted," she said. "They demand definite recognition, even as men have it. They know that their interests and men's interests have not been identical since the dawn of human history, and it will take something more than a mere statement of the fact to make them believe that they can be identical under socialism." She complained that Socialist literature and speakers were directed towards a male audience, and warned that women would ignore the party unless their concerns were accorded equality with those of men. Untermann similarly urged that "the party can never progress if it holds itself aloof in any way or gives to itself an air of exclusiveness. It must broaden itself in all directions, reach out to the hearts of the people, all [the] exploited and oppressed, gain their love and make plain beyond a doubt that it is fighting their battles.... The purpose merely is to carry on our work in a manner that will convince women that we are fighting for them."[5]
Many writers asserted that women were an integral part of the working class, and, as such, absolutely essential for the triumph of socialism. "We can never have Socialism without the aid and consent of women," The Socialist Women urged. Conger-Kaneko repeatedly asserted that most women were proletarians because they either worked for a living or were married to propertyless industrial or agricultural serfs; "through their class interests they belong to us." Downing said that "the party that stands for the interests of the workers the world over cannot forget the interest of the weakest, most unprotected workers that are shamefully imprisoned and enslaved before their eyes today."[6]
Most proletarian women (as many men) did not regard themselves as members of the working class, partly because they expected to work outside the home for wages for only a short time before marrying. But many working-class men, including Socialists, also denied that women were members of the working class. Most unions, perceiving women as low-wage competitors rather than as fellow workers, discriminated against and refused to organize them. The SP's neglect of women's issues, and its refusal to see women's most pressing concerns as class issues, reflected this same blindness. If the unions and the SP ignored the class position of most women, how could the women be expected to view themselves as workers? Socialist women asserted that the capitalists used women in a class-conscious fashion, to undermine male wages and unions and vote against Socialists; the SP must, therefore, also appeal to the class interests of women. Although male Socialists groused about the "sex consciousness" of female Socialists, the males were in reality those who reduced the workers' struggle from one of class to one of sex. Indeed, male Socialists waged a surreptitious sex struggle under the guise of class conflict. Dr. Wells Le Fevre pointed out that whoever "ignores the sex conscious struggle must only see the class struggle as a male struggle and hence sees but one-half the whole struggle. It is not a male class struggle; it is not a female class struggle; it is a human class struggle and the woman must demand her share of it as a human."[7]
Some writers went beyond asserting the class interests of women to more general claims about the nature of human freedom and of Socialism. Kaneko argued that without women, "we will not have a democratic Socialism, and a Socialism that is not democratic is not Socialism at all." Brewer asserted that "there can be no free men as long as their wives are in economic dependence upon them.... There can be no brotherhood of man until the sisterhood of women can be realized.... Socialism is unthinkable without the full and unequivocal rights of women along with men." While some SP members complained that women were reactionary and would oppose Socialism at the polls--a point conceded even by some strident SP proponents of women suffrage--some Socialist women claimed that women had figured in every previous revolutionary epoch, and would help topple capitalism. As one author said, "the foundations must move first.... if we ever expect our brothers to rise, we must be the first to move." The Socialist Woman editorialized that "the most significant feature in the progress of modern society is the rebellion of women against age-long oppression. It means revolution, the most complete since the introduction of civilization." Echoing anarchist Emma Goldman, some members claimed that women, once mobilized, were far more revolutionary than men, and quickly jettisoned antiquated notions of respectability.[8]
Many Socialist women asserted that women's issues, far from being minor distractions, were central examples of the oppression foisted upon workers by industrial capitalism. Child labor, low pay and horrendous conditions for women workers, prostitution, and other evils were inextricably bound up in the class oppression endemic to capitalism. Enfranchised women, one author asserted, would strike a blow for economic justice, "for better conditions of labor and of life. That would diminish the profits of capitalism, extorted from women's and children's labor." Capitalism debased motherhood, the cradle of civilization and the race itself; impoverished, malnourished, and overworked mothers jeopardized the very future of humanity, as did the squalid tenements in which most children were raised. "The children of the poor inherit poverty and its numerous handicaps with almost the same regularity as they inherit the physical form which belongs to man," one author lamented.[9]
Such writers urged that the two vibrant, modern, international movements, those of women and of labor, unite because both sprung from the same cause, demanded similar immediate reforms, and could find fulfillment in the same cause, Socialism. As Conger-Kaneko said, "whether they are conscious of it or not, the possibility of economic freedom is the cause of the awakening [of both workers and women], and economic freedom is the goal which must be reached before either woman or the workingman is masterless." The Socialist Women averred that "there are 8,000,000 organized women in the world who are demanding certain sex rights, and 7,000,000 socialists who are demanding certain class rights. When this 8 million women and 7 million Socialists join forces on the economic field both the sex and the class rights will be easily won, for the slavery of women and the slavery of the working class have their roots in the same soil--which is economic."[10]
Some Socialist women defended sex consciousness, which arguably undermined class consciousness, by claiming that women must fight and win their own bourgeois revolution before they would become completely class conscious, and hence capable of joining wholeheartedly in the fight for socialism. This argument ingeniously adapted traditional socialist philosophy, which stated that workers must win full inclusion in the capitalist political system--and even foster bourgeois reforms against the wishes of their own bourgeoisie if necessary--before they could effectively fight for their rights as workers. It also paralleled an argument, adumbrated by certain sectors of the U.S. left (particularly among blacks and Irish) that nationalist movements could be a springboard to internationalist class consciousness. As long as women found themselves treated as a separate caste by the state, the industrial apparatus, the unions, and even the SP, The Socialist Woman asked, how could they transcend a vision of themselves as members of a sex to perceive their status as workers with problems (and solutions) common to other workers? Women naturally focused on equality with men when stigmatized as inferior. As Malkiel said (writing in The International Socialist Review), "under a regime of political tyranny the first and most urgent ideal is necessarily the conquest of political liberty."[11]
The road to class consciousness, therefore, was through cultivating, rather than ignoring, sex consciousness. "The more sex conscious the masses of women become, the sooner will they be ready to work for both political and economic emancipation," The Socialist Woman claimed. Brewer confidently predicted that women's "economic emancipation will follow her political emancipation"; women would become class conscious after they had won their demands for full inclusion in the bourgeois political and economic order. Dr. Wells Le Fevre also said that "the demand of the 'sex conscious' woman is the next necessary political step in the class struggle" because women, like men, must have political freedom in order to win economic liberty. Both sexes must win economic freedom together. The Progressive Woman believed that "there can be no true class solidarity until women are awakened" both because women were an integral part of the working class and because women must win formal equality of men before they could perceive themselves in class terms.[12]
This argument was so important that even Lena Morrow Lewis, sometimes regarded as a women who emphasized class to the virtual exclusion of gender issues,[13] heartily endorsed it. Women united across class lines in suffrage associations because "the one thing they have in common" was their desire for the ballot, which was "the symbol of power and freedom. When, however, this right has been secured and women begin to use the ballot, their class interest which has been subservient to their sex interest will then assert itself and the women will unite with men in the political parties that represent their interests." Lewis confidently predicted that most working-class women would join the Socialists, perhaps augmented by some bourgeois women whose social consciousness trumped their class interests. Socialism "is an impossibility where there is sex antagonism and differences. The breaking down and destroying of the latter is one of the necessary steps in establishing full and complete social cooperation.... The woman movement, the class struggle, the awakening of a social consciousness, all these are factors in the establishing of the new social system."[14] In propounding this argument, the Socialist women enlisted a standard Socialist doctrine--the necessity that a bourgeois revolution precede socialism--in the cause of Socialist feminism.
