THE SOCIALIST WOMEN'S ATTACK ON TRADITIONAL VALUES: MARRIAGE, FAMILY, AND THE HOME
In no area of life was the Socialist women's revolutionary stance as uncompromising as their stance on traditional gender roles. The Socialist Woman thoroughly and vociferously repudiated almost every aspect of customary marriage and the family. Socialist women consistently attacked these institutions as a form of female slavery, a virtual death sentence for innumerable children, a sure recipe for unhappy homes, and an incubator of conservative, narrow-minded women. The Socialist women so thoroughly redefined the family and the home that they in effect demanded the complete abolition of both institutions and the substitution of entirely new ones in their place.
Conger-Kaneko branded marriage as, for women, "the final annihilation of the self"; a wife was "the slave of a slave." Wives were often "mere menials, mere conveniences for the sake of saving a few pennies, which often are later spent in dissipation and upon other women." The root of women's slavery, as that of the workers, lay in their economic dependence. Indeed, both Conger-Kaneko and Lida Parce believed that economic dependence was more destructive even than the patriarchal marriage contract, which legally enslaved women. "If marriage is serfdom," Conger-Kaneko said, "it is because of woman in the contract is dependent upon the man she marries for her support. This dependence, and this alone, is the basis of the slavery of woman, not only in the marriage relation, but in the shop, the factory, the mill, as well. The woman who is dependent on ANY man, whether in the home or out, for her food and clothes, may be regarded as a serf. She must take what the employer or her husband offers her, poor wages or good, a full life or a starved one, and she has no choice." Nothing but economic equality and independence could ameliorate this evil because "dependence upon an individual for actual support means always a degree of ownership by that individual of her personality or person." Women had performed creative, productive work in the home since time immemorial. Recently, however, capitalists had robbed women of their essential economic functions, replaced skilled household production for use with unskilled, mechanized production for profit outside the home, and expropriated the vast portion of the wage worker's product. Women became mere appendages of factory machinery at the workplace and unpaid servants of their husbands at home.[1]
Parce agreed that economic dependence undergirded woman's oppression in the home. Parce said that women had three options in their quest for survival: exclusive prostitution (marriage); promiscuous prostitution, or working "under conditions that make her produce several times as much value as she receives for her work." Even now, under capitalism, millions of women chose the latter option of "personal freedom in their work"; when Socialism collectivized production "so that every one shall receive the full value of his labor, woman will become for the first time really free." Parce proclaimed that when a woman no longer receives "the reward of her labor through the channel of her sex attachment," she was "no longer the sex property of her husband. The law may declare that she is his property, as indeed it does. But such a woman is, at least potentially, freed from the operation of that law."[2]
The degradation of women caused by economic dependence resulted in homes of horror, Conger-Kaneko said, because "the men and the women hold to each other through poverty, after love and even toleration are gone.... This dependence must of itself bring discord and unhappiness into the married life." Marriage destroyed men as well as women, but an unhappy man could readily abandon his wife because he could earn his living in the marketplace and was unburdened with the care of children. Meanwhile, the overworked wife and mother unwillingly neglected her children, especially if she also worked outside the home--a combination that Conger-Kaneko called "a killing and demoralizing" task. Marriage and motherhood were "too frequently a curse" to the wage-earning woman" because "the health destroying and soul killing pace that she must keep up renders her unfit for wifehood or motherhood." Malkiel similarly ridiculed conventional shibboleths about the sacredness of motherhood and the home, based as they were on mercenary motives, "as though anything can be sacred under a system which is founded on greed and the ability to kill."[3] The Socialist Woman depicted the traditional home as a virtual charnel house for women and children.
Socialist women also attacked the traditional home as characterized by primitive, repetitive labor and the isolation of the woman from all broader social currents. Hunt complained that the housewife works at "fifteen separate, specialized occupations, with crude tools and methods of four generations ago" instead of modern technology. Stern lamented that although savage women laughed together as they worked in groups, the modern housewife was alone in her drudgery. The home was "a sort of old curiosity shop of the relics of past stages, for no occupation is so utterly unprogressive in character, so hopelessly conservative in its methods, as the occupation of housekeeper." The home "has made the woman herself conservative, reactionary, blind to her own interests, and deaf to the call of that broader life which calls her and needs her today."[4]
The laws of the male state combined with woman's inadequate pay to fasten the chains of slavery upon her. In a devastating series of articles, Parce demonstrated that the husband had legal ownership of his wife's body, labor, earnings, and children. He could force her to work for him in the home without limit and without compensation, appropriate her wages, sexually assault her with impunity, and confiscate her children in the event of divorce. He could not kill or sell her, but otherwise his power was nearly absolute; she suffered "the penalties and obligations of slavery, without enjoying the protection arising from the market value of a slave." A husband had no legally-enforceable duty to feed or clothe his wife. Marriage, Parce said, was "a fraud perpetrated by the state upon its women."[5] No state printed the terms of the marriage contract upon its marriage licenses, for no free woman or honorable man would enter into such a contract if they understood its terms. In a brilliant and horrifying discussion of the concept of illegitimacy, Parce declared that mothers
must bear the economic as well as the psychological burden [of raising a child], unless she has entered into a contract whereby the father of the child becomes the owner of her body, or her property, of her services and earnings, of her child and of the services and earnings of her child.... The mother of the illegitimate child is the owner of her own body; there is no one who can violate her by force under the protection of the law. She owns her own wages, she can choose her place of residence, she preserves her contractual power and she is not only a guardian but the guardian of her child. In marriage she sacrifices every one of these advantages; but she is "respectable."[6]
The illegitimate child was also better off than his respectable siblings because the father could not confiscate his earnings, while his mother must support him. (Some states, solicitous of male taxpayers, did obligate the father to support his illegitimate child, but made no effective provisions for the support of legitimate offspring.) Women forfeited their freedom in a contract which involved "the utter negation of the woman in her legal, her economic, and even her maternal relation" only because other women, currying favor with the men who owned them, ostracized the unmarried women and their blameless children. Parce suggested that the concept of legitimacy should attach to the father, not the child; a legitimate father was one who begat a child the mother wanted and who fulfilled "his share of the burdens of parenthood."[7]
Jessie Ashley, an IWW member, argued that every woman, whether prostitute, "submissive wife or rebellious virgin" was virtually a white slave. Wives
must dress and eat and sleep and talk and walk as their husband's income and will dictates; who must work interminably or be odiously idle as his wishes or necessity prescribes; who must bear children unwillingly because it is a "crime" to instruct her how to prevent conception, yet [the state] imposes the legal duty of "serving" her husband as "wife" and calls it murder to prevent a birth, and this irrespective of what the state of her health may be or what kind of life her husband might be leading.[8]
In terms similar to Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman, Malkiel movingly described the plight of the wife whose health made pregnancy a virtual death sentence, yet who was preyed upon by her husband. She was "slowly sacrificed upon the altar of legitimized lust.... The poor soul has made a vow of conjugal duty and now considered herself bound by it" partly because she depended on him for her economic survival. Her husband was in reality "the vampire who was in the name of so-called love, sapping her life's blood." Most women were in the hands of such vampires, who sated their lust at the expense of the health and lives of those they claimed to love. Traditional religious and moral beliefs legitimized this marital relationship; "she is his chattel, his goods, and he often takes advantage of this fact in sapping all health and vitality from her." Parce summarized the views of most Socialist women when she charged that the marriage laws "stand in the way of any ethical standard of conduct between the sexes.... and surround it with suggestions of indignity, brutality, exploitation, lust, greed, and everything that is unlovely and repugnant to the sensibilities of refinement."[9]
According to Socialist woman, children suffered as much as wives from these arrangements. Most mothers, lacking time, energy, and training, stunted their children's psychological and mental development. Children were their parents' insurance policy and pension; many working-class parents, out of dire necessity, forced their children to work at enervating, dangerous jobs in the home or the factory. Parce charged that fathers in Southern mill towns begat numerous children and forced them to work themselves to death for his benefit; "it is easier for the patriarch to replenish their number than it would be to earn the amount of their wages himself. Thus the slaughter of the innocents proceeds." Conger-Kaneko asserted that six million American babies died, mostly unnecessarily, in every decade; multitudes more lingered on, malnourished, crippled, and physically and mentally injured. Every mother made a vital contribution to society by bearing her children, yet she received nothing from society in return, "not even the guarantee that society will not destroy her contribution before it is fully made... And yet we are told that nowhere in the world is womanhood revered so much as in the United States.... In America a woman and her children are the property of a man. The man is supposed to take care of his property. If he does, well and good. If he doesn't, then let the property suffer the consequences. The cheapest thing in the world is human life." No wonder that Whitehead said that women's sexuality "is made a matter of traffic, and motherhood, that should be the highest, holiest joy of womanhood, is the curse," that Parce concluded that marriage was "a license to a man to commit depredations against a woman and her children," and that Malkiel spoke of "the monstrosity of the nuptial vow."[10]
As a solution for these evils, The Socialist Woman proposed a revolutionary transformation of the home and of traditional gender roles. Moore demanded "a new home to correspond with the new woman and new man and the new life.... in which all shall live their individual lives, irrespective of sex, age, caste, or color." Conger-Kaneko similarly asserted that for the new woman "there must open a new society, a new world. The complete emancipation of woman is itself a revolution."[11] The Socialist Woman demanded economic equality and independence for all women; the destruction of the patriarchal household and inauguration of complete legal equality for women; the mechanization and professionalization of household tasks and childcare; and a broadened conception of social motherhood that made fathers and society, as well as mothers, responsible for the nurture of children.
