KATE RICHARDS O'HARE AS A SOCIALIST-FEMINIST
The trajectory of Kate Richards O'Hare symbolizes in a different fashion from that of Crystal Eastman the dead-end which socialist-feminism reached after the death of Conger-Kaneko's publications. Unlike The Socialist Woman, which propounded a Socialism very much informed by feminism, or Eastman, who largely argued the two causes separately, O'Hare inconspicuously incorporated feminism as a minor partner in her overall Socialist analysis. If Conger-Kaneko's publications were Feminist-Socialist, and Eastman was a Feminist and a Socialist, O'Hare was genuinely a Socialist-Feminist, with the accent on Socialism. Rather than directly assaulting patriarchal marriage or SP sexism, O'Hare subtly introduced gender into her discussions of more traditional Socialist topics, often modulating her own strongly feminist ideas in the process. Her numerous denunciations of male oppression and ridicule of male pretense usually occurred in the course of her writings on other subjects, while she was making points more orthodox in their thrust, and less threatening to male egos. O'Hare wrote almost nothing for The Socialist Woman, preferring as her venue the more general-interest, family-centered magazine The National Rip-Saw. This approach earned her widespread popularity among party members and leaders, but at the cost of subsuming her very real, if moderate, feminism beneath other concerns of more immediate interest to her readers.
An orthodox Marxist who emphasized class over gender, O'Hare staunchly upheld traditional values, and apotheosized the family, wifehood, and motherhood. Although she served one term on the Women's National Committee, she usually worked side-by-side with men within mainstream party institutions. For these reasons she became, after the demise of The Socialist Woman and the WNC, the best-known Socialist woman columnist and orator. She addressed problems which particularly afflicted women--alcoholism, prostitution, the pay and working conditions of female workers, and the decline of religion--and usually discussed the impact of more general problems on her sex. However, her readers could easily ignore her distinctly muted form of feminism (unlike the insistent version of The Socialist Woman); O'Hare's feminism became lost in the demands of seemingly "larger" concerns. After the eruption of World War I, O'Hare became far better known for her anti-war stance than for the feminist sentiments she did express. Still later she won renown as a prison reformer and one of the architects of Llano Co-operative Colony and its associated Commonwealth College. To these endeavors she once again brought a feminist analysis which was both omnipresent and yet subdued. By the late 1920s, however, with the both Socialist and feminist movements moribund (and their remnants at loggerheads), O'Hare found yet more mainstream expressions for her enduring radical conscience.
Yet O'Hare, whom her biographer has called an "honorary man," lived a daring and unorthodox life, which diverged sharply from the family-centered ideal which (probably in part for protective coloration), she so strenuously advocated.[1] Before considering her writings, therefore, a brief examination of her life is in order.
O'Hare's earliest memories were "of a Kansas ranch, of the wide stretches of prairie, free herds roaming over the hills.... of the freedom and security and plenty of a well-to-do rancher's home."[2] A financial Panic and a drought in effect confiscated her family's ranch, however, and her father sold their possessions and trekked to the city for work.
He who had always been master of his own domain, who had hewn his destiny bare-handed from the virgin soil, forced to go out and beg some other man for a chance to labor, an opportunity to use his hands. Though I could not comprehend it then the bitterness of it all was seared upon my memory and I never see a strong man vainly seeking and begging for work that my whole soul does not revolt..... The poverty, the misery, the want, the wan-faced women and hunger pinched children, men trampling the streets by day and begging for a place in the police stations or turning footpads by night, the sordid, grinding, pinching poverty of the workless workers and the frightful, stinging, piercing cold of that winter in Kansas City will always stay with me as a picture of inferno such as Dante never painted.[3]
As many other women, Kate threw herself into humanitarian and religious reform. She fought drunkenness and prostitution, which she was told caused poverty, with "the heart-breaking zeal that [only] an intense young girl" could muster. Yet she found that intemperance and vice proliferated, and even controlled governments and churches. Gradually she discovered that the universe was governed by "fixed natural laws... and that prayers would never fill an empty stomach or avoid a panic." Drink and sin resulted from poverty rather than causing it; "poverty was the fundamental cause of the things I abhorred" and must be abolished.[4]
Meanwhile, O'Hare did office work in her father's machine shop, and, in her spare time, "teased, coaxed, and cajoled the men into letting me try my hand at their work." At first she overcame male skepticism and hostility by taking on "the dirtiest, greasiest work in the shop." Soon, however, "when the men realized that I meant to stick, they grumbled long and loud, and finally threatened to revolt.... If one girl learned the machinist trade, others would, and soon the shops would be over-run by women, and wages would go down as they have in every trade that women have entered." Kate persisted, however, and eventually became one of the first women members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM). A "true mechanic," she said, must possess "a touch as tender and as gentle as a mother's."[5]