The Socialist women also warned their male comrades that if the SP did not actively recruit women, the capitalist parties would. Although women were natural Socialists, they would succumb by default to capitalist blandishments if the SP ignored them. The Socialist party contributed to this by its lackadaisical, insincere efforts on women's issues; Parce spoke of women "who are Socialists at heart" but were "women's women first" and did "not feel that the interests of women would be safe in the hands of the Socialist party" because of the ignorant, patronizing remarks that often fell from the lips of prominent male Socialists.[15]
The Socialist Woman analyzed the historical connections between capitalism and patriarchy much as did male writers. Following Engels, most agreed that women's oppression began with the rise of private property, long before the advent of capitalism. Men subjugated women so that each husband could appropriate the fruits of his wife's and daughters' labor and insure that his own male children would inherit his property. However, conservative male socialists argued that this link between private property and women's subjugation meant that the socialization of productive property would automatically liberate women. In this rendition, no special efforts were needed for women, who could not win freedom before the revolution and would inevitably inherit it afterwards. Socialist women disagreed.
Most Socialist women asserted that the condition of women had deteriorated under capitalism, especially in recent decades. Capitalists had expropriated women's skills and taken their work out of the home into exploitative and dangerous factories; this had forced women into the maelstrom of competitive production for profit. Yet this wrenching experience had emancipatory potential as well; by forcing women out of the isolation of the home into the wider world of industry and politics, it had immeasurably broadened their horizons and prepared them to struggle together with men for the liberation of all of humanity. At the same time, capitalism had eroded the position of the patriarch by making his job so insecure and his pay so low that he could not support a family. Further, when the patriarch had owned the tools and seemingly provided work for his wife and children, his ownership of their output seemed somehow legitimate; now, however, his wife and children worked outside the home and received their wages as individuals directly from the capitalist. The husband's expropriation of these wages violated even bourgeois standards of justice. For all these reasons capitalism portended the end of patriarchy when it thrust women into the horrors of industrial slavery, just as it had created its own gravedigger when it generated the working class.
Even while lamenting the traditional conservatism of women, Conger-Kaneko enthused that "the capitalist class, playing its legitimate part in social evolution, has given to womankind the habit of reading, and with this habit has come the power of reasoning." Socialist women had only to reap the harvest. Yet they had competitors, women in the bourgeois feminist movements. "They are going after our women of the working class, and to our everlasting shame, it will be to the sex-conscious woman's movement that our sisters will owe their awakening and their education, and it is to this movement that will give their allegiance, if we don't wake up and do something for them ourselves." Whitehead asked why Socialists should blame women "if they give their support to the parties who give them what they have a right to?"[16]
Socialist women also transformed the Socialist doctrine of inevitable triumph and used it for their own feminist purposes. Capitalist transformations of the economy guaranteed that women would attain the vote, enter industry in increasing numbers, and become a major factor in social life; the only question was what impact these trends would have on the march to Socialism. Elsa Untermann confidently predicted that "side by side with, and dependent upon, the development of capitalist production into Socialist production, goes the development of the capitalist woman into the Socialist woman." England, speaking of the suffrage campaign, similarly averred that "social evolution guarantees it. As to the final outcome we have no fear. It is only for the hastening of that outcome that we labor."[17]
Such a belief generates the paradox that afflicted Puritan theology and orthodox Marxism: why should the individual struggle for a preordained goal? Socialist women responded creatively and diversely to this challenge. Parce compared the proper Socialist attitude towards woman's emancipation with their policy towards working-class struggles. "Socialists recognize that the process of evolution would bring in the co-operative commonwealth, in the course of time, quite without the intervention of the Socialist party." But the party does not cease or abate its work because of this knowledge. "Neither do we forswear our sex-consciousness because of the benefits that evolution may be expected to bring to women." Cole took a somewhat different approach in her effort to galvanize men. She claimed that although feminism would surely triumph, the SP might fail if it did not align itself with the forces of historical necessity. "It is not for [women] that I speak," she said. "We will get the ballot; never fear. I speak for the party." On another occasion she warned that "this is the age of woman, and that movement which does not make an appeal to womankind is bound to suffer confusion and possible defeat at the moment when supremacy would seem imminent." She warned the party that "men cannot inaugurate a better society, except they do it in harmony with evolution." Another feminist, echoing statements familiar in the orthodox Marxist canon, asserted that "the political party which stands for that which is to be necessarily grows, while those which support that which has outlived its usefulness will die."[18]
Many Socialist women predicted that the capitalists would enfranchise women in an effort to defeat the rising tide of Socialism. If the SP did not educate, recruit, and mobilize women, they would remain a reactionary class which would save capitalism from its otherwise inevitable downfall. Socialist women pointed out that even if the SP enfranchised women after it came to power, as party conservatives claimed it would, these neophyte voters would defeat Socialism at the next election. Helen Unterman agreed; the SP must train women, as it educated the working class, for freedom and self-governance as part of its march towards Socialism. "Under Socialism women will be a part of the whole public life," she said. "They might as well begin now to train themselves for their future position." Many writers argued that women in suffrage states were already far more politically sophisticated than those in non-suffrage states. Mila Tupper Maynard complained that "after a decade in a suffrage state the atmosphere elsewhere, even in many well-meaning Socialist circles, is oppressive."[19]
Lest feminist rhetoric frighten timid males, however, Conger-Kaneko and The Socialist Woman vigorously argued that Socialist feminism, far from disrupting the family, would ensure happy Socialist homes. Socialism would redeem the home after the revolution, and the very struggle for Socialism would transform the marriages of Socialist couples in the present. Further, women's involvement in the Socialist movement would change the home from a bastion of capitalist indoctrination to a building block of the future Socialist society. The SP, Conger-Kaneko said, was more than a political party. "Our principles reach into every department of human life, into the most intimate relations of home life, as well as into our social and business activities.... Let us educate our women for the upbuilding of Socialist homes." This would almost insure the triumph of Socialism, for "once the mind of the woman of this land comes to accept Socialism, other forces will count for little."[20]
The Socialist Woman reassuringly described female party activists as model wives and mothers. Theresa Malkiel was "a model housekeeper"; May Woods Simon was "the most devoted mother of my acquaintance.... [a] self-effaced beautiful little woman"; the Mexican radical Andrea Gonzales was a "little slip of a creature--so pretty and sweet and pure, and yet so firm and invincible and revolutionary." Even Kate Richards O'Hare, a self-described "union man" because of her membership (almost unique for a woman) in the International Association of Machinists, won praise as the devoted mother of four. She was, The Progressive Woman assured its readers, "not a bit masculine" even though she could "ride a bronco as well as she can make biscuits" and shoot a rifle with the best of them. O'Hare herself, a forceful lecturer who was often away from home, reassured jittery male Socialists upon her nomination for Congress in 1910 that "I long for domestic life, home, and children with every fibre of my being. Nothing is of less interest to me than practical politics and public speaking has lost its novelty. I always start of a trip with a feeling of depression. But there is the call of Socialism," which alone could rescue the home from the depredations of capitalism. When socialism triumphed, she would "agree to become a candidate for nothing different than what the average woman's life should be."[21] Disingenuously, O'Hare did not describe her vision of women's lives under Socialism--one that differed radically from that of most Socialist men.