Economic independence was the first demand of the Socialist-feminist program. Conger-Kaneko demanded that women become "wholly independent from man. Economic independence is, indeed, the keynote of woman's entire need. Dependence upon an individual for actual support means always a degree of ownership by that individual of her personality or person."[12] The Socialist women demanded economic independence not only from their husbands, but also from their capitalist masters; mere wage-slave equality with men would not suffice. Women and men needed salaries sufficient to support themselves in independence, so that they would marry only for love, and not for money or services. Although some privileged women and men could already earn such an income--and such women were avoiding marriage in large numbers--the masses of women and men could achieve this only when they collectively owned the means of production, produced for use under conditions of their own choosing, and paid no tribute to capitalist parasites.
Next, Socialist women demanded full legal equality with men: control over their own bodies, labor, and earnings. This entailed the complete destruction of traditional marriage and of the slave marriage contract. It also implied the rights of divorce and of birth control. Although Socialist women sometimes claimed that Socialism and feminism would virtually eliminate divorce by destroying its causes (poverty, overwork, crowded tenements, and the legal subordination of wives), they also asserted women's right to terminate an unsatisfactory marriage. Malkiel, countering arguments that blamed divorce on the selfishness of the new woman, declared that many couples would render their country and humanity a service by ending marriages that had degenerated into "nothing more than a conventional burden." Mutually-detesting couples remained married for the sake of social appearances or out of a misguided concern for their children, forgetting "that nothing warps the children's character so much as discord between the parents." Conger-Kaneko also approved of divorce, believing it sufficient that people arrange their domestic affairs in a manner satisfactory to the individuals concerned.[13]
The Socialist Woman, of course, also demanded that women take control of their own sexuality and bodies inside the home and outside of it. "Woman," Malkiel proclaimed, "has a right to assert her wishes in regards to sexual relations." Socialist women unequivocally demanded the end of marital rape and enforced motherhood; they regarded legalized birth control as both an individual right against their husbands and as a political protest against the murderous capitalist state. Janet Pearl complained that women were regarded as mere breeding machines but enthused that "with religious superstition cast aside she can refuse to bring forth children for the sole purpose of supplying wage slaves for capitalist markets." Parce similarly charged that the uproar over "race suicide" stemmed from the capitalist state's need for a new citizens, "partly to die preventable deaths from social causes" and partly as workers, cannon fodder for the armed forces, and prostitutes. In all these cases, women were considered as but means to an end, machines for the satisfaction of needs outside their own welfare. But, she predicted, "women will use their withholding power until preventable deaths from social causes cease." In March 1912, The Progressive Woman published "A Man's Letter," a devastating picture of the horrendous consequences of enforced motherhood for women, children, men, and society at large.[14]
The Socialist Woman considered prostitution a woman's issue as well as a class one, another denial of women's control over their bodies and sexuality. Prostitution, it claimed, was seldom if ever a voluntary choice on the part of the victim. In addition to its roots in capitalism, prostitution resulted from male lust and the male double standard. Socialist women attacked the patrons of brothels as "prostitute men" and pointed out that they far outnumbered the female variety. Such men inflicted themselves on helpless women in the knowledge that they would escape all censure, while the woman suffered irredeemable disgrace and ruin for the slightest deviation from male-defined propriety. Men contracted venereal disease through this traffic (Conger-Kaneko claimed that 60% of men had gonorrhea and 12% syphilis) and infected their innocent and unsuspecting wives. Many women were ruined by their employers, who demanded sexual favors for jobs or for the small perks that could mean the difference between life and death. Most capitalists paid women less than a living wage, thus acting as virtual recruiting dens for white slaves. The Socialist Woman depicted the prostitute's life as a life of horror as well as of shame, and claimed (although statistics varied) that one-third of the prostitutes died in any given year.[15] This mortality rate exceeded even that of the textile mills. Socialist women complained that the police and the courts acted in concert with brothel owners, and returned fleeing slaves to their owners in exchange for kickbacks and bribes. Capitalist governments, in other words, protected property in girl and women slaves as they did other capitalist property. Because a women considered unchaste was outside the protection of the law, a procurer could kidnap and rape a girl and then use her lack of virginity as an excuse for enslaving her. The Progressive Woman described one such case, where a fifteen year old girl accused a man of rape; the rapist presented other men who also claimed to have assaulted the girl, whereupon she was incarcerated in a refuge for wayward girls, while "the self-confessed criminals" went free.[16]
Malkiel summarized the Socialist women's indictment in her statement that "the most frequent causes [of prostitution] are poverty and the sensuality of bestial men who are creating the demand." Women and men accept prostitute men as social equals, and marry them to our respectable daughters, while "we heap shame and abuse upon the girl who succumbs to starvation, and in distress exchanges her body for bread.... Those of us who have homes and are respected members of society cannot realize the depth of degradation and misery that those women are subject to. Even the market of shame is overcrowded, and after a woman loses the first bloom of youth she is left to starve like a dog in the street, without human pity or help." Malkiel thundered that "it is the pure and the good who are responsible for the great and most shameful evil of the twentieth century. It is within your power, mothers of the race, to quench it, before it spreads any further." Male law and moral standards divided the so-called "good" from "bad" women, but all women must unite to overthrow their common oppression. Laws against prostitution further degraded the victims, by allowing corrupt politicians and police to harass and extort from them.[17]
Parce also denounced the entire ethos upon which prostitution rested, thundering that the very term "fallen women" only "exists for a society in which a woman's sole value is a sexual one." Capitalism, of course, reinforced this patriarchal degradation of women, and divided the "good" from the "bad" just as it divided the workers into competing, mutually suspicious groups. Grace Brewer lamented that "the women on either side of the line that has been drawn by so-called civilized society, which divides the good from the bad, are calling to each other, but they encounter a huge wall at every turn in the shape of filthy Profit.... The hands of the woman-victim and the woman-rescuer are almost touching." Caroline Lowe thundered that "If I do not condemn a system that works [the prostitute's] destruction, a thousand times greater condemnation is resting upon me than should fall to the victim whom I have helped to murder."[18]
To combat women's oppression, The Socialist Woman strenuously advocated the mechanization, professionalization, and socialization of housework and childcare as a remedy for the backbreaking, inefficient, and isolating drudgery of the house-slave. Conger-Kaneko enthused that "machinery makes [a] new woman with new matrimonial ideals," while Eleanor Dean saw machinery as "the emancipator of womankind" from "the hard, deadening, soul-destroying round of household service" that enslaved women to men, kept them dependent and throttled their intellectual development. Mechanization of housework and childcare, Socialist women asserted, would free women for dignified, paid employment outside the home. Trained professionals with a natural aptitude for their work would perform their jobs better and more efficiently than untrained, unspecialized housewives. For example, some women had a natural aptitude for educating children of one age, other women had affinities for some other age, while some women did not enjoy raising children at all. The professionalization of childcare would ensure that each caregiver attended children of an age she most liked; in addition, such workers would be expertly trained and equipped with the latest scientific knowledge of child psychology and development. Men, being physically stronger, would do most housework for wages. Socialist women frequently asserted that traditional motherhood was a horror to women and their children alike. The woman confined in the home, one writer asserted, "became a very prolific child bearer, though a very inefficient rearer of children."[19]