O'Hare's direct contact with the working class further radicalized her, as she saw misery, degradation, and servitude everywhere. Placing her hopes in the trade union movement, she was quickly disillusioned. When she remonstrated against her union endorsing for mayor a vicious capitalist against whom it had recently struck, she was "unmercifully ridiculed for daring to talk politics to a lot of American Voting Kings." Shortly afterwards she heard Mother Jones tell a crowd "that a scab at the ballot box" was worse than a scab "at the factory door, that a scab ballot could do more harm than a scab bullet; that workingmen must support the political party of their class and that the only place for a sincere union man was in the Socialist party."[6]
Asking for Socialist literature, O'Hare found herself piled high "with Socialist classics enough to give a college professor mental indigestion." (The only one she understood was The Communist Manifesto, which disappointed her by not mentioning Socialism.) Julius Wayland, publisher of the mass-circulation Socialist monthly The Appeal to Reason, gave her some more comprehensible books. "For a time I lived in a dazed dream while my mental structure was being ruthlessly torn asunder and rebuilt upon a new foundation," she reminisced. After this painful process "I awoke in a new world, with new viewpoints, and a new outlook. Recreated, I lived again with new aims, new hopes, new aspirations and the dazzling view of the new and wonderful work to do. All the universe pulsated with new life that swept away the last vestige of the mists of creed and dogma and old ideas and beliefs." Revolted at the horrors of capitalism (and perhaps wearied by male opposition and obstruction at the shop), she "hung up my cap, laid aside my calipers and rule," and joined "the fight for Socialism. And here I stay until the Co-operative Commonwealth is ours." She attended a school for Socialist agitators and publicists in Girard, where she found not only enlightenment "but that crowning, finishing touch of human life, love."[7] She married Frank O'Hare (at Wayland's home) on January 1, 1902, two days after the school term ended.
The newly-weds spent their honeymoon on a grand speaking tour, where the novelty of married Socialist orators attracted great crowds. Frank taught Kate the "tricks of the trade" of an itinerant agitator and speaker. Yet she soon became the more prominent of the two, earning more money and attracting larger crowds. She went undercover as an investigative reporter in New York City in 1902, working at various women's jobs, where she found inadequate pay and death-camp conditions. She created a sensation when she appeared at the SP's 1904 convention with her six-month old son cradled in her arms. She had a girl the next year, and twin boys in 1908. By that time she had become a nationally-known SP speaker and writer, whose lecture tours covered vast distances over long stretches of time. Frank stayed at home and became her publicity agent and manager--a reversal of traditional gender roles resembling that of Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman, but almost unique within the Socialist milieu. Although O'Hare (like Goldman) touted motherhood as the most exalted privilege of womankind, the responsibility for raising the children increasingly devolved upon Frank and relatives. In practice, O'Hare much preferred the adventurous life of travel and verbal combat over the claustrophobic confines of the home.
Kate's actual life, contrasted with her rhetoric, was apparent in a Progressive Woman feature on her at the time of her run for Congress in 1910--an article which obviously adopted O'Hare's own view of her persona. O'Hare, a self-described "union man" because of her membership in the IAM, 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 reassured jittery Socialists that despite her nomination for Congress 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 on 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 "become a candidate for nothing different than what the average woman's life should be."[8] Although She campaigned vigorously, she won only 5% of the vote.
In addition to running for Congress in 1910, O'Hare served on the SP's Woman's National Committee and its National Executive Committee. She also served as the SP's representative to the meeting of the Second International in 1913, beating out party stalwarts Debs, Hillquit, and Berger for that prestigious post. She ran as the SP's Senatorial candidate from Missouri in 1916, before women had even fully won the franchise in that state. She chaired the pivotal Committee on War and Militarism at the SP's Emergency Convention in St. Louis in 1917, which drafted the Majority "Proclamation" vigorously opposing U.S. entry into World War I; she was shortly thereafter arrested for her anti-war stance. Sentenced to five years in prison, she once again extolled her family, including her extended family of Socialist comrades. "Thank God, we Socialists have sources of strength of mind and heart and soul that judges know not of.... No judge on earth can break me, for back of me are my husband and my children and my grey-haired mother whose faith in me and whose loyalty to the cause of humanity will sustain me through any ordeal, even to the laying down of my life. Back of my family are the hundreds of thousands of comrades with whom I have worked and suffered and sacrificed for many years, and no trial can come to me that they will not share."[9] Perhaps feeling that a federal prison was not the most appropriate place for a mother of four children, she reassured audiences (and herself) during her farewell tour en route to the penitentiary that
When I go to prison, I leave four children outside: a boy of fifteen, a girl of twelve, and twins, boys tens years of age.