The Socialist women touted the benefits of Socialist wives who vigorously aided their husbands' party and union activities. Non-socialist wives, they said, opposed such activities because they entailed expense and drew the husband out of the home. Socialist wives, on the contrary, understood the purposes of the privations imposed by strikes and the necessity of paying Party dues. The Socialist Woman occasionally cited evidence that Socialist men actively preferred Socialists when choosing a wife. It also praised the greater love and harmony characterizing the Socialist version of companionate marriage. Anita Block enthused that "perhaps the most ideal relation that has yet existed between man and woman is that of the Socialist husband and wife," who worked together as equals for a transcendent cause. "Clara Brown" concluded her diary by exclaiming that she and her husband "are as happy as two young lovers! It is a good thing for two people to be just in love with each other. But when they have a third great cause upon which to focus their mutual affection and their joint intellects--then it is absolute glory. They can actually feel themselves grow in strength and knowledge and power. The little narrow, self-concentration vanishes, and all the world becomes one's work-a-day and holiday abiding place."[22]
Mere SP membership and activity improved a couple's marriage, but Socialism would transform the institution of marriage itself. Women, freed from degrading economic dependence on a man and granted free and equal access to the means of production, would marry for love alone. Men would benefit from this as much as women. Fully realized, developed persons would love each other for their unique qualities and live in a harmony unruffled by base utilitarian concerns. According to Elsa Untermann, "man's passion has been made vile by woman's years of enslavement.... Woman also has sex needs" and "longs ardently" for "companionship and mutual love instead of submission on the one hand and mere passion on the other." Modern women want a complete, mutually fulfilling, and purer love, "a man with whom they will be able to labor together at whatever task life has set for them."[23]
Garbutt similarly warned men that "as long as the marriage relation is perverted as it is today by woman's economic necessities, there can be no freedom, no equality, no joy, no lasting sympathy between man and wife." Marriages contracted for economic motives were doomed, while even those based on love were often destroyed by the "utter dependence of the wife." When women worked outside the home at dignified jobs, they would more fully share their husband's life and values. Similar experiences would develop "a common culture" and "sympathy of thought and interest that will bind them more closely together and make their relations richer and more harmonious." Braverman asserted that working wives would revivify the home, have more ideas and energy, and contribute economically to a more prosperous family. Professional housekeeping and childcare, of higher quality than those provided by "the overworked housewife," would free the wife for paid employment outside the home. "The home would be a place to rest in--not to cook in. The wife would be as glad as her pal to be at home. And the kiddies would be glad to see their parents again, and greet them with delight. Is there anything dreadful in this?"[24] Some equal marriages, Braverman asserted, were appearing even under capitalism.
The Socialist Woman offered one additional reassurance to men: Socialist feminism would improve the party even as it transformed the Socialist home. To the exasperation of many Socialist women, many male SP members stubbornly insisted that the Woman's National Committee was an autonomous organization, rather than a part of the SP's national machinery. Socialist women often reminded such men that the WNC was a committee of the party, just like any other committee. It neither had nor aspired to autonomy, any more than did the committees on agriculture or labor. The WNC was not a separatist institution which detached women from the regular party apparatus or organized them separately from men. On the contrary, it recruited women for the party locals, even as it worked to transform those locals into environments hospitable to women. The frequency with which these reassurances appeared, however, imply that many men obdurately refused to listen.
Socialist women, nevertheless, confidently predicted that women, given a chance, would participate as equals in every sphere of Socialist activity. Not every woman, of course, would become a brilliant orator or master the intricacies of Marxist theory. Nor was this necessary; every woman who understood the causes and cure for the evils of capitalism would make a loyal party member. "If she wants to go into history and biology, why, let her," Conger-Kaneko urged. "It will help her, but if she hasn't time, she can be a good, influential Socialist anyway. The same holds true of men. Workingmen haven't time to become scholars. If they had they wouldn't need Socialism."[25]
Yet Socialist women also asserted that women would occupy a distinct niche in the Socialist transformation of society. Women would inject new energy into SP campaigns against capitalist evils which directly afflicted them, such as prostitution, child labor, and death-trap tenements. In the process, they would convert bourgeois women who worked for these same causes. Women would fight for better public schools and foster alternatives to them and to the militaristic Boy Scout movement. Conger-Kaneko, utilizing the conservative male (and radical feminist) view of women as prime nurturers, said that "the mothers in the home, school teachers, Sunday school teachers--in every avenue of child life, the woman is the teacher.... Men haven't time for it. They aren't as fit for it as are women." Another writer averred that "to reach the children it is absolutely necessary to reach the teachers of children--the mothers and teachers."[26]
Socialist women bitterly assailed the public school system for indoctrinating children in capitalist and militarist values. "You cannot leave the training of the minds of your children in the hands of the ruling class," Wood-Simons admonished her comrades. The public schools, she complained, considered working-class children as raw materials for capitalist death-mills, rather than as full persons with unique capacities. Children were deprived of vibrant new scientific knowledge by antiquated textbooks, and psychologically mutilated by old-fashioned methods of instruction that ignored recent advances in child development and psychology. Maley indignantly asserted that "our modern educational institutions retain the worthy purpose of all the tortures that have blackened the face of the past; all this to the end that the proper mental attitude may be created in our students toward the order of industrial slavery now prevailing." Another writer agreed that sending children to capitalist schools and expecting them to emerge as socialists was "the height of impractibility" because "the impressions of childhood are in the majority of cases graven beyond eradication." Even "the most revolutionary Socialist today carries in his soul the scars of a former bourgeois training." Hazlitt, writing about "Capitalist Education as a Means of Subjugation," warned that the miseducation of slaves could cause ideas to persist long after the conditions which had inspired them had disappeared; this could retard or even prevent the advent of Socialism. Socialist women also complained that many working-class families could not afford to send their children to school, and cited official statistics showing that huge numbers of those who did attend were so malnourished that they could not profit from instruction.[27]
Women, it was asserted, must remake the schools in the course of refashioning society. Socialist parents must involve themselves in the management of the schools, encourage Party members to apply for jobs as teachers and principals, and run candidates for school boards. Socialist women actually created their own Socialist Sunday Schools which offered instruction, singing, and entertainment. These, it was hoped, would educate children in Socialist principles and attract women who would not otherwise join the party by giving them a field of activity. Socialist women hoped that even non-Socialist parents would enroll their children for the educational and social benefits; these children would then convert their parents. The Socialist Woman offered advice and sample curricula, and publicized the efforts of women who constructed a widespread network of such schools. It also published stories, songs, and skits for and by children. Socialist women launched The Little Socialist, a children's magazine. The very fact that it was mostly women who organized and staffed these schools, however, evinces the persistence of stereotyped gender roles within the SP. Entreaties that men participate equally in this important enterprise apparently fell on deaf ears.[28]
The Socialist Woman also bitterly attacked the Boy Scout movement for inculcating patriotism, militarism, work discipline, and blind obedience to employers. The Boy Scouts, it asserted, prepared boys for their future role as soldiers who murdered "foreign" enemies and gunned down striking workers at the behest of their capitalist masters. The Progressive Woman devoted its November 1911 issue to denouncing the Boy Scouts. "You would not set up a toy scaffold and have your boy practice hanging dummies until he became a proficient hangman--then why give him a toy gun and train him in the other branch of legal murder--the Army?" The Boy Scouts, Socialist women alleged, seduced working-class boys, starved for fulfilling activity and an active social life, with pageantry, uniforms, medals, and activities. Some socialist women emulated their sisters in England by starting an alternative youth club, The Universal Scouts of Freedom, that offered boys and girls recreation and social activities while inculcating Socialist moral and political values.[29]
The Socialist Woman also claimed that Party women would enliven Socialist meetings and educate adults as well as children. Women could sell embroidery, raise money (as they did for churches), distribute literature, build Socialist labor temples, and boost the Socialist lyceum, a radical version of Chautauqua. The lyceum gave every member something to do, thus binding him or her to the Party; it stimulated the sale of Socialist literature; it offered a coherent series of lectures that would truly educate the audience, instead of an endless repetition of the same old introductory exposition of Socialism; and it gained public attention and newspaper coverage. Socialist women emphasized the practical nature of their sex; women craved meaningful activity and eschewed vapid theoretical debates. Women, Conger-Kaneko told men, would not remain in the Party "unless you keep them busy; and once they are started they will keep themselves busy. And keep you busy, too." Women would also add a social element to Socialist meetings, making them more attractive to women and men alike. "Social life is necessary to any organization," Conger-Kaneko said. "Women make it possible. We need women to give entertainments, socials, dances, suppers, children's parties, and a score of other diversions that constantly fill life in human society." SP locals, she said, should end their meetings with light refreshments and socializing. Some Socialists condemned this as frivolity, but it was necessary "if we are to make [the Socialist movement] the living, throbbing, human thing it should be."[30] The Socialist Woman, therefore, often accepted and utilized traditional notions of gender and the customary division of labor between the sexes in its argument for a distinct women's institutional structure within the Socialist party.