Socialism combined with feminism would transform the home. Workers, managing the socialized industries and receiving their full product, would greatly shorten the workday, so that parents would return to their homes refreshed and invigorated by their jobs, with time and energy to enjoy their children. The shorter workday plus the professionalization of housework would liberate vast quantities of leisure time, enabling workers to cultivate themselves and their family relationships. Parenting and marriage would become joyous, fulfilling play rather than tedious, burdensome work. Moore enthused that under Socialism the home, traditionally a "haven from a heartless world" for the man only, "will be a place of rest, recreation, and renewal of mental and spiritual power for mothers and daughters, as well as for fathers and sons."[20]
The Socialist Woman sometimes implied that housework would remain a woman's job within the private family. In this vein, Untermann demanded scientific training for mothers, which would elevate motherhood in the eyes of its practitioners and society at large. Other writers demanded that men do their share, though this was stressed less than the mechanization and professionalization of the housewife's traditional duties. In either case, the socialization of production would raise wages and lower prices by ending profit, thus enabling workers to purchase the latest labor-saving devices. In addition, socialized production for use would more efficiently mass-produce goods and systematically develop new and better machinery. Each family would therefore own the best equipment that modern technology could produce. After describing the wonders of modern technology, Conger-Kaneko promised that "all of these conveniences you could have in your home today, if you had the money. Under Socialism you will have it." At other times, The Socialist Woman implied that individual households would do little housework; professionals would clean and do laundry for every individual home, or families would live in large cooperative establishments. As one writer asserted, "machinery is always connected with large establishments, and the home will be no exception"; by the time mechanization was complete "the home as we know it will have disappeared." Parce heaped scorn on Home Economics courses in the public schools. "We thought it would safeguard 'the home' to have the girls taught, outside the home, to do things in the home, which we do not think it worthwhile either to do or to teach the girls to do.... The trouble with domestic science is that when it is domestic it ceases to be scientific, and when scientific it ceases to be domestic."[21] Bread, for example, could be made cheaply, efficiently, and scientifically for thousands of people outside the home by a few workers.
The Socialist Woman predicted that in a socialist and feminist world, the boundaries between home and society would disappear. When paid experts raised children and did housework, wives would outgrow their obsessive concern with their own offspring (maladaptive in any case in a world where society at large decisively affected their welfare) and bestow their mother-love upon all children. Stern heralded "the dawn of a higher, nobler form of motherhood than any previously conceived: SOCIAL MOTHERHOOD." According to Inez Gillmore, "the time has come for women not to destroy the home, but to enlarge it until it covers the whole world; not to neglect the family, but to increase it until it embraces the entire human race." A Socialist and feminist society would perfect the best qualities of each individual human personality; these fulfilled persons would contribute their individual excellences to the fulfillment of society as a whole. Conflict between competing individuals, classes, and sexes would disappear; each individual's contribution to her family and to society as a whole include their own self-cultivation. Conger-Kaneko epitomized this belief when she said that "'woman and the home' means woman and the whole world, in modern interpretation."[22]
The Socialist Woman, therefore, advocated the complete destruction of the home and family in their familiar forms. Walden openly announced that when women were free, "marriage as we know it" would be regarded as a relic of barbarism and "of women's slavery."[23] Women would leave their individual homes for paid employment, while paid experts, and, secondarily, both men and women in the home, would perform women's traditional tasks. Women would attain full economic, legal, and political equality with men, thus transforming their status in the workplace, the polling booth, the kitchen, and the bedroom. Women would control their own bodies and sexuality, and bear children when and if they wished. Men and women would receive the full product of their labor, and manage the industries for the benefit of all. Because both could live independently as bachelors, they would marry for love alone, and divorce when love dissipated. Economic equality would combine with the annihilation of the patriarchal legal code to give women full control over their own bodies, labor, and earnings, making for an egalitarian home and society. The home would become the world, and the world the home.
Just as the new woman demanded a new world, this new world necessitated a new woman. The new socialist-feminist woman, unlike the later New Socialist Man, was a firm individualist as well as a "social mother." She eschewed parasitic idleness and longed for, and achieved, meaningful, creative, and productive work. She rejected the obliteration of individual personality that characterized the old woman. Conger-Kaneko demanded "woman's perfect freedom and right to develop her individual powers to their fullest extent." Moore pointed to Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot (exemplars for anarchist Emma Goldman and IWW editor-philosopher Ben Williams, respectively) as women "who lived their lives as they deemed they should be lived," and as a result gave treasures to the world. Malkiel, in terms similar to those of Williams and Goldman, cautioned that the task of self-liberation, which could only find fulfillment if individual women transformed their private lives in conformity with their political principles, "may be a long and painful one. Many of us may perish in the effort without leaving any evident trace of the long and bitter struggle. But woman will be fully compensated for it all when the goal is finally reached." Parce similarly proclaimed the identity of the personal and the political when she, echoing Emma Goldman, defined the modern martyr as a person whose life and personality required a new social order, but who was confronted by the recalcitrant demands of the old. "His individual revolution is a part of his contribution to the social revolution," Parce said. She urged that couples sign voluntary marriage contracts, whose egalitarian provisions would contradict and perhaps supersede the slave relationship established by the standard contract. Echoing the IWW's insistence on building the new within the shell of the old, Parce said that "this is one of the situations in which a new custom can grow up within the old without having to wait to formally abolish the old." In general, Parce asked that women evolve standards of morality and respectability "which meet their views and maintain their dignity," which economic freedom would empower them to do.[24]
Stern described the new female lifestyle when she asserted that "the weak, dependent, submissive creature, with her coquettish little wiles and her cunning strategies, is passing from existence. In her place enters the new woman, strong, independent and self-reliant, loyal and honest...." Yet this new socialist woman was well aware that mere individual self-cultivation, detached from and ignorant of, larger social struggles, was but another desiccated form of narrow self-indulgence. Individual self-cultivation and social service mutually reinforced each other; socialism "should appeal to her womanhood, to her motherhood, to her self-respect and to her sympathies, to her striving for freedom and her desire for a richer, fuller life." While disclaiming full agreement with Emma Goldman's incendiary views, The Socialist Woman touted America's foremost anarchist in 1909, years after the bitter conflict between Goldman and the Socialists had flared. In September 1913, shortly after the Socialist party had recalled IWW leader Big Bill Haywood from its National Executive Committee and virtually anathematized the Wobblies, it praised Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most prominent and flamboyant female organizer.[25]
The Socialist Woman stridently repudiated the traditional ideal of genteel womanhood. The lady-like woman, Sara Kingsbury declaimed, was "a gross violation of natural law. She is a crime in nature.... She is not for service, but for ornament, like the bric-a-brac that gathers dust and microbes on your mantle.... The more ignorant she is, the more lady-like she is.... The lady-like woman never considers herself an individual, but only an appendage to man.... To her the existing order is divine.... The wasted life is for the lady, the ideal life." Parce asserted that the new woman disdained "the bugaboos of disgrace that have been used to hold men and women in servitude" and recognized that "it is on a fearful and trembling practice of the virtues as defined by the ruling class, that the power of that class depends." When four Los Angeles Socialist women were arrested for speaking in public, they jauntily sent out dainty "At Home" cards, inviting visitors, who were warned that they would be served no refreshments. Those who could not attend were urged to send their regrets to the city police or the mayor.[26] As discussed above, Socialist women lamented that too many women had internalized the ethos of their own oppression.