And to my children, I know no one can take a mother's place, but they too come of good fighting stock, and the will face the loss of their mother with courage worthy of their ancestry. When they are old enough to understand, they will rather have a mother inside prison walls true to her ideals and principles than outside, a craven coward who dared not protest when our rights were wrested from us and when grievous wrongs were thrust upon us.... [My] millions of devoted comrades will never see my children want for anything. If the administration sends my children's mother to prison for her political beliefs, they will not be motherless, a million women will gladly mother them.[10]
In a letter written shortly after her incarceration ostensibly to her family (but which she knew her husband Frank would publicize widely), O'Hare said that she would continue her role as nurturing mother to the lost, the forlorn, and the abandoned, in the federal hell at Jefferson City:
This is Easter, and I think it means more to me that any other Easter in my whole life. I think that I have come just a little nearer the soul of the universe; that I can touch hands across the ages with all who have walked through Gethsemane and who have found peace for their own souls in service for others..... My own [loved ones] have the memories of long years of love and they can afford to lend me for a time to these poor, despoiled, despairing creatures here.... The poor little "dope fiend" in the cell next to me needs me more than my own do.... If I were outside to-day I might be speaking to a great crowd. Perhaps my empty place and silent voice will serve my comrades and my cause better than my presence.... So do not worry about me and do not be sad. I am all right and I will come back to you a better wife, a more tender mother and a wiser and more efficient comrade.[11]
Upon her release from prison she spent a short time with her family before leaving on a long lecture tour on behalf of the remaining political prisons. "It seemed a crime against the children to leave home even for this purpose," she wrote her supporters. But, she claimed, one of her children reminded her that she was free only because of the efforts of others; she owed the remaining prisoners an equal effort on their behalf. "Mr. O'Hare made the first trip with me," she said, "and it was one of those experiences that can come but once in a lifetime--a joyous pageant of love and fellowship and thanksgiving everywhere."[12]
Until her imprisonment for anti-war agitation, O'Hare was best known as an editor of the National Rip-Saw, a hugely influential mass market Socialist publication, and as the author of The Sorrows of Cupid, "a Socialist best-seller." First published in 1904 under the title What Happened to Dan, this work underwent numerous subsequent expanded editions. The Socialist Woman strongly recommended it, and at times offered it as a free premium with a subscription. In this book, and in several contemporaneous pamphlets largely derived from it, Kate expounded upon capitalism's destructive effects on the family, and proffered Socialism as the salvation of traditional values and family structures. Although sometimes criticizing men and masculine dominance and oppression, the book's seeming exaltation of the traditional home appears on balance far distant from the bitter condemnations which filled the pages of The Socialist Woman. Men (including drunks and customers of prostitutes), were viewed more as fellow-victims of capitalism than as oppressors of women. Nevertheless, O'Hare's depiction of marital bliss unobtrusively assumed an egalitarian revolution in the traditional family.
The Sorrows of Cupid accepts the terms of debate established by conservative moralists and "race suicide" theorists: O'Hare views the decline of the traditional home and family (institutions which The Socialist Women described as a patriarchal slave-pens), as an unmitigated disaster. "Love, home and babies are the three graces that make the trials, struggles and suffering of life worthwhile," O'Hare asserted. "Take these things from us and all our vaunted learning, our wonderful handiwork, our sciences and our achievements become valueless, and earth a barren waste indeed." O'Hare asserted that "sex attraction and joy in reproduction are primal; they come down to us from the far-gone past before society existed." For O'Hare, "marriage, or sex union," was natural, and necessary for a full life. However, both sexes were marrying later, and fewer were marrying at all, causing "unnatural sex repression." Unhappy marriages and divorce had reached epidemic proportions, and "motherhood, once the crown of womanhood, has seemingly fallen into disrepute. Far from being looked upon as the acme of human joy, it is now felt by many to be a curse, a thing to be avoided at all costs." Drunkenness, prostitution, and venereal disease were rampant, and religion in decline.[13]
What, O'Hare asked, was the cause of all this, and the solution?