The Socialist women, therefore, directly addressed the male arguments which trivialized women's issues, and creatively refashioned key Marxist ideas in the process. They maintained the centrality of women in a viable Socialist movement, just as, in appealing to women, they argued that feminism implied Socialism. Without women, they warned male Socialists, the SP could not triumph; with them, it promised the men, victory was inevitable. Sex consciousness, they said, reinforced rather than diluted class consciousness. Socialist wives and mothers would strengthen the Socialist home, while transforming it into an incubator of social revolution. Simultaneously, however, the Socialist women transformed the meaning of Socialist marriage in portentous ways.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] Male arguments against feminist demands never appear directly in The Socialist Woman; we know of them only from their rebuttals.
[2] The Progressive Woman set these goals by 1913, and frequently boosted them in ads and articles.
[3] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW February 1910 and October 1910; see also Josephine Cole, "The International and Women Suffrage," PW November 1907.
[4] Whitehead, "What About Woman's Suffrage," PW April 1910; Stern, SW "The Socialist Party and Women, July 1908.
[5] JCK< "Are the Interests of Men and Women Identical?," SW May 1908; Elsa Untermann, "The Suffrage Question at the Congress," PW June 1910.
[6] "To Our Readers," SW August 1907; JCK, "A Party-Owned Press," CN April 1914; Downing, "Official Protection of Vice, II," PW August 1909.
[7] Le Fevre, "Sex Consciousness in the Class Struggle," PW July 1910.
[8] Kaneko, "Where is Your Wife," SW August 1907 (reprinted as a leaflet); Brewer, SW January 1908; Brown, "Why Women Should Organize," SW July 1907; squib, PW August 1909; Editorials, "Strike of the Shirtwaist Strikers," SW Jan 1910.
[9] Meta Anges England, "Woman Suffrage and Socialism," PW April 1910; C.F. Dight, "Equal Opportunity Must Be Inherited," PW January 1910.
[10] JCK, "In This Our World," March 1913; squib, PW September 1909.
[11] TM, "Where Do We Stand of the Woman Question?", ISR, August 1909.
[12] PW February 1910 squib; Brewer, "Woman's Enslaver," PW April 1913; Le Fevre, "Sex Consciousness in the Class Struggle," PW July 1910; "For Socialist Locals," PW February 1911.
[13] Mari Jo Buhle, "Lena Morrow Lewis: Her Rise and Fall," in Sally M. Miller, Flawed Liberation: Socialism and Feminism, Greenwood Press, Westport Connecticut, 1981. Lewis did demand that women eschew separatism and participate as equals in the regular party organizations.
[14] Lewis, "The Woman Suffrage Movement," PW March 1911.
[15] Parce, "Women and the Socialist Philosophy," PW September 1909, reprinted from The International Socialist Review. Parce and others assailed Joseph Cohen, a conservative Socialist, for patronizing remarks in The International Socialist Review. Cohen had written, "The impulse below intellect is intuition, which is developed further in many animals than in man. Thus animals scent danger more quickly than man and are better weather prophets. And because woman is nearer to the lower forms than man, intuition is more deeply seated in the female of the race, enabling her to peremptorily pass judgments that the male arrives at only after laborious thought. Intuition is often spoken of as a feminine attribute." Cohen, "Socialism for Students, VIII. Socialist Philosophy," ISR, June 1909, p. 966. In the previous installment of this series, in the May issue, Cohen had discussed at greater length the alleged differences between male and female sensibilities, and had strongly endorsed equal rights for women. Cohen, presumably stung by the criticism he had evoked, repaired relations with the Socialist women and frequently contributed articles to The Progressive Woman.
[16] JCK, "Why 'The Socialist Woman' Comes Into Existence," SW June 1907; JCK, "The Progressive Woman," April 1910; Whitehead, "What About Woman's Suffrage," PW April 1910.
[17] Untermann, "Capitalism and the Woman Question," PW March 1910; England, "Woman Suffrage and Socialism," PW April 1910.
[18] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," SW November 1908; Cole, in "Socialist Women Hold Meetings During Convention Week," SW June 1908; JCK, SW June 1907 squib; "Woman Candidate for State Secretary," PW November 1909.
[19] Kaneko, "Where is Your Wife?," SW August 1907; Untermann, "What Environment Has to do with Women," SW September 1907; Mila Tupper Maynard, "Women's Vote Effective," SW December 1908; see also article by Luella Twining in SW December 1908.
[20] JCK, "Must Have Socialist Homes or None," SW September 1907; JCK, "Victory will Follow Knowledge," SW January 1909.
[21] Malkiel was featured in PW May 1909; "Our Women Delegates to the International," PW August 1910; "The Heroine of the Mexican Revolution," PW May 1909; Kate Richards O'Hare was featured in PW August 1910. For the first several years, most issues of The Socialist Woman had a picture of a prominent Socialist woman on the cover, and briefly profiled her in the issue. A remarkable number of these profiles extol the beauty, delicacy, and wifely qualities of their subjects.
[22] Bloc, symposium of New York women on suffrage, PW March 1910; "Clara Brown's Diary," N. 5," PW May 1909.
[23] Elsa Untermann, "Capitalism and the Woman Question," PW March 1910. The original quotation was framed as a question.
[24] Garbutt, "The Woman Movement and Marriage," CN January 1914; Braverman, "Things in the Making," CN April 1914.
[25] JCK, "What Women Can Do," PW August 1910.
[26] JCK, "What Women Can Do," PW August 1910; "Go After the Teacher," PW November 1909.
[27] Simons, "Industrial Education and the Public Schools," PW May 1910; "Go After the Teacher," PW November 1909; Maley, "The Suffrage and Freedom," SW February 1908; Hazlitt, "Capitalist Education as a Means of Subjugation," PW November 1911; Thomas Wood, "To the Health of Our Children," PW December 1912.
[28] Fuller, "Industrial Infanticide," PW June-July 1913; "Socialist Sunday Schools in England," SW November 1907; Helen Lowry, "The Importance of Socialist Sunday Schools," PW December 1910; Pearl Lanfersiek, "Socialist Sunday School," SW October 1909; Mary Livingston, "Socialist Sunday Schools," PW November 1909; Kendrick Shedd, "Men and Socialist Schools," The American Socialist, January 2, 1915. The definite account of the Socialist Sunday Schools is Kenneth Teitelbaum, Schooling for "Good Rebels": Socialist Education for Children in the United States, 1900-1920 (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1993).
[29] PW November 1911, Boy Scout Issue; Georgia Kotsch, "Some Boy Scout History," PW July 1911; George Kirkpatrick, "The Boy Scout Movement," PW February 1911; Mrs. J.F. Kiefner, "Universal Scouts of Freedom," PW November 1911. A letter in PW, August 1911 claimed that the largest of the Boy Scout organizations was not militaristic; JCK replied that nonetheless Socialists should create their own boys' club.
[30] "By Arthur Brooks Baker," PW September 1912; JCK, "What Women Can Do," PW August 1910; JCK, "How Women Helped Local M--," PW October 1911.
Socialist women's assertions that women were a natural SP constituency were in part addressed to these male Socialists. Who could argue with the goal of a half million female SP votes and a party membership that would be half women by 1916?[2] Yet The Socialist Women also promised male SP members that an organized, institutional voice for women within the party, and a strong focus on women's issues, would materially advance the struggle for Socialism.