The new woman who had cast off the chains of hegemony, however, demanded her rights in the present, not in any vague, distant future. The Progressive Woman, writing both before and after the Socialist party made advocacy of violence or illegal methods grounds for expulsion, praised, justified, and extenuated the violent and illegal tactics of the English suffragists. Women, it said, were an outlawed class, and women's rights were more important than capitalist property and law. When the suffragists smashed the windows of elite London shops, The Progressive Woman editorialized that women were criticized whatever they did and enthused that the new woman "is becoming independent, is reaching out, and taking the things she wants, and is doing the things she wants to do.... She is asking less and less for her 'rights,' and is beginning to take them with the same assurance that she takes the air and the sunshine." Eleanor Wentworth's husband predicted that "the free woman will laugh at the laws [man] has made to restrain her as at tales to scare a child."[27]
The Socialist women's attack on the traditional home and family must have deeply troubled the gender-conservative Socialist men whom they targeted for conversion. On the one hand, Socialist women promised that Socialist wives and mothers wold vastly improve the Socialist home for their husbands and children; on the other hand they vowed that Socialism would annihilate the home in its familiar form. This unacknowledged contradiction would bedevil the Socialist women, and render their hopes for male support largely nugatory.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] JCK, "The Economic Dependence of Husbands," SW November 1907; JCK, "Marriage and Divorce," SW July 1907; JCK, "Sex Subjection," PW August 1907.
[2] LP, "Woman and Industrial Freedom," SW, June 1908.
[3] JCK, "Marriage and Divorce," SW July 1907; JCK, "Machinery Makes New Women with New Matrimonial Ideals," SW December 1907; Malkiel, "Capitalism and the Home," SW January 1909.
[4] Hunt, featured in SW November 1907; Stern, "'Viribus Unitas'," PW January 1910.
[5] Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW April 1910; Parce, "Sex and 'Contractual Morality,'" PW January 1910.
[6] Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW June 1910.
[7] Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW June 1910.
[8] Ashley, "Who Are the White Slaves?," PW April 1913.
[9] Malkiel, "The Vampire," PW April 1910; Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW May 1910.
[10] Parce, "The Changing Fortunes of the Home," SW January 1909; JCK, "In the Trail of the Little White Hearse," SW September 1909; Whitehead, "What About Woman's Suffrage," PW April 1910; Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW June 1910; Malkiel, "Hedda Gabler," PW February 1910.
[11] Moore, "The Virtue of Daring," SW December 1907; JCK, "Is the American Family to Die?," PW March 1909.
[12] JCK, "Sex Subjection," SW August 1907.
[13] Malkiel, "Capitalism and the Home," SW January 1909; JCK, "Women and Socialism," SW October 1907.
[14] Malkiel, "The Vampire," PW April 1909; Pearl, "Women in Society," PW October 1907; Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW June 1909; Bert E.H.,"A Man's Letter," PW March 1912.
[15] JCK, "The Traffic in Girl Slaves," PW September 1910; Downing, "A Report on the White Slave Traffic," PW June 1910; Downing, "Why Socialists Should Expose the White Slave Traffic," PW July 1910; snippet, PW June 1910. The PW featured articles on the white slave traffic in June 1911, February 1912, and April 1913.
[16] Josephine Cole, "Party Politics and Prostitution," SW February 1908; Agnes Downing, "Benefits of a Larger Suffrage," May 1909; "The Cruelest Slavery of Modern Times," May 1909; Agnes Downing, "A Report on the White Slave Trade," PW June 1910; Downing, "Some Reasons Why," PW September 1910.
[17] Malkiel, "Our Unfortunate Sisters," SW November 1908;
[18] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW February 1910; Brewer, "The Trend of the Woman Movement," CN March 1914 and "Woman's Enslaver," PW April 1913; Caroline Lowe, "The Working Girl and Prostitution," PW June 1911.
[19] JCK, "Machinery Makes New Woman with New Matrimonial Ideals," SW December 1907; Dean, "To Lessen Household Labor," PW June 1909; Belle Oury, "Woman's Relation to Society," PW June 1910.
[20] Moore, "The Virtue of Daring," SW December 1907.
[21] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW June 1910 and PW August 1910; "Woman's Relation to Society," PW June 1910; Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW May 1909; JCK, "Housekeeping Under Socialism," SW September 1908. JCK also touted the benefits of communal households.
[22] Stern, "Motherly Love," SW October 1907; "Inez Haynes Gilmore," PW September 1913; JCK, "The Unrest of Woman," PW October 1913.
[23] Walden, "True Homes Under Socialism," SW, January 1908. After the demise of Conger-Kaneko's publication and of the WNC, Meta Stern Lilienthal directly stated that "You might as well face the fact, dear reader, that Socialism will destroy the home and the family as they exist today." She promised that the new home and family would be much better, and not "founded on the economic dependence of women." She also said that capitalism was destroying the traditional home and family in any case. Meta Stern Lilienthal, Women of the Future, Rand School for Social Science (New York, 1916), pp. 17-18.
[24] JCK, "Machinery Makes New Woman with New Matrimonial Ideals," SW December 1907; Moore, "The Virtues of Daring," SW December 1907; Malkiel, "The Tragedy of Human Passion," PW July 1909; Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," SW December 1908; Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW July 1910 and June 1910.
[25] Stern, "'Viribus Unitas,'" PW January 1910; the June 1909 PW reprinted William Marion's famous "The Daughter of the Dream"; "Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Social Rebel," PW September 1913.
[26] Kingsbury, "The Lady-Like Woman: Her Place in Nature," SW August 1908; Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," SW February 1909; "Socialist Women in Jail," SW August 1908.