O'Hare emphatically denied that individual moral failings or women's liberation (the standard conservative suspects) undermined the family. Indeed, the cause was "so plain that even a college professor must see it": low wages and the high cost of living meant that couples could not afford marriage and a family. The concentration of productive wealth in few hands meant that capitalists and landlords confiscated most of a worker's product, making most Americans either impoverished tenant farmers or "mere working attachments to machines owned by others." O'Hare asserted that "thousands of young men" were "wrecked mentally, morally and physically each year because the high cost of living and low wages rob them of the opportunity to have the blessing of a woman's love," and an equal number of young women were similarly "robbed of their youth, health, beauty and womanhood because these same young men are not receiving wages enough to marry and take them from the drudgery of the mill, factory and workshop. The wrecking of young men's lives by sex dissipation and the dwarfing and stunting of young women's lives by sex repression are two of the heart-breaking tragedies of modern civilization."[14]
O'Hare lamented that when couples did marry, they faced daunting obstacles for which capitalism was responsible. In her discussion of marriage's travails, however, she unobtrusively assured that egalitarian, companionate marriage was the only marriage of value. Her first grievance against capitalism, for example, was that because of it, the different experiences of men and women both before and during marriage made them alienated strangers to one another rather than equal soul mates. "The competitive struggle must of necessity create men who are mere money-making machines" and women who are "mercenaries."[15] O'Hare charged that
Common ideals and mental equality--the absolutely essential basis on which real marital happiness must rest, are the last things to be considered in the conventional modern marriages.... If a man succeeds in the commercial struggle of our present system of society he must of necessity concentrate and specialize in money making. Naturally the spiritual and emotional qualities of his being become deadened. On the other hand, the conventions of modern life make women largely bundles of emotion, with little real, intelligent understanding of life and its struggles. A marriage between a man all calculating and practical and a woman all sentiment and emotion must end in disaster.[16]
In words reminiscent of those of The Socialist Women, O'Hare charged that capitalist competition and struggle deformed working-class and elite marriages alike. Working men married because they detested boarding-house existence, while working women wanted only escape from the deadening routine of the machine and factory. O'Hare said that "men of the upper class choose a wife very much as they choose a house or automobile--something that is ornate and attractive; a rack upon which they can hang the outward evidences of their prowess in the industrial battlefield; a piece of property of sufficient value, beauty and distinction to create envy in the hearts of their male associates." Elite girls were bartered for money to diseased or depraved men. Neither workers nor capitalists valued companionship or the raising of a family. The men (and women) were "as ignorant as blocks of wood concerning the real basis of marriage."[17]
Marriage also estranged men from women because the man left home for the world of work, while his wife remained chained to the stove and laundry-tub. "An endless round of domestic drudgery of the woman of the working class, the strain of social duties in the leisure class and the conventionalities with which both are bound, retard the mental growth of women and cause them to lag behind their husbands in mind development," O'Hare said. "The vista of life seen from the kitchen window... is not very broad. Neither is there... food for soul development in the contemplation of the butcher's bill.... The wives of the rich are as great slaves to their social duties as the wives of the poor to their cookstoves and washtubs. Neither has time for study or real self-development"; the minds the and figures of the wives of both classes quickly deteriorate, and the man finds "no soul-companionship in marriage." Meanwhile, "the competitive struggle for existence leaves many men with little time for interest or share in the family life."[18]
O'Hare charged that many marriages were initially based on mercenary and sexual considerations, and were thus merely "legalized prostitution," except that men and women suffered equally. In words that could have been penned by Conger Kaneko (or, for that matter, anarchist Emma Goldman), O'Hare said that
A really happy married life demands that husband and wife share their lives fully, grow and develop together mentally, morally and spiritually. This is almost impossible under existing economic conditions.... Of all the bitter tragedies, there is none more bitter than that of two human beings bound together by the chains of economic dependence when love has ceased to hallow their union.... The saddest, the bitterest, the most damnable wrong, is the wrong to little children born to such a union. If there is one right that is sacred and holy, it is that each child shall be born loved and desired.... If there is one sin that God and nature never pardons, that can never be atoned for, it is the sin of begetting unwanted children. And the world is full of them.... If we could bring no accusation against our present social and economic system but that it forces women to become unwilling mothers, that should be enough to forever condemn it in the sight of God and man.[19]
Poor health was another major cause of marital unhappiness, largely because capitalism bred disease at the workplace, in the tenement, and by the poisoned foods and medicines it produced. O'Hare had herself worked at many women's jobs when investigating working conditions in New York in 1902, and exposed women workers' death-camp conditions in St. Louis in 1913. Because girls starting at age 14 or younger worked at a vast array of dangerous jobs, O'Hare charged that "the very foundation of twentieth century civilization rests upon the slender toil-bowed shoulders of working women and children," working at less than survival wages, and unprotected by man-made governments. "THEY ALL WORKED BECAUSE THEY WERE COMPELLED TO WORK," O'Hare thundered. "No feminine unrest there; no struggle for a 'wider life,' no suffragist tendencies, no revolt against home, husbands, and babies. The whole question resolved itself into the problem of BREAD," for the working girl and often enough for her mother and her crippled and\or unemployed father, "whose only value now is to act as a fertilizing machine for a human breeding machine." Half of the female workers, O'Hare asserted, were destroyed by a single year of factory work. Further, "hundreds of thousands of children die each year from impure milk, patent infant foods and soothing syrups, all poisoned in the interests of profit."[20] Children also died in swarms in the slaughter-pens of industrial capitalism. O'Hare said that