Socialist women debunked the argument that women's issues were minor distractions, and women's goals mere trifles, compared to the overwhelming importance of the class struggle and the necessity of socialism. Many writers pointed out that the SP fought shoulder to shoulder with labor unions, including the anti-socialist AFL, for relatively minor reforms such as the eight hour day, higher wages and improved conditions. The party did not enter these fights out of any illusions that such reforms would solve the real problems of workers. Rather, Socialists confidently expected that, in the course of struggle, the workers would learn that only socialism could really emancipate them. Workers would also see that Socialists were their firmest allies. The SP should heartily cooperate with NAWSA, Parce argued, for similar reasons: most suffragists did not understand the class struggle, but would encounter it as they attacked child labor and other evils of particular concern to women. The SP did not ask that male workers await the advent of socialism before the SP addressed their immediate problems, but used those specific grievances as springboards for the discussion of larger issues. Parce was angry when the International Socialist Women's Conference in 1910, bowing to party orthodoxy, condemned a partial suffrage bill that would have enfranchised English women on the same terms as English men, thereby excluding most workers. Parce asserted that the Conference "was in favor of working for installments of Socialism" but in effect demanded that no women vote until all men did. "One is compelled to ask why it did not denounce every partial measure of Socialism and declare for nothing less than the complete revolution in a lump."[3]
Whitehead compared the male assertion that Socialism would eventually enfranchise women with religion's deferral of bliss to a distant and uncertain future. If the SP claimed that women's emancipation must await the advent of socialism, she asked, then "how much better are we than the religionists whom we hold up to scorn and ridicule when they prate of a heaven" and preach contentment in the here-and-now? Women would not accept such a callous deferral of their claims. Stern said that women would not wait until socialism liberated them because they would not "go forth into the cooperative commonwealth as a fettered and oppressed womanhood, to be liberated only as a sort of tail-end of the day's work by the good grace of our Socialist brethren. It is poor comfort indeed to the women of today that the Socialist state will grant their offspring the full rights of citizenship. No one would ever dare to put off the urgent demands of men with a similar promise."[4]
Conger-Kaneko similarly debunked the standard masculine claim that women were automatically included in every appeal made by the party. "Women are tired of being 'included,' tired of being taken for granted," she said. "They demand definite recognition, even as men have it. They know that their interests and men's interests have not been identical since the dawn of human history, and it will take something more than a mere statement of the fact to make them believe that they can be identical under socialism." She complained that Socialist literature and speakers were directed towards a male audience, and warned that women would ignore the party unless their concerns were accorded equality with those of men. Untermann similarly urged that "the party can never progress if it holds itself aloof in any way or gives to itself an air of exclusiveness. It must broaden itself in all directions, reach out to the hearts of the people, all [the] exploited and oppressed, gain their love and make plain beyond a doubt that it is fighting their battles.... The purpose merely is to carry on our work in a manner that will convince women that we are fighting for them."[5]
Many writers asserted that women were an integral part of the working class, and, as such, absolutely essential for the triumph of socialism. "We can never have Socialism without the aid and consent of women," The Socialist Women urged. Conger-Kaneko repeatedly asserted that most women were proletarians because they either worked for a living or were married to propertyless industrial or agricultural serfs; "through their class interests they belong to us." Downing said that "the party that stands for the interests of the workers the world over cannot forget the interest of the weakest, most unprotected workers that are shamefully imprisoned and enslaved before their eyes today."[6]
Most proletarian women (as many men) did not regard themselves as members of the working class, partly because they expected to work outside the home for wages for only a short time before marrying. But many working-class men, including Socialists, also denied that women were members of the working class. Most unions, perceiving women as low-wage competitors rather than as fellow workers, discriminated against and refused to organize them. The SP's neglect of women's issues, and its refusal to see women's most pressing concerns as class issues, reflected this same blindness. If the unions and the SP ignored the class position of most women, how could the women be expected to view themselves as workers? Socialist women asserted that the capitalists used women in a class-conscious fashion, to undermine male wages and unions and vote against Socialists; the SP must, therefore, also appeal to the class interests of women. Although male Socialists groused about the "sex consciousness" of female Socialists, the males were in reality those who reduced the workers' struggle from one of class to one of sex. Indeed, male Socialists waged a surreptitious sex struggle under the guise of class conflict. Dr. Wells Le Fevre pointed out that whoever "ignores the sex conscious struggle must only see the class struggle as a male struggle and hence sees but one-half the whole struggle. It is not a male class struggle; it is not a female class struggle; it is a human class struggle and the woman must demand her share of it as a human."[7]
Some writers went beyond asserting the class interests of women to more general claims about the nature of human freedom and of Socialism. Kaneko argued that without women, "we will not have a democratic Socialism, and a Socialism that is not democratic is not Socialism at all." Brewer asserted that "there can be no free men as long as their wives are in economic dependence upon them.... There can be no brotherhood of man until the sisterhood of women can be realized.... Socialism is unthinkable without the full and unequivocal rights of women along with men." While some SP members complained that women were reactionary and would oppose Socialism at the polls--a point conceded even by some strident SP proponents of women suffrage--some Socialist women claimed that women had figured in every previous revolutionary epoch, and would help topple capitalism. As one author said, "the foundations must move first.... if we ever expect our brothers to rise, we must be the first to move." The Socialist Woman editorialized that "the most significant feature in the progress of modern society is the rebellion of women against age-long oppression. It means revolution, the most complete since the introduction of civilization." Echoing anarchist Emma Goldman, some members claimed that women, once mobilized, were far more revolutionary than men, and quickly jettisoned antiquated notions of respectability.[8]
Many Socialist women asserted that women's issues, far from being minor distractions, were central examples of the oppression foisted upon workers by industrial capitalism. Child labor, low pay and horrendous conditions for women workers, prostitution, and other evils were inextricably bound up in the class oppression endemic to capitalism. Enfranchised women, one author asserted, would strike a blow for economic justice, "for better conditions of labor and of life. That would diminish the profits of capitalism, extorted from women's and children's labor." Capitalism debased motherhood, the cradle of civilization and the race itself; impoverished, malnourished, and overworked mothers jeopardized the very future of humanity, as did the squalid tenements in which most children were raised. "The children of the poor inherit poverty and its numerous handicaps with almost the same regularity as they inherit the physical form which belongs to man," one author lamented.[9]
Such writers urged that the two vibrant, modern, international movements, those of women and of labor, unite because both sprung from the same cause, demanded similar immediate reforms, and could find fulfillment in the same cause, Socialism. As Conger-Kaneko said, "whether they are conscious of it or not, the possibility of economic freedom is the cause of the awakening [of both workers and women], and economic freedom is the goal which must be reached before either woman or the workingman is masterless." The Socialist Women averred that "there are 8,000,000 organized women in the world who are demanding certain sex rights, and 7,000,000 socialists who are demanding certain class rights. When this 8 million women and 7 million Socialists join forces on the economic field both the sex and the class rights will be easily won, for the slavery of women and the slavery of the working class have their roots in the same soil--which is economic."[10]
Some Socialist women defended sex consciousness, which arguably undermined class consciousness, by claiming that women must fight and win their own bourgeois revolution before they would become completely class conscious, and hence capable of joining wholeheartedly in the fight for socialism. This argument ingeniously adapted traditional socialist philosophy, which stated that workers must win full inclusion in the capitalist political system--and even foster bourgeois reforms against the wishes of their own bourgeoisie if necessary--before they could effectively fight for their rights as workers. It also paralleled an argument, adumbrated by certain sectors of the U.S. left (particularly among blacks and Irish) that nationalist movements could be a springboard to internationalist class consciousness. As long as women found themselves treated as a separate caste by the state, the industrial apparatus, the unions, and even the SP, The Socialist Woman asked, how could they transcend a vision of themselves as members of a sex to perceive their status as workers with problems (and solutions) common to other workers? Women naturally focused on equality with men when stigmatized as inferior. As Malkiel said (writing in The International Socialist Review), "under a regime of political tyranny the first and most urgent ideal is necessarily the conquest of political liberty."[11]
The road to class consciousness, therefore, was through cultivating, rather than ignoring, sex consciousness. "The more sex conscious the masses of women become, the sooner will they be ready to work for both political and economic emancipation," The Socialist Woman claimed. Brewer confidently predicted that women's "economic emancipation will follow her political emancipation"; women would become class conscious after they had won their demands for full inclusion in the bourgeois political and economic order. Dr. Wells Le Fevre also said that "the demand of the 'sex conscious' woman is the next necessary political step in the class struggle" because women, like men, must have political freedom in order to win economic liberty. Both sexes must win economic freedom together. The Progressive Woman believed that "there can be no true class solidarity until women are awakened" both because women were an integral part of the working class and because women must win formal equality of men before they could perceive themselves in class terms.[12]
This argument was so important that even Lena Morrow Lewis, sometimes regarded as a women who emphasized class to the virtual exclusion of gender issues,[13] heartily endorsed it. Women united across class lines in suffrage associations because "the one thing they have in common" was their desire for the ballot, which was "the symbol of power and freedom. When, however, this right has been secured and women begin to use the ballot, their class interest which has been subservient to their sex interest will then assert itself and the women will unite with men in the political parties that represent their interests." Lewis confidently predicted that most working-class women would join the Socialists, perhaps augmented by some bourgeois women whose social consciousness trumped their class interests. Socialism "is an impossibility where there is sex antagonism and differences. The breaking down and destroying of the latter is one of the necessary steps in establishing full and complete social cooperation.... The woman movement, the class struggle, the awakening of a social consciousness, all these are factors in the establishing of the new social system."[14] In propounding this argument, the Socialist women enlisted a standard Socialist doctrine--the necessity that a bourgeois revolution precede socialism--in the cause of Socialist feminism.