[27] "Acres of Broken Glass," PW April 1912; Wentworth, "Woman's Portion," PW September 1910. See Pauline Newman, "Workers of the World," PW March 1913; Braverman, "Things in the Making," PW March 1913; JCK, "In This Our World," PW May 1913; Stern, "Women of Other Lands," PW May 1913. In May 1913, Braverman urged the unemployed to clog the jails and protest against a society that force-fed prisoners in jail (a reference to the National Woman's Party prisoners) while starving workers in society. Most writers stopped short of outright endorsement of violent tactics, but expressed sympathy for them.
Conger-Kaneko branded marriage as, for women, "the final annihilation of the self"; a wife was "the slave of a slave." Wives were often "mere menials, mere conveniences for the sake of saving a few pennies, which often are later spent in dissipation and upon other women." The root of women's slavery, as that of the workers, lay in their economic dependence. Indeed, both Conger-Kaneko and Lida Parce believed that economic dependence was more destructive even than the patriarchal marriage contract, which legally enslaved women. "If marriage is serfdom," Conger-Kaneko said, "it is because of woman in the contract is dependent upon the man she marries for her support. This dependence, and this alone, is the basis of the slavery of woman, not only in the marriage relation, but in the shop, the factory, the mill, as well. The woman who is dependent on ANY man, whether in the home or out, for her food and clothes, may be regarded as a serf. She must take what the employer or her husband offers her, poor wages or good, a full life or a starved one, and she has no choice." Nothing but economic equality and independence could ameliorate this evil because "dependence upon an individual for actual support means always a degree of ownership by that individual of her personality or person." Women had performed creative, productive work in the home since time immemorial. Recently, however, capitalists had robbed women of their essential economic functions, replaced skilled household production for use with unskilled, mechanized production for profit outside the home, and expropriated the vast portion of the wage worker's product. Women became mere appendages of factory machinery at the workplace and unpaid servants of their husbands at home.[1]
Parce agreed that economic dependence undergirded woman's oppression in the home. Parce said that women had three options in their quest for survival: exclusive prostitution (marriage); promiscuous prostitution, or working "under conditions that make her produce several times as much value as she receives for her work." Even now, under capitalism, millions of women chose the latter option of "personal freedom in their work"; when Socialism collectivized production "so that every one shall receive the full value of his labor, woman will become for the first time really free." Parce proclaimed that when a woman no longer receives "the reward of her labor through the channel of her sex attachment," she was "no longer the sex property of her husband. The law may declare that she is his property, as indeed it does. But such a woman is, at least potentially, freed from the operation of that law."[2]
The degradation of women caused by economic dependence resulted in homes of horror, Conger-Kaneko said, because "the men and the women hold to each other through poverty, after love and even toleration are gone.... This dependence must of itself bring discord and unhappiness into the married life." Marriage destroyed men as well as women, but an unhappy man could readily abandon his wife because he could earn his living in the marketplace and was unburdened with the care of children. Meanwhile, the overworked wife and mother unwillingly neglected her children, especially if she also worked outside the home--a combination that Conger-Kaneko called "a killing and demoralizing" task. Marriage and motherhood were "too frequently a curse" to the wage-earning woman" because "the health destroying and soul killing pace that she must keep up renders her unfit for wifehood or motherhood." Malkiel similarly ridiculed conventional shibboleths about the sacredness of motherhood and the home, based as they were on mercenary motives, "as though anything can be sacred under a system which is founded on greed and the ability to kill."[3] The Socialist Woman depicted the traditional home as a virtual charnel house for women and children.
Socialist women also attacked the traditional home as characterized by primitive, repetitive labor and the isolation of the woman from all broader social currents. Hunt complained that the housewife works at "fifteen separate, specialized occupations, with crude tools and methods of four generations ago" instead of modern technology. Stern lamented that although savage women laughed together as they worked in groups, the modern housewife was alone in her drudgery. The home was "a sort of old curiosity shop of the relics of past stages, for no occupation is so utterly unprogressive in character, so hopelessly conservative in its methods, as the occupation of housekeeper." The home "has made the woman herself conservative, reactionary, blind to her own interests, and deaf to the call of that broader life which calls her and needs her today."[4]
The laws of the male state combined with woman's inadequate pay to fasten the chains of slavery upon her. In a devastating series of articles, Parce demonstrated that the husband had legal ownership of his wife's body, labor, earnings, and children. He could force her to work for him in the home without limit and without compensation, appropriate her wages, sexually assault her with impunity, and confiscate her children in the event of divorce. He could not kill or sell her, but otherwise his power was nearly absolute; she suffered "the penalties and obligations of slavery, without enjoying the protection arising from the market value of a slave." A husband had no legally-enforceable duty to feed or clothe his wife. Marriage, Parce said, was "a fraud perpetrated by the state upon its women."[5] No state printed the terms of the marriage contract upon its marriage licenses, for no free woman or honorable man would enter into such a contract if they understood its terms. In a brilliant and horrifying discussion of the concept of illegitimacy, Parce declared that mothers
must bear the economic as well as the psychological burden [of raising a child], unless she has entered into a contract whereby the father of the child becomes the owner of her body, or her property, of her services and earnings, of her child and of the services and earnings of her child.... The mother of the illegitimate child is the owner of her own body; there is no one who can violate her by force under the protection of the law. She owns her own wages, she can choose her place of residence, she preserves her contractual power and she is not only a guardian but the guardian of her child. In marriage she sacrifices every one of these advantages; but she is "respectable."[6]
The illegitimate child was also better off than his respectable siblings because the father could not confiscate his earnings, while his mother must support him. (Some states, solicitous of male taxpayers, did obligate the father to support his illegitimate child, but made no effective provisions for the support of legitimate offspring.) Women forfeited their freedom in a contract which involved "the utter negation of the woman in her legal, her economic, and even her maternal relation" only because other women, currying favor with the men who owned them, ostracized the unmarried women and their blameless children. Parce suggested that the concept of legitimacy should attach to the father, not the child; a legitimate father was one who begat a child the mother wanted and who fulfilled "his share of the burdens of parenthood."[7]
Jessie Ashley, an IWW member, argued that every woman, whether prostitute, "submissive wife or rebellious virgin" was virtually a white slave. Wives
must dress and eat and sleep and talk and walk as their husband's income and will dictates; who must work interminably or be odiously idle as his wishes or necessity prescribes; who must bear children unwillingly because it is a "crime" to instruct her how to prevent conception, yet [the state] imposes the legal duty of "serving" her husband as "wife" and calls it murder to prevent a birth, and this irrespective of what the state of her health may be or what kind of life her husband might be leading.[8]
In terms similar to Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman, Malkiel movingly described the plight of the wife whose health made pregnancy a virtual death sentence, yet who was preyed upon by her husband. She was "slowly sacrificed upon the altar of legitimized lust.... The poor soul has made a vow of conjugal duty and now considered herself bound by it" partly because she depended on him for her economic survival. Her husband was in reality "the vampire who was in the name of so-called love, sapping her life's blood." Most women were in the hands of such vampires, who sated their lust at the expense of the health and lives of those they claimed to love. Traditional religious and moral beliefs legitimized this marital relationship; "she is his chattel, his goods, and he often takes advantage of this fact in sapping all health and vitality from her." Parce summarized the views of most Socialist women when she charged that the marriage laws "stand in the way of any ethical standard of conduct between the sexes.... and surround it with suggestions of indignity, brutality, exploitation, lust, greed, and everything that is unlovely and repugnant to the sensibilities of refinement."[9]
According to Socialist woman, children suffered as much as wives from these arrangements. Most mothers, lacking time, energy, and training, stunted their children's psychological and mental development. Children were their parents' insurance policy and pension; many working-class parents, out of dire necessity, forced their children to work at enervating, dangerous jobs in the home or the factory. Parce charged that fathers in Southern mill towns begat numerous children and forced them to work themselves to death for his benefit; "it is easier for the patriarch to replenish their number than it would be to earn the amount of their wages himself. Thus the slaughter of the innocents proceeds." Conger-Kaneko asserted that six million American babies died, mostly unnecessarily, in every decade; multitudes more lingered on, malnourished, crippled, and physically and mentally injured. Every mother made a vital contribution to society by bearing her children, yet she received nothing from society in return, "not even the guarantee that society will not destroy her contribution before it is fully made... And yet we are told that nowhere in the world is womanhood revered so much as in the United States.... In America a woman and her children are the property of a man. The man is supposed to take care of his property. If he does, well and good. If he doesn't, then let the property suffer the consequences. The cheapest thing in the world is human life." No wonder that Whitehead said that women's sexuality "is made a matter of traffic, and motherhood, that should be the highest, holiest joy of womanhood, is the curse," that Parce concluded that marriage was "a license to a man to commit depredations against a woman and her children," and that Malkiel spoke of "the monstrosity of the nuptial vow."[10]
As a solution for these evils, The Socialist Woman proposed a revolutionary transformation of the home and of traditional gender roles. Moore demanded "a new home to correspond with the new woman and new man and the new life.... in which all shall live their individual lives, irrespective of sex, age, caste, or color." Conger-Kaneko similarly asserted that for the new woman "there must open a new society, a new world. The complete emancipation of woman is itself a revolution."[11] The Socialist Woman demanded economic equality and independence for all women; the destruction of the patriarchal household and inauguration of complete legal equality for women; the mechanization and professionalization of household tasks and childcare; and a broadened conception of social motherhood that made fathers and society, as well as mothers, responsible for the nurture of children.