We shudder at the tales of babies murdered in the terrible race riots of Russia and the massacre of the Armenians in Turkey. But if the choice were left to you, which would you prefer--that your child die by a Cossack's sword or a Turk's scimitar, or live the long drawn out agony of a living death in a velvet mill or a pearl button factory? We thunder our condemnation of Russian brutality to the defenseless Jews and peasants, but it would be well for us to look into a cotton or velvet mill, packinghouse or tobacco factory before we censure Czar Nicholas and the autocracy of Russia too severely..... Death was short and sharp for them, but for our little ones it is the long-drawn-out agony of never ending want and poverty....[21]
The press, pulpit, and platform were "all owned by the despoilers of childhood" who decried the lack of babies "not because of desolate homes and heart-hungry men and women" but "because child laborers are needed that their flesh and blood may be coined into gold." O'Hare claimed that "the mill, the mine and the factory are killing American children as fast as babies are being born" and concluded that "an economic system which robs men and women of health and the ability to bring healthy children into the existence is certainly unworthy of perpetuation."[22]
If husbands, wives, and children died in the slaughter pens of industrial capitalism, lack of work also destroyed marriages and blighted families. "Unemployment is responsible for thousands of desertions by husbands," O'Hare said. "The American wage earner is fast becoming a nomad who roams about from one town to another seeking a job." In 1904 fifty per cent of the workers were employed only part of the time. Capitalists required a reserve army of unemployed to lower wages and furnish cannon fodder for imperialistic wars. Desperate men and women sometimes killed their offspring; O'Hare charged that "we are fast degenerating into a nation of infanticides or child murderers."[23]
O'Hare also blamed capitalist education and values for poisoning marriages, again much in the style of The Socialist Woman. In particular, ignorance of sex, "the most important and sacred relation of life," ruined many couples. Lack of "rational understanding of the intimate physical relationship of [the marriage] contract" generated misery and disease; yet boys were inculcated with a brutalized double standard, while girls were inoculated with a delicate ignorance. Any woman who discussed sex, children, or the basics of marriage with her prospective mate would be outcast. "Girls reared in ignorance, gaining all the knowledge of life they possess from novels that end at the altar, fall in love with a pair of blue eyes or a bank account, are wooed in a maze of romance, married in a blaze of glory and awake on the first morning of the honeymoon disillusioned, disenchanted victims of innocence and ignorance. Many a woman's love is cold and dead before the flowers that form her marriage wreath are withered and the dawn of the honeymoon looks upon many a shattered ideal and bitterly bruised heart." O'Hare sarcastically said that "The man who has learned all he knows of the sex relation from the courtesan and prostitute is a fit mate for your innocent daughter, isn't he? But, nevertheless, your daughter has a very small chance to have any other kind."[24]
Yet O'Hare's assertion that neither girls nor boys were prepared for the humdrum realities of marriage implicitly, if only partially, accepted the traditional division of labor within the home. "Each stratum of society assiduously apes the one just above, and health, happiness and comfort are sacrificed to mere show," she said. "The object of the average home is to keep up appearances." In a passage that would have horrified Lida Parce, O'Hare apotheosized the domestic arts so essential for a happy home, and strongly implied that they were mostly women's chores. "More homes have been ruined by indigestion than by intoxicating drink," she said. Women were taught fancy dances and complicated musical compositions but not the arts of cooking, sewing, and darning socks; they dabbled in art and science "but entirely ignore the greatest art known to man, that of making a house Home, and giving life to wellborn children.... God pity the poor little defenseless [children] that come into such a travesty on home." O'Hare believed that "all education has but one end--to enable us to really live"; that "the right to a domestic as well as an artistic education is the inalienable right of every woman; that culture and refinement should be the heritage of all."[25]
Yet O'Hare added a significant caveat--one easily ignored by men attracted by her traditional-values rhetoric, but very real nonetheless. "A real home must of necessity being a co-operative thing," she said; unless the husband acknowledged himself "a mere fertilizing agent like a drone in the beehive," he had an important role in the family besides that of breadwinner. "If women need to be trained for the duties of motherhood, men need to be trained for the duties of fatherhood. If mothers must be educated to the possibilities of home making, fathers must be educated to be helpers and sustainers."[26] The very term "helpers," however, conceded that women rightfully shouldered most of the burdens of homemaking.
O'Hare discussed at length the most blatant threats undermining the traditional home--prostitution, venereal disease, drunkenness, and the decline of religion--which alarmed traditionalist and bourgeois reformers. Eschewing the fashionable moralism of her (and our) time, she focused instead on causes and effects, and blamed these evils squarely on capitalism. Socialism, she claimed, would cure these problems. For example, although she blamed prostitution partly on the economic dependence of women on men (a focus which would condemn patriarchy as well as capitalism),[27] her class analysis blamed it ultimately on capitalism.