The Socialist women also warned their male comrades that if the SP did not actively recruit women, the capitalist parties would. Although women were natural Socialists, they would succumb by default to capitalist blandishments if the SP ignored them. The Socialist party contributed to this by its lackadaisical, insincere efforts on women's issues; Parce spoke of women "who are Socialists at heart" but were "women's women first" and did "not feel that the interests of women would be safe in the hands of the Socialist party" because of the ignorant, patronizing remarks that often fell from the lips of prominent male Socialists.[15]
The Socialist Woman analyzed the historical connections between capitalism and patriarchy much as did male writers. Following Engels, most agreed that women's oppression began with the rise of private property, long before the advent of capitalism. Men subjugated women so that each husband could appropriate the fruits of his wife's and daughters' labor and insure that his own male children would inherit his property. However, conservative male socialists argued that this link between private property and women's subjugation meant that the socialization of productive property would automatically liberate women. In this rendition, no special efforts were needed for women, who could not win freedom before the revolution and would inevitably inherit it afterwards. Socialist women disagreed.
Most Socialist women asserted that the condition of women had deteriorated under capitalism, especially in recent decades. Capitalists had expropriated women's skills and taken their work out of the home into exploitative and dangerous factories; this had forced women into the maelstrom of competitive production for profit. Yet this wrenching experience had emancipatory potential as well; by forcing women out of the isolation of the home into the wider world of industry and politics, it had immeasurably broadened their horizons and prepared them to struggle together with men for the liberation of all of humanity. At the same time, capitalism had eroded the position of the patriarch by making his job so insecure and his pay so low that he could not support a family. Further, when the patriarch had owned the tools and seemingly provided work for his wife and children, his ownership of their output seemed somehow legitimate; now, however, his wife and children worked outside the home and received their wages as individuals directly from the capitalist. The husband's expropriation of these wages violated even bourgeois standards of justice. For all these reasons capitalism portended the end of patriarchy when it thrust women into the horrors of industrial slavery, just as it had created its own gravedigger when it generated the working class.
Even while lamenting the traditional conservatism of women, Conger-Kaneko enthused that "the capitalist class, playing its legitimate part in social evolution, has given to womankind the habit of reading, and with this habit has come the power of reasoning." Socialist women had only to reap the harvest. Yet they had competitors, women in the bourgeois feminist movements. "They are going after our women of the working class, and to our everlasting shame, it will be to the sex-conscious woman's movement that our sisters will owe their awakening and their education, and it is to this movement that will give their allegiance, if we don't wake up and do something for them ourselves." Whitehead asked why Socialists should blame women "if they give their support to the parties who give them what they have a right to?"[16]
Socialist women also transformed the Socialist doctrine of inevitable triumph and used it for their own feminist purposes. Capitalist transformations of the economy guaranteed that women would attain the vote, enter industry in increasing numbers, and become a major factor in social life; the only question was what impact these trends would have on the march to Socialism. Elsa Untermann confidently predicted that "side by side with, and dependent upon, the development of capitalist production into Socialist production, goes the development of the capitalist woman into the Socialist woman." England, speaking of the suffrage campaign, similarly averred that "social evolution guarantees it. As to the final outcome we have no fear. It is only for the hastening of that outcome that we labor."[17]
Such a belief generates the paradox that afflicted Puritan theology and orthodox Marxism: why should the individual struggle for a preordained goal? Socialist women responded creatively and diversely to this challenge. Parce compared the proper Socialist attitude towards woman's emancipation with their policy towards working-class struggles. "Socialists recognize that the process of evolution would bring in the co-operative commonwealth, in the course of time, quite without the intervention of the Socialist party." But the party does not cease or abate its work because of this knowledge. "Neither do we forswear our sex-consciousness because of the benefits that evolution may be expected to bring to women." Cole took a somewhat different approach in her effort to galvanize men. She claimed that although feminism would surely triumph, the SP might fail if it did not align itself with the forces of historical necessity. "It is not for [women] that I speak," she said. "We will get the ballot; never fear. I speak for the party." On another occasion she warned that "this is the age of woman, and that movement which does not make an appeal to womankind is bound to suffer confusion and possible defeat at the moment when supremacy would seem imminent." She warned the party that "men cannot inaugurate a better society, except they do it in harmony with evolution." Another feminist, echoing statements familiar in the orthodox Marxist canon, asserted that "the political party which stands for that which is to be necessarily grows, while those which support that which has outlived its usefulness will die."[18]
Many Socialist women predicted that the capitalists would enfranchise women in an effort to defeat the rising tide of Socialism. If the SP did not educate, recruit, and mobilize women, they would remain a reactionary class which would save capitalism from its otherwise inevitable downfall. Socialist women pointed out that even if the SP enfranchised women after it came to power, as party conservatives claimed it would, these neophyte voters would defeat Socialism at the next election. Helen Unterman agreed; the SP must train women, as it educated the working class, for freedom and self-governance as part of its march towards Socialism. "Under Socialism women will be a part of the whole public life," she said. "They might as well begin now to train themselves for their future position." Many writers argued that women in suffrage states were already far more politically sophisticated than those in non-suffrage states. Mila Tupper Maynard complained that "after a decade in a suffrage state the atmosphere elsewhere, even in many well-meaning Socialist circles, is oppressive."[19]
Lest feminist rhetoric frighten timid males, however, Conger-Kaneko and The Socialist Woman vigorously argued that Socialist feminism, far from disrupting the family, would ensure happy Socialist homes. Socialism would redeem the home after the revolution, and the very struggle for Socialism would transform the marriages of Socialist couples in the present. Further, women's involvement in the Socialist movement would change the home from a bastion of capitalist indoctrination to a building block of the future Socialist society. The SP, Conger-Kaneko said, was more than a political party. "Our principles reach into every department of human life, into the most intimate relations of home life, as well as into our social and business activities.... Let us educate our women for the upbuilding of Socialist homes." This would almost insure the triumph of Socialism, for "once the mind of the woman of this land comes to accept Socialism, other forces will count for little."[20]
The Socialist Woman reassuringly described female party activists as model wives and mothers. Theresa Malkiel was "a model housekeeper"; May Woods Simon was "the most devoted mother of my acquaintance.... [a] self-effaced beautiful little woman"; the Mexican radical Andrea Gonzales was a "little slip of a creature--so pretty and sweet and pure, and yet so firm and invincible and revolutionary." Even Kate Richards O'Hare, a self-described "union man" because of her membership (almost unique for a woman) in the International Association of Machinists, won praise as the devoted mother of four. She was, The Progressive Woman assured its readers, "not a bit masculine" even though she could "ride a bronco as well as she can make biscuits" and shoot a rifle with the best of them. O'Hare herself, a forceful lecturer who was often away from home, reassured jittery male Socialists upon her nomination for Congress in 1910 that "I long for domestic life, home, and children with every fibre of my being. Nothing is of less interest to me than practical politics and public speaking has lost its novelty. I always start of a trip with a feeling of depression. But there is the call of Socialism," which alone could rescue the home from the depredations of capitalism. When socialism triumphed, she would "agree to become a candidate for nothing different than what the average woman's life should be."[21] Disingenuously, O'Hare did not describe her vision of women's lives under Socialism--one that differed radically from that of most Socialist men.