Economic independence was the first demand of the Socialist-feminist program. Conger-Kaneko demanded that women become "wholly independent from man. Economic independence is, indeed, the keynote of woman's entire need. Dependence upon an individual for actual support means always a degree of ownership by that individual of her personality or person."[12] The Socialist women demanded economic independence not only from their husbands, but also from their capitalist masters; mere wage-slave equality with men would not suffice. Women and men needed salaries sufficient to support themselves in independence, so that they would marry only for love, and not for money or services. Although some privileged women and men could already earn such an income--and such women were avoiding marriage in large numbers--the masses of women and men could achieve this only when they collectively owned the means of production, produced for use under conditions of their own choosing, and paid no tribute to capitalist parasites.
Next, Socialist women demanded full legal equality with men: control over their own bodies, labor, and earnings. This entailed the complete destruction of traditional marriage and of the slave marriage contract. It also implied the rights of divorce and of birth control. Although Socialist women sometimes claimed that Socialism and feminism would virtually eliminate divorce by destroying its causes (poverty, overwork, crowded tenements, and the legal subordination of wives), they also asserted women's right to terminate an unsatisfactory marriage. Malkiel, countering arguments that blamed divorce on the selfishness of the new woman, declared that many couples would render their country and humanity a service by ending marriages that had degenerated into "nothing more than a conventional burden." Mutually-detesting couples remained married for the sake of social appearances or out of a misguided concern for their children, forgetting "that nothing warps the children's character so much as discord between the parents." Conger-Kaneko also approved of divorce, believing it sufficient that people arrange their domestic affairs in a manner satisfactory to the individuals concerned.[13]
The Socialist Woman, of course, also demanded that women take control of their own sexuality and bodies inside the home and outside of it. "Woman," Malkiel proclaimed, "has a right to assert her wishes in regards to sexual relations." Socialist women unequivocally demanded the end of marital rape and enforced motherhood; they regarded legalized birth control as both an individual right against their husbands and as a political protest against the murderous capitalist state. Janet Pearl complained that women were regarded as mere breeding machines but enthused that "with religious superstition cast aside she can refuse to bring forth children for the sole purpose of supplying wage slaves for capitalist markets." Parce similarly charged that the uproar over "race suicide" stemmed from the capitalist state's need for a new citizens, "partly to die preventable deaths from social causes" and partly as workers, cannon fodder for the armed forces, and prostitutes. In all these cases, women were considered as but means to an end, machines for the satisfaction of needs outside their own welfare. But, she predicted, "women will use their withholding power until preventable deaths from social causes cease." In March 1912, The Progressive Woman published "A Man's Letter," a devastating picture of the horrendous consequences of enforced motherhood for women, children, men, and society at large.[14]
The Socialist Woman considered prostitution a woman's issue as well as a class one, another denial of women's control over their bodies and sexuality. Prostitution, it claimed, was seldom if ever a voluntary choice on the part of the victim. In addition to its roots in capitalism, prostitution resulted from male lust and the male double standard. Socialist women attacked the patrons of brothels as "prostitute men" and pointed out that they far outnumbered the female variety. Such men inflicted themselves on helpless women in the knowledge that they would escape all censure, while the woman suffered irredeemable disgrace and ruin for the slightest deviation from male-defined propriety. Men contracted venereal disease through this traffic (Conger-Kaneko claimed that 60% of men had gonorrhea and 12% syphilis) and infected their innocent and unsuspecting wives. Many women were ruined by their employers, who demanded sexual favors for jobs or for the small perks that could mean the difference between life and death. Most capitalists paid women less than a living wage, thus acting as virtual recruiting dens for white slaves. The Socialist Woman depicted the prostitute's life as a life of horror as well as of shame, and claimed (although statistics varied) that one-third of the prostitutes died in any given year.[15] This mortality rate exceeded even that of the textile mills. Socialist women complained that the police and the courts acted in concert with brothel owners, and returned fleeing slaves to their owners in exchange for kickbacks and bribes. Capitalist governments, in other words, protected property in girl and women slaves as they did other capitalist property. Because a women considered unchaste was outside the protection of the law, a procurer could kidnap and rape a girl and then use her lack of virginity as an excuse for enslaving her. The Progressive Woman described one such case, where a fifteen year old girl accused a man of rape; the rapist presented other men who also claimed to have assaulted the girl, whereupon she was incarcerated in a refuge for wayward girls, while "the self-confessed criminals" went free.[16]
Malkiel summarized the Socialist women's indictment in her statement that "the most frequent causes [of prostitution] are poverty and the sensuality of bestial men who are creating the demand." Women and men accept prostitute men as social equals, and marry them to our respectable daughters, while "we heap shame and abuse upon the girl who succumbs to starvation, and in distress exchanges her body for bread.... Those of us who have homes and are respected members of society cannot realize the depth of degradation and misery that those women are subject to. Even the market of shame is overcrowded, and after a woman loses the first bloom of youth she is left to starve like a dog in the street, without human pity or help." Malkiel thundered that "it is the pure and the good who are responsible for the great and most shameful evil of the twentieth century. It is within your power, mothers of the race, to quench it, before it spreads any further." Male law and moral standards divided the so-called "good" from "bad" women, but all women must unite to overthrow their common oppression. Laws against prostitution further degraded the victims, by allowing corrupt politicians and police to harass and extort from them.[17]
Parce also denounced the entire ethos upon which prostitution rested, thundering that the very term "fallen women" only "exists for a society in which a woman's sole value is a sexual one." Capitalism, of course, reinforced this patriarchal degradation of women, and divided the "good" from the "bad" just as it divided the workers into competing, mutually suspicious groups. Grace Brewer lamented that "the women on either side of the line that has been drawn by so-called civilized society, which divides the good from the bad, are calling to each other, but they encounter a huge wall at every turn in the shape of filthy Profit.... The hands of the woman-victim and the woman-rescuer are almost touching." Caroline Lowe thundered that "If I do not condemn a system that works [the prostitute's] destruction, a thousand times greater condemnation is resting upon me than should fall to the victim whom I have helped to murder."[18]
To combat women's oppression, The Socialist Woman strenuously advocated the mechanization, professionalization, and socialization of housework and childcare as a remedy for the backbreaking, inefficient, and isolating drudgery of the house-slave. Conger-Kaneko enthused that "machinery makes [a] new woman with new matrimonial ideals," while Eleanor Dean saw machinery as "the emancipator of womankind" from "the hard, deadening, soul-destroying round of household service" that enslaved women to men, kept them dependent and throttled their intellectual development. Mechanization of housework and childcare, Socialist women asserted, would free women for dignified, paid employment outside the home. Trained professionals with a natural aptitude for their work would perform their jobs better and more efficiently than untrained, unspecialized housewives. For example, some women had a natural aptitude for educating children of one age, other women had affinities for some other age, while some women did not enjoy raising children at all. The professionalization of childcare would ensure that each caregiver attended children of an age she most liked; in addition, such workers would be expertly trained and equipped with the latest scientific knowledge of child psychology and development. Men, being physically stronger, would do most housework for wages. Socialist women frequently asserted that traditional motherhood was a horror to women and their children alike. The woman confined in the home, one writer asserted, "became a very prolific child bearer, though a very inefficient rearer of children."[19]