Prostitution, O'Hare asserted, originated in private property. "When the ownership of slaves planted in the human heart the passion for the ownership of property, women, being the most prized of man's possessions, became the first thing to be owned." Prostitution originated in "man's mastery of woman's bread, and throughout all the ages that men have controlled the means of life woman has been subject to his will, subservient to his wish and panderer to his passions. Since all existing forms of government are the bulwarks of mastery and privilege, it is but natural that they should be used to strengthen man's mastery and women's servitude." Capitalism fostered prostitution by paying women a dying wage, and men so little that they could not afford a wife and family; it reduced the most sacred aspects of life and personality to mere articles of commerce. The causes of prostitution were "first, the capitalist class, the men who live upon the fruits of her labor and who, because they control the means of life, can place her wages so low that she must submit to be the gratifier of their passions as well as the producer of their wealth; second, the men in the professional and wage-working class who are able to secure so small a share of the wealth they produce as to be unable to properly support a wife." O'Hare asserted that "the prostitute is simply a by-product of any social system in which women are economically dependent"; as a matter of mere survival women "submit their sex as well as their labor to the men who control the machinery of production."[28] This analysis largely ignored the legally-sanctioned depredations of husbands on wives, which formed a cornerstone of patriarchal marriage.
O'Hare exclaimed that prostitution was a death-sentence for its practitioners, who had a life expectancy of five years. Prostitution was "the most brutal, debasing, debauching slavery that the world has ever known. The prostitution of the girl's body, the murder of her soul, the coining of her life into profits for human vampires, then wrecked, ruined and murdered, a grave in the potter's field." Prostitution spread venereal disease, "the black plague of the brothel.... the one incurable disease... That loathsome, nameless horror that has killed more men than war, ruined more women's lives and blasted more babies than all other diseases combined." O'Hare claimed that one of every twenty babies was born afflicted and that one of every 15 wives was "paying the penalty of the husband's transgression."[29]
O'Hare insisted that "we may rant and cant, preach and pray from now until doomsday, but facts are facts just the same. Though we may shut our eyes they are there still. Sex desire and companionship is just as natural, just as necessary as food and drink, and if young men are denied the opportunity for sex companionship in home and marriage they will seek it in the brothel, all the preaching and moralizing we may do to the contrary." Prostitution had become highly organized, and the "independent prostitute, like an independent businessman, is practically a thing of the past." It was run for profit, under the protection of local, state, and national governments. "White slavery could be stamped out in a single year did the powers of government so desire. It exists not in defiance to law and government, but by permission and co-partnership." O'Hare claimed that within two blocks of the White House "white slaves who would consider a harem in Turkey a haven of rest and security" were sold in "slave pens a thousand times more hellish than the slave markets of Constantinople." The "scarlet thread" ran from the lowest prostitute to the White House and back again. The regulation or prohibition of prostitution merely worsened the plight of its victims by making prostitutes victims of police harassment, corruption, and persecution. Only Socialism could end the "social evil" by empowering women, paying workers of both sexes the full product of their labor, and creating the necessary conditions for stable homes based on love. Implicitly criticizing the power of the husband in marriage as well as that of the capitalist in the factory, O'Hare claimed that "Socialism will shear man of his economic power to force women to submit either in marriage or prostitution to his sensual desires, and a few generations of free women will produce a race free from sensuality and that old falsehood of the male's greater need of sexual expression and its natural result, a double standard of morals."[30]
Having been an ardent temperance campaigner herself, O'Hare was well aware of the evils of excessive drink. She recognized that "there is never a drunkard man but there are broken-hearted women and neglected children." Yet she recognized that drunkenness could be solved only "by a rational, scientific study of cause and effect," rather than by preaching or moralism. "Nothing exists without cause, and the scientist can trace the cause of drunkenness as readily and scientifically as the cause of prostitution or any other social disease." Intemperance was "a disease, the fruit of capitalism." It was something of an occupational disease, as black lung disease for miners or tuberculosis for textile workers. It especially afflicted those with enervating, dangerous jobs--workers who knew that their fate was sealed and that it was only a matter of time before they were killed on the job or thrown on scrap heap--and those suffering from vacuous idleness.[31]
Such victims of capitalism "demand stimulants to spur the jaded brains and bodies on to renewed effort, and to provide a substitute for the thrill of life of which they are robbed. Many men seek this in drink, some in sex debauchery and some in religious frenzy." The worker with a hard, dangerous job who returned to a lonely boarding house "is not a bad man--he is just a robbed man, robbed of all that makes life worth while. He has sought the only substitute within his reach and understanding.... The insane religious frenzy of a Gypsy Smith revival or a holiness camp meeting is merely the howling drunk or sex-revel given a religious trend. It has the same cause and the same effect on its victims.... a wrecked body, a warped brain and a murdered soul."[32]
O'Hare viewed creative labor as "the master theme of the universe"; anyone shut out from this by poverty or the gilded bars of idle wealth was doomed to unhappiness. "Man must have companionship and social intercourse, or become a raving maniac or mumbling imbecile. Capitalism has largely robbed the workingman of the opportunity for social life. Family life is broken up," children railroaded into cities, men and women into boarding houses and factories. "It is a law of nature that men and women denied social expression either sour into misanthropes, dry up into moving mummies, or degenerate into vice."[33] The meager earning power of the working class prevented access to culture and its accompanying social life.