The Socialist women touted the benefits of Socialist wives who vigorously aided their husbands' party and union activities. Non-socialist wives, they said, opposed such activities because they entailed expense and drew the husband out of the home. Socialist wives, on the contrary, understood the purposes of the privations imposed by strikes and the necessity of paying Party dues. The Socialist Woman occasionally cited evidence that Socialist men actively preferred Socialists when choosing a wife. It also praised the greater love and harmony characterizing the Socialist version of companionate marriage. Anita Block enthused that "perhaps the most ideal relation that has yet existed between man and woman is that of the Socialist husband and wife," who worked together as equals for a transcendent cause. "Clara Brown" concluded her diary by exclaiming that she and her husband "are as happy as two young lovers! It is a good thing for two people to be just in love with each other. But when they have a third great cause upon which to focus their mutual affection and their joint intellects--then it is absolute glory. They can actually feel themselves grow in strength and knowledge and power. The little narrow, self-concentration vanishes, and all the world becomes one's work-a-day and holiday abiding place."[22]
Mere SP membership and activity improved a couple's marriage, but Socialism would transform the institution of marriage itself. Women, freed from degrading economic dependence on a man and granted free and equal access to the means of production, would marry for love alone. Men would benefit from this as much as women. Fully realized, developed persons would love each other for their unique qualities and live in a harmony unruffled by base utilitarian concerns. According to Elsa Untermann, "man's passion has been made vile by woman's years of enslavement.... Woman also has sex needs" and "longs ardently" for "companionship and mutual love instead of submission on the one hand and mere passion on the other." Modern women want a complete, mutually fulfilling, and purer love, "a man with whom they will be able to labor together at whatever task life has set for them."[23]
Garbutt similarly warned men that "as long as the marriage relation is perverted as it is today by woman's economic necessities, there can be no freedom, no equality, no joy, no lasting sympathy between man and wife." Marriages contracted for economic motives were doomed, while even those based on love were often destroyed by the "utter dependence of the wife." When women worked outside the home at dignified jobs, they would more fully share their husband's life and values. Similar experiences would develop "a common culture" and "sympathy of thought and interest that will bind them more closely together and make their relations richer and more harmonious." Braverman asserted that working wives would revivify the home, have more ideas and energy, and contribute economically to a more prosperous family. Professional housekeeping and childcare, of higher quality than those provided by "the overworked housewife," would free the wife for paid employment outside the home. "The home would be a place to rest in--not to cook in. The wife would be as glad as her pal to be at home. And the kiddies would be glad to see their parents again, and greet them with delight. Is there anything dreadful in this?"[24] Some equal marriages, Braverman asserted, were appearing even under capitalism.
The Socialist Woman offered one additional reassurance to men: Socialist feminism would improve the party even as it transformed the Socialist home. To the exasperation of many Socialist women, many male SP members stubbornly insisted that the Woman's National Committee was an autonomous organization, rather than a part of the SP's national machinery. Socialist women often reminded such men that the WNC was a committee of the party, just like any other committee. It neither had nor aspired to autonomy, any more than did the committees on agriculture or labor. The WNC was not a separatist institution which detached women from the regular party apparatus or organized them separately from men. On the contrary, it recruited women for the party locals, even as it worked to transform those locals into environments hospitable to women. The frequency with which these reassurances appeared, however, imply that many men obdurately refused to listen.
Socialist women, nevertheless, confidently predicted that women, given a chance, would participate as equals in every sphere of Socialist activity. Not every woman, of course, would become a brilliant orator or master the intricacies of Marxist theory. Nor was this necessary; every woman who understood the causes and cure for the evils of capitalism would make a loyal party member. "If she wants to go into history and biology, why, let her," Conger-Kaneko urged. "It will help her, but if she hasn't time, she can be a good, influential Socialist anyway. The same holds true of men. Workingmen haven't time to become scholars. If they had they wouldn't need Socialism."[25]
Yet Socialist women also asserted that women would occupy a distinct niche in the Socialist transformation of society. Women would inject new energy into SP campaigns against capitalist evils which directly afflicted them, such as prostitution, child labor, and death-trap tenements. In the process, they would convert bourgeois women who worked for these same causes. Women would fight for better public schools and foster alternatives to them and to the militaristic Boy Scout movement. Conger-Kaneko, utilizing the conservative male (and radical feminist) view of women as prime nurturers, said that "the mothers in the home, school teachers, Sunday school teachers--in every avenue of child life, the woman is the teacher.... Men haven't time for it. They aren't as fit for it as are women." Another writer averred that "to reach the children it is absolutely necessary to reach the teachers of children--the mothers and teachers."[26]
Socialist women bitterly assailed the public school system for indoctrinating children in capitalist and militarist values. "You cannot leave the training of the minds of your children in the hands of the ruling class," Wood-Simons admonished her comrades. The public schools, she complained, considered working-class children as raw materials for capitalist death-mills, rather than as full persons with unique capacities. Children were deprived of vibrant new scientific knowledge by antiquated textbooks, and psychologically mutilated by old-fashioned methods of instruction that ignored recent advances in child development and psychology. Maley indignantly asserted that "our modern educational institutions retain the worthy purpose of all the tortures that have blackened the face of the past; all this to the end that the proper mental attitude may be created in our students toward the order of industrial slavery now prevailing." Another writer agreed that sending children to capitalist schools and expecting them to emerge as socialists was "the height of impractibility" because "the impressions of childhood are in the majority of cases graven beyond eradication." Even "the most revolutionary Socialist today carries in his soul the scars of a former bourgeois training." Hazlitt, writing about "Capitalist Education as a Means of Subjugation," warned that the miseducation of slaves could cause ideas to persist long after the conditions which had inspired them had disappeared; this could retard or even prevent the advent of Socialism. Socialist women also complained that many working-class families could not afford to send their children to school, and cited official statistics showing that huge numbers of those who did attend were so malnourished that they could not profit from instruction.[27]
Women, it was asserted, must remake the schools in the course of refashioning society. Socialist parents must involve themselves in the management of the schools, encourage Party members to apply for jobs as teachers and principals, and run candidates for school boards. Socialist women actually created their own Socialist Sunday Schools which offered instruction, singing, and entertainment. These, it was hoped, would educate children in Socialist principles and attract women who would not otherwise join the party by giving them a field of activity. Socialist women hoped that even non-Socialist parents would enroll their children for the educational and social benefits; these children would then convert their parents. The Socialist Woman offered advice and sample curricula, and publicized the efforts of women who constructed a widespread network of such schools. It also published stories, songs, and skits for and by children. Socialist women launched The Little Socialist, a children's magazine. The very fact that it was mostly women who organized and staffed these schools, however, evinces the persistence of stereotyped gender roles within the SP. Entreaties that men participate equally in this important enterprise apparently fell on deaf ears.[28]
The Socialist Woman also bitterly attacked the Boy Scout movement for inculcating patriotism, militarism, work discipline, and blind obedience to employers. The Boy Scouts, it asserted, prepared boys for their future role as soldiers who murdered "foreign" enemies and gunned down striking workers at the behest of their capitalist masters. The Progressive Woman devoted its November 1911 issue to denouncing the Boy Scouts. "You would not set up a toy scaffold and have your boy practice hanging dummies until he became a proficient hangman--then why give him a toy gun and train him in the other branch of legal murder--the Army?" The Boy Scouts, Socialist women alleged, seduced working-class boys, starved for fulfilling activity and an active social life, with pageantry, uniforms, medals, and activities. Some socialist women emulated their sisters in England by starting an alternative youth club, The Universal Scouts of Freedom, that offered boys and girls recreation and social activities while inculcating Socialist moral and political values.[29]
The Socialist Woman also claimed that Party women would enliven Socialist meetings and educate adults as well as children. Women could sell embroidery, raise money (as they did for churches), distribute literature, build Socialist labor temples, and boost the Socialist lyceum, a radical version of Chautauqua. The lyceum gave every member something to do, thus binding him or her to the Party; it stimulated the sale of Socialist literature; it offered a coherent series of lectures that would truly educate the audience, instead of an endless repetition of the same old introductory exposition of Socialism; and it gained public attention and newspaper coverage. Socialist women emphasized the practical nature of their sex; women craved meaningful activity and eschewed vapid theoretical debates. Women, Conger-Kaneko told men, would not remain in the Party "unless you keep them busy; and once they are started they will keep themselves busy. And keep you busy, too." Women would also add a social element to Socialist meetings, making them more attractive to women and men alike. "Social life is necessary to any organization," Conger-Kaneko said. "Women make it possible. We need women to give entertainments, socials, dances, suppers, children's parties, and a score of other diversions that constantly fill life in human society." SP locals, she said, should end their meetings with light refreshments and socializing. Some Socialists condemned this as frivolity, but it was necessary "if we are to make [the Socialist movement] the living, throbbing, human thing it should be."[30] The Socialist Woman, therefore, often accepted and utilized traditional notions of gender and the customary division of labor between the sexes in its argument for a distinct women's institutional structure within the Socialist party.