Socialism combined with feminism would transform the home. Workers, managing the socialized industries and receiving their full product, would greatly shorten the workday, so that parents would return to their homes refreshed and invigorated by their jobs, with time and energy to enjoy their children. The shorter workday plus the professionalization of housework would liberate vast quantities of leisure time, enabling workers to cultivate themselves and their family relationships. Parenting and marriage would become joyous, fulfilling play rather than tedious, burdensome work. Moore enthused that under Socialism the home, traditionally a "haven from a heartless world" for the man only, "will be a place of rest, recreation, and renewal of mental and spiritual power for mothers and daughters, as well as for fathers and sons."[20]
The Socialist Woman sometimes implied that housework would remain a woman's job within the private family. In this vein, Untermann demanded scientific training for mothers, which would elevate motherhood in the eyes of its practitioners and society at large. Other writers demanded that men do their share, though this was stressed less than the mechanization and professionalization of the housewife's traditional duties. In either case, the socialization of production would raise wages and lower prices by ending profit, thus enabling workers to purchase the latest labor-saving devices. In addition, socialized production for use would more efficiently mass-produce goods and systematically develop new and better machinery. Each family would therefore own the best equipment that modern technology could produce. After describing the wonders of modern technology, Conger-Kaneko promised that "all of these conveniences you could have in your home today, if you had the money. Under Socialism you will have it." At other times, The Socialist Woman implied that individual households would do little housework; professionals would clean and do laundry for every individual home, or families would live in large cooperative establishments. As one writer asserted, "machinery is always connected with large establishments, and the home will be no exception"; by the time mechanization was complete "the home as we know it will have disappeared." Parce heaped scorn on Home Economics courses in the public schools. "We thought it would safeguard 'the home' to have the girls taught, outside the home, to do things in the home, which we do not think it worthwhile either to do or to teach the girls to do.... The trouble with domestic science is that when it is domestic it ceases to be scientific, and when scientific it ceases to be domestic."[21] Bread, for example, could be made cheaply, efficiently, and scientifically for thousands of people outside the home by a few workers.
The Socialist Woman predicted that in a socialist and feminist world, the boundaries between home and society would disappear. When paid experts raised children and did housework, wives would outgrow their obsessive concern with their own offspring (maladaptive in any case in a world where society at large decisively affected their welfare) and bestow their mother-love upon all children. Stern heralded "the dawn of a higher, nobler form of motherhood than any previously conceived: SOCIAL MOTHERHOOD." According to Inez Gillmore, "the time has come for women not to destroy the home, but to enlarge it until it covers the whole world; not to neglect the family, but to increase it until it embraces the entire human race." A Socialist and feminist society would perfect the best qualities of each individual human personality; these fulfilled persons would contribute their individual excellences to the fulfillment of society as a whole. Conflict between competing individuals, classes, and sexes would disappear; each individual's contribution to her family and to society as a whole include their own self-cultivation. Conger-Kaneko epitomized this belief when she said that "'woman and the home' means woman and the whole world, in modern interpretation."[22]
The Socialist Woman, therefore, advocated the complete destruction of the home and family in their familiar forms. Walden openly announced that when women were free, "marriage as we know it" would be regarded as a relic of barbarism and "of women's slavery."[23] Women would leave their individual homes for paid employment, while paid experts, and, secondarily, both men and women in the home, would perform women's traditional tasks. Women would attain full economic, legal, and political equality with men, thus transforming their status in the workplace, the polling booth, the kitchen, and the bedroom. Women would control their own bodies and sexuality, and bear children when and if they wished. Men and women would receive the full product of their labor, and manage the industries for the benefit of all. Because both could live independently as bachelors, they would marry for love alone, and divorce when love dissipated. Economic equality would combine with the annihilation of the patriarchal legal code to give women full control over their own bodies, labor, and earnings, making for an egalitarian home and society. The home would become the world, and the world the home.
Just as the new woman demanded a new world, this new world necessitated a new woman. The new socialist-feminist woman, unlike the later New Socialist Man, was a firm individualist as well as a "social mother." She eschewed parasitic idleness and longed for, and achieved, meaningful, creative, and productive work. She rejected the obliteration of individual personality that characterized the old woman. Conger-Kaneko demanded "woman's perfect freedom and right to develop her individual powers to their fullest extent." Moore pointed to Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot (exemplars for anarchist Emma Goldman and IWW editor-philosopher Ben Williams, respectively) as women "who lived their lives as they deemed they should be lived," and as a result gave treasures to the world. Malkiel, in terms similar to those of Williams and Goldman, cautioned that the task of self-liberation, which could only find fulfillment if individual women transformed their private lives in conformity with their political principles, "may be a long and painful one. Many of us may perish in the effort without leaving any evident trace of the long and bitter struggle. But woman will be fully compensated for it all when the goal is finally reached." Parce similarly proclaimed the identity of the personal and the political when she, echoing Emma Goldman, defined the modern martyr as a person whose life and personality required a new social order, but who was confronted by the recalcitrant demands of the old. "His individual revolution is a part of his contribution to the social revolution," Parce said. She urged that couples sign voluntary marriage contracts, whose egalitarian provisions would contradict and perhaps supersede the slave relationship established by the standard contract. Echoing the IWW's insistence on building the new within the shell of the old, Parce said that "this is one of the situations in which a new custom can grow up within the old without having to wait to formally abolish the old." In general, Parce asked that women evolve standards of morality and respectability "which meet their views and maintain their dignity," which economic freedom would empower them to do.[24]
Stern described the new female lifestyle when she asserted that "the weak, dependent, submissive creature, with her coquettish little wiles and her cunning strategies, is passing from existence. In her place enters the new woman, strong, independent and self-reliant, loyal and honest...." Yet this new socialist woman was well aware that mere individual self-cultivation, detached from and ignorant of, larger social struggles, was but another desiccated form of narrow self-indulgence. Individual self-cultivation and social service mutually reinforced each other; socialism "should appeal to her womanhood, to her motherhood, to her self-respect and to her sympathies, to her striving for freedom and her desire for a richer, fuller life." While disclaiming full agreement with Emma Goldman's incendiary views, The Socialist Woman touted America's foremost anarchist in 1909, years after the bitter conflict between Goldman and the Socialists had flared. In September 1913, shortly after the Socialist party had recalled IWW leader Big Bill Haywood from its National Executive Committee and virtually anathematized the Wobblies, it praised Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most prominent and flamboyant female organizer.[25]
The Socialist Woman stridently repudiated the traditional ideal of genteel womanhood. The lady-like woman, Sara Kingsbury declaimed, was "a gross violation of natural law. She is a crime in nature.... She is not for service, but for ornament, like the bric-a-brac that gathers dust and microbes on your mantle.... The more ignorant she is, the more lady-like she is.... The lady-like woman never considers herself an individual, but only an appendage to man.... To her the existing order is divine.... The wasted life is for the lady, the ideal life." Parce asserted that the new woman disdained "the bugaboos of disgrace that have been used to hold men and women in servitude" and recognized that "it is on a fearful and trembling practice of the virtues as defined by the ruling class, that the power of that class depends." When four Los Angeles Socialist women were arrested for speaking in public, they jauntily sent out dainty "At Home" cards, inviting visitors, who were warned that they would be served no refreshments. Those who could not attend were urged to send their regrets to the city police or the mayor.[26] As discussed above, Socialist women lamented that too many women had internalized the ethos of their own oppression.