O'Hare reminded myopic reformers that "the saloon is always open, full of light and music; it is a common meeting place where soul-starved men may find warmth, welcome and social intercourse. Usually the liquor men drink, is only incidental to the companionship they crave." Church doors were shut all but three hours per week; and when open, recreation was carefully regimented and supervised, with no free discussion allowed. Welfare cranks, ladling out uplift, shoved "kulchure" down the unwilling throats of the church-goers much in the manner as sulphur and molasses.[34] But O'Hare declared that "Art, culture and upliftment must come from within" and "must be the expression of the soul unfolding."
Though there may not be an atmosphere of upliftment about the saloon, there is an atmosphere of democracy. Class, creed and race lines are not so closely drawn.... [The saloon owner] knows that his very existence depends on attracting men to his bar. He knows that the drink he dispenses is not sufficient for this, so he makes his saloon a forum, a social gathering place, where men may expound their philosophy, expiate on their religion or lack of it, and defend their political principles.... The fat, gross saloonkeeper may be neither pious nor godly. Though engaged in a cursed trade, he usually has more real human feeling, more sympathy and understanding of the wrongs, and sorrows of the workers than the mummified preacher wrapped in his moldering garments of theology.[35]
Saloon-keepers also opened their halls for union meetings, while the churches denounced unionism.
Dreadful as the saloon was, O'Hare said, it was but a minor problem spawned by capitalism, only a part of the "larger questions demanding solution." Private ownership of the means of production caused much more misery than did saloons. Private ownership of railroads alone had wrecked more homes, and levied more tribute from working-class paychecks, than all saloons combined. Similarly, private ownership of flour mills and meatpacking plants starved more households, while the private ownership of real estate generated more vagrants, more broken homes, and homeless children. O'Hare claimed that in 1906, 2707 Americans died from alcoholism, but 616,295 were killed or permanently crippled by industry.[36]
O'Hare pointed out that drink was manufactured for profit, and that entire industries and communities depended upon it: not only manufacturers, but distributors, sellers, and other businesses. She claimed that socialism, by abolishing the profits of alcohol, would end its production; then, possibly afraid that this argument would alienate many workers, allowed that under socialism the majority might vote to produce alcohol and sell it at cost. (Even then, she somewhat inconsistently added, it would soon cease to exist, because no one would profit by it.) The craving for alcohol would dissipate when the overworked and the idle were allowed the joys of creative, productive labor; such people "will be too busy with the better things of life to seek the lower.... When men can earn enough to maintain homes, support their families, life will be clean, sane, secure and happy, and few will care to lose a single moment of it in a drunken stupor."[37]
O'Hare worried that hard drugs were overwhelming the United States in an epidemic far worse than alcoholism. For every alcoholic, she averred, there were two drug addicts, whose life expectancy was far shorter even than that of a drunk.
As the strain of life grows more intense, the robbery of life more complete the suffering of mankind grows greater and a stimulant and narcotic more powerful than alcohol is sought.... Capitalism has robbed [the wage-slave] of life, starved [his] body, brain and soul, racked and ruined him, then provides the blessed drug that makes him forget that he is a worn-out wreck on the human scrapheap and brings the sweet belief for a little time that he is a man again. Happiness is all there is in life, and if the only happiness capitalism can insure is the artificial happiness of drunkenness and drugs we can not condemn mankind for grasping the counterfeit when we withhold the real..... From my experience I draw the conclusion that man is made up of nine parts environment and one part heredity, and heredity is the environment of our ancestors. Man is made or marred by his environment, and man can not be saved or uplifted except through it and it alone.[38]
In support of this point, O'Hare told the story of an elderly woman (in this case an alcoholic) whom a restaurant-keeper indignantly and with disgust evicted from his establishment.