The Socialist women, therefore, directly addressed the male arguments which trivialized women's issues, and creatively refashioned key Marxist ideas in the process. They maintained the centrality of women in a viable Socialist movement, just as, in appealing to women, they argued that feminism implied Socialism. Without women, they warned male Socialists, the SP could not triumph; with them, it promised the men, victory was inevitable. Sex consciousness, they said, reinforced rather than diluted class consciousness. Socialist wives and mothers would strengthen the Socialist home, while transforming it into an incubator of social revolution. Simultaneously, however, the Socialist women transformed the meaning of Socialist marriage in portentous ways.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] Male arguments against feminist demands never appear directly in The Socialist Woman; we know of them only from their rebuttals.
[2] The Progressive Woman set these goals by 1913, and frequently boosted them in ads and articles.
[3] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW February 1910 and October 1910; see also Josephine Cole, "The International and Women Suffrage," PW November 1907.
[4] Whitehead, "What About Woman's Suffrage," PW April 1910; Stern, SW "The Socialist Party and Women, July 1908.
[5] JCK< "Are the Interests of Men and Women Identical?," SW May 1908; Elsa Untermann, "The Suffrage Question at the Congress," PW June 1910.
[6] "To Our Readers," SW August 1907; JCK, "A Party-Owned Press," CN April 1914; Downing, "Official Protection of Vice, II," PW August 1909.
[7] Le Fevre, "Sex Consciousness in the Class Struggle," PW July 1910.
[8] Kaneko, "Where is Your Wife," SW August 1907 (reprinted as a leaflet); Brewer, SW January 1908; Brown, "Why Women Should Organize," SW July 1907; squib, PW August 1909; Editorials, "Strike of the Shirtwaist Strikers," SW Jan 1910.
[9] Meta Anges England, "Woman Suffrage and Socialism," PW April 1910; C.F. Dight, "Equal Opportunity Must Be Inherited," PW January 1910.
[10] JCK, "In This Our World," March 1913; squib, PW September 1909.
[11] TM, "Where Do We Stand of the Woman Question?", ISR, August 1909.
[12] PW February 1910 squib; Brewer, "Woman's Enslaver," PW April 1913; Le Fevre, "Sex Consciousness in the Class Struggle," PW July 1910; "For Socialist Locals," PW February 1911.
[13] Mari Jo Buhle, "Lena Morrow Lewis: Her Rise and Fall," in Sally M. Miller, Flawed Liberation: Socialism and Feminism, Greenwood Press, Westport Connecticut, 1981. Lewis did demand that women eschew separatism and participate as equals in the regular party organizations.
[14] Lewis, "The Woman Suffrage Movement," PW March 1911.
[15] Parce, "Women and the Socialist Philosophy," PW September 1909, reprinted from The International Socialist Review. Parce and others assailed Joseph Cohen, a conservative Socialist, for patronizing remarks in The International Socialist Review. Cohen had written, "The impulse below intellect is intuition, which is developed further in many animals than in man. Thus animals scent danger more quickly than man and are better weather prophets. And because woman is nearer to the lower forms than man, intuition is more deeply seated in the female of the race, enabling her to peremptorily pass judgments that the male arrives at only after laborious thought. Intuition is often spoken of as a feminine attribute." Cohen, "Socialism for Students, VIII. Socialist Philosophy," ISR, June 1909, p. 966. In the previous installment of this series, in the May issue, Cohen had discussed at greater length the alleged differences between male and female sensibilities, and had strongly endorsed equal rights for women. Cohen, presumably stung by the criticism he had evoked, repaired relations with the Socialist women and frequently contributed articles to The Progressive Woman.
[16] JCK, "Why 'The Socialist Woman' Comes Into Existence," SW June 1907; JCK, "The Progressive Woman," April 1910; Whitehead, "What About Woman's Suffrage," PW April 1910.
[17] Untermann, "Capitalism and the Woman Question," PW March 1910; England, "Woman Suffrage and Socialism," PW April 1910.
[18] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," SW November 1908; Cole, in "Socialist Women Hold Meetings During Convention Week," SW June 1908; JCK, SW June 1907 squib; "Woman Candidate for State Secretary," PW November 1909.
[19] Kaneko, "Where is Your Wife?," SW August 1907; Untermann, "What Environment Has to do with Women," SW September 1907; Mila Tupper Maynard, "Women's Vote Effective," SW December 1908; see also article by Luella Twining in SW December 1908.
[20] JCK, "Must Have Socialist Homes or None," SW September 1907; JCK, "Victory will Follow Knowledge," SW January 1909.
[21] Malkiel was featured in PW May 1909; "Our Women Delegates to the International," PW August 1910; "The Heroine of the Mexican Revolution," PW May 1909; Kate Richards O'Hare was featured in PW August 1910. For the first several years, most issues of The Socialist Woman had a picture of a prominent Socialist woman on the cover, and briefly profiled her in the issue. A remarkable number of these profiles extol the beauty, delicacy, and wifely qualities of their subjects.
[22] Bloc, symposium of New York women on suffrage, PW March 1910; "Clara Brown's Diary," N. 5," PW May 1909.
[23] Elsa Untermann, "Capitalism and the Woman Question," PW March 1910. The original quotation was framed as a question.
[24] Garbutt, "The Woman Movement and Marriage," CN January 1914; Braverman, "Things in the Making," CN April 1914.
[25] JCK, "What Women Can Do," PW August 1910.
[26] JCK, "What Women Can Do," PW August 1910; "Go After the Teacher," PW November 1909.
[27] Simons, "Industrial Education and the Public Schools," PW May 1910; "Go After the Teacher," PW November 1909; Maley, "The Suffrage and Freedom," SW February 1908; Hazlitt, "Capitalist Education as a Means of Subjugation," PW November 1911; Thomas Wood, "To the Health of Our Children," PW December 1912.
[28] Fuller, "Industrial Infanticide," PW June-July 1913; "Socialist Sunday Schools in England," SW November 1907; Helen Lowry, "The Importance of Socialist Sunday Schools," PW December 1910; Pearl Lanfersiek, "Socialist Sunday School," SW October 1909; Mary Livingston, "Socialist Sunday Schools," PW November 1909; Kendrick Shedd, "Men and Socialist Schools," The American Socialist, January 2, 1915. The definite account of the Socialist Sunday Schools is Kenneth Teitelbaum, Schooling for "Good Rebels": Socialist Education for Children in the United States, 1900-1920 (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1993).
[29] PW November 1911, Boy Scout Issue; Georgia Kotsch, "Some Boy Scout History," PW July 1911; George Kirkpatrick, "The Boy Scout Movement," PW February 1911; Mrs. J.F. Kiefner, "Universal Scouts of Freedom," PW November 1911. A letter in PW, August 1911 claimed that the largest of the Boy Scout organizations was not militaristic; JCK replied that nonetheless Socialists should create their own boys' club.
[30] "By Arthur Brooks Baker," PW September 1912; JCK, "What Women Can Do," PW August 1910; JCK, "How Women Helped Local M--," PW October 1911.