The new woman who had cast off the chains of hegemony, however, demanded her rights in the present, not in any vague, distant future. The Progressive Woman, writing both before and after the Socialist party made advocacy of violence or illegal methods grounds for expulsion, praised, justified, and extenuated the violent and illegal tactics of the English suffragists. Women, it said, were an outlawed class, and women's rights were more important than capitalist property and law. When the suffragists smashed the windows of elite London shops, The Progressive Woman editorialized that women were criticized whatever they did and enthused that the new woman "is becoming independent, is reaching out, and taking the things she wants, and is doing the things she wants to do.... She is asking less and less for her 'rights,' and is beginning to take them with the same assurance that she takes the air and the sunshine." Eleanor Wentworth's husband predicted that "the free woman will laugh at the laws [man] has made to restrain her as at tales to scare a child."[27]
The Socialist women's attack on the traditional home and family must have deeply troubled the gender-conservative Socialist men whom they targeted for conversion. On the one hand, Socialist women promised that Socialist wives and mothers wold vastly improve the Socialist home for their husbands and children; on the other hand they vowed that Socialism would annihilate the home in its familiar form. This unacknowledged contradiction would bedevil the Socialist women, and render their hopes for male support largely nugatory.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] JCK, "The Economic Dependence of Husbands," SW November 1907; JCK, "Marriage and Divorce," SW July 1907; JCK, "Sex Subjection," PW August 1907.
[2] LP, "Woman and Industrial Freedom," SW, June 1908.
[3] JCK, "Marriage and Divorce," SW July 1907; JCK, "Machinery Makes New Women with New Matrimonial Ideals," SW December 1907; Malkiel, "Capitalism and the Home," SW January 1909.
[4] Hunt, featured in SW November 1907; Stern, "'Viribus Unitas'," PW January 1910.
[5] Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW April 1910; Parce, "Sex and 'Contractual Morality,'" PW January 1910.
[6] Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW June 1910.
[7] Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW June 1910.
[8] Ashley, "Who Are the White Slaves?," PW April 1913.
[9] Malkiel, "The Vampire," PW April 1910; Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW May 1910.
[10] Parce, "The Changing Fortunes of the Home," SW January 1909; JCK, "In the Trail of the Little White Hearse," SW September 1909; Whitehead, "What About Woman's Suffrage," PW April 1910; Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW June 1910; Malkiel, "Hedda Gabler," PW February 1910.
[11] Moore, "The Virtue of Daring," SW December 1907; JCK, "Is the American Family to Die?," PW March 1909.
[12] JCK, "Sex Subjection," SW August 1907.
[13] Malkiel, "Capitalism and the Home," SW January 1909; JCK, "Women and Socialism," SW October 1907.
[14] Malkiel, "The Vampire," PW April 1909; Pearl, "Women in Society," PW October 1907; Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW June 1909; Bert E.H.,"A Man's Letter," PW March 1912.
[15] JCK, "The Traffic in Girl Slaves," PW September 1910; Downing, "A Report on the White Slave Traffic," PW June 1910; Downing, "Why Socialists Should Expose the White Slave Traffic," PW July 1910; snippet, PW June 1910. The PW featured articles on the white slave traffic in June 1911, February 1912, and April 1913.
[16] Josephine Cole, "Party Politics and Prostitution," SW February 1908; Agnes Downing, "Benefits of a Larger Suffrage," May 1909; "The Cruelest Slavery of Modern Times," May 1909; Agnes Downing, "A Report on the White Slave Trade," PW June 1910; Downing, "Some Reasons Why," PW September 1910.
[17] Malkiel, "Our Unfortunate Sisters," SW November 1908;
[18] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW February 1910; Brewer, "The Trend of the Woman Movement," CN March 1914 and "Woman's Enslaver," PW April 1913; Caroline Lowe, "The Working Girl and Prostitution," PW June 1911.
[19] JCK, "Machinery Makes New Woman with New Matrimonial Ideals," SW December 1907; Dean, "To Lessen Household Labor," PW June 1909; Belle Oury, "Woman's Relation to Society," PW June 1910.
[20] Moore, "The Virtue of Daring," SW December 1907.
[21] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW June 1910 and PW August 1910; "Woman's Relation to Society," PW June 1910; Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW May 1909; JCK, "Housekeeping Under Socialism," SW September 1908. JCK also touted the benefits of communal households.
[22] Stern, "Motherly Love," SW October 1907; "Inez Haynes Gilmore," PW September 1913; JCK, "The Unrest of Woman," PW October 1913.
[23] Walden, "True Homes Under Socialism," SW, January 1908. After the demise of Conger-Kaneko's publication and of the WNC, Meta Stern Lilienthal directly stated that "You might as well face the fact, dear reader, that Socialism will destroy the home and the family as they exist today." She promised that the new home and family would be much better, and not "founded on the economic dependence of women." She also said that capitalism was destroying the traditional home and family in any case. Meta Stern Lilienthal, Women of the Future, Rand School for Social Science (New York, 1916), pp. 17-18.
[24] JCK, "Machinery Makes New Woman with New Matrimonial Ideals," SW December 1907; Moore, "The Virtues of Daring," SW December 1907; Malkiel, "The Tragedy of Human Passion," PW July 1909; Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," SW December 1908; Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW July 1910 and June 1910.
[25] Stern, "'Viribus Unitas,'" PW January 1910; the June 1909 PW reprinted William Marion's famous "The Daughter of the Dream"; "Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Social Rebel," PW September 1913.
[26] Kingsbury, "The Lady-Like Woman: Her Place in Nature," SW August 1908; Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," SW February 1909; "Socialist Women in Jail," SW August 1908.
[27] "Acres of Broken Glass," PW April 1912; Wentworth, "Woman's Portion," PW September 1910. See Pauline Newman, "Workers of the World," PW March 1913; Braverman, "Things in the Making," PW March 1913; JCK, "In This Our World," PW May 1913; Stern, "Women of Other Lands," PW May 1913. In May 1913, Braverman urged the unemployed to clog the jails and protest against a society that force-fed prisoners in jail (a reference to the National Woman's Party prisoners) while starving workers in society. Most writers stopped short of outright endorsement of violent tactics, but expressed sympathy for them.