Yes, she was drunk, but she was something else also. She was a woman, a mother, a worker, one who had toiled long and hard.... Old and poor, she crept about the streets of the city and begged for the crust of bread she could not buy with her labor power.... As I looked at her, I thought of my own mother, almost the same age.... Two women as far apart as the poles, but made of the same clay, both have loved, sorrowed and joyed, gave birth to children and fulfilled their missions in life. One is a drunkard, one a happy grandmother. One fate cast in a home of comfort, one in a pit of poverty, and had the lives of the women been reversed, the happy grandmother would have been the drunkard and the drunkard the happy matron.[39]
Assailing uplifters who claimed that workers wasted their wages in drink, O'Hare exclaimed that if she lived a workers' hopeless existence, and sent her sons and daughters to the capitalist slaughter pens, "I would get drunk tomorrow and never get sober if I could avoid it." Drunkenness, she said, was far less frequent than one would imagine, given the sordid brutality of life under capitalism; "if man can rise above the animal in such brutalizing environments," creativity, love and happiness would flourish after "we have trod the long, long, weary way and reached real civilization."[40]
O'Hare denied that reform could abolish the evils of drink any more that it could ameliorate those of prostitution. The legions dependent upon the liquor industry for their bread would not "vote themselves out of a job." The Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League were unwitting allies of the liquor interests. In winning a ban on the sale of alcohol in U.S. Army canteens, for example, they "played directly in the hands of the liquor men" and "won a victory, the liquor element could not have won for themselves." However, she then cited the example of Sweden, where the Socialist government had monopolized the liquor industry, taken the profit out of it, and turned the saloons into recreational and cultural centers. Liquor was so cheap, O'Hare claimed, that it is "impossible for a working man to drink up his wages."[41] She said that "as long as there is poverty, and want, and misery, heart-hunger, loneliness and social repression, men will drink.... As long as all political action is controlled by liquor, our nation must be merely an adjunct to the saloon." Drunkenness was just one aspect of "an unscientifically organized society." She concluded:
Just as long as we try to deal with the problem of drunkenness as THE problem and not part of the whole science of life, we must fall short of our ideal. I know the frightful effects of drunkenness, realize the menace of the saloon, comprehend its demoralizing grip on mankind, yet insist that it is only one of the minor problems of capitalism. I dread it no more than I dread many other problems and know that the solution can only come with a better organized system of life.... We have allowed this one phase of the problem of life to obscure our view of the other and larger questions demanding solution.... The private ownership of the means of life has caused more misery, suffering, poverty and prostitution, wrecked more homes, ruined more lives, murdered more men, women and children than the drunk traffic a hundredfold.[42]
O'Hare also asserted that the church, rather than moral decay among the workers, cased the decline of religion among the working class. Religion had dominated American life until very recently, O'Hare said, but then "the church took its stand with the master class and turned its back upon the workers." As a result, "the Christianity dealt out by the church and minister has no saving force; meets no problems; solves no great questions, and is not a living, vital thing, but an old dead theology."[43] When investigating the state of the churches O'Hare found that
Men who occupied the pews were not there for music, nor beauty, nor spiritual uplift; but they were hard-featured, strong-faced men of business, whose hearts and souls are so immersed in the struggle for wealth, and power, and mastery, that their appreciation of the finer things of life are dulled and atrophied, if not completely killed. They were in church because it was popular and fashionable and good for their business to occupy a pew in a wealthy church. The women ... were there... because they wanted to see who could wear the biggest hat, the tightest hobble shirt and the biggest bunch of somebody else's hair. These occupants of mahogany pews did not come there for spiritual uplift; they are so immersed in their own concerns that they would not recognize the spiritual uplift, if they met it on the street.[44]
The church, revealing its class bias, attacked essentially economic problems such as prostitution, intemperance, and poverty, as if they resulted from individual moral failings rather than endemic social injustices. It emphasized charity, which "can only exist in a system of injustice.... As long as Rockefeller can amass five hundred millions to give to charity, then twenty million working men and women will have the need of charity." Charitable institutions have proliferated, "but the flood of wrecked lives, surges down and submerges them all."[45]
O'Hare insisted that "if we could make mankind grasp the real Christianity of the Bible, the real teachings of the Nazarine, that all would be well." She asserted that "the truths of the Christian Bible are just as true today as they every were," and that most people hungered for an authentic and vital religion. Jesus, she said, was a despised working man, born illegitimately, who knew "the heartache and misery of the working class" from which he sprung. He was in fact a proletarian rebel killed by an elite mob and their creature, a corrupt judge.[46]
But O'Hare's own vision emphasized a materialism and a scientific, cause-and-effect determinism at great variance with the prophetic traditions out of which Jesus emerged. The church, she said, had neglected "the science of the being of mankind" and the fact
that man is first physical, an animal, and that the seat and foundation and basis of physical life is in the human stomach; that all civilization rests on a biscuit; religion on a loaf of bread, and morals on a beef steak. The human stomach is the cornerstone of civilization and unless that stomach is well fed, then civilization and everything it means and is, comes tumbling down about our ears like a house of cards. Civilization never did withstand hunger, never can exist in starvation, never will develop as long as there is a hungry man or woman or child.[47]
O'Hare insisted that intellectual and then spiritual needs developed only after the body was satisfied. A person "will never sprout a soul unless there is a soil of a physical and mental well-being in which it can take root and find sustenance and draw its nourishment.... His three natures [material, intellectual, and spiritual] must be developed and brought into force and power in their natural order." Even refined Christians would fight like savages if food and water were scarce; "a man can't be pious on an empty stomach, can't pray when he is hungry, or love his fellow-men when he is out of a job." O'Hare concluded that "the problem the church confronts is an economic problem; the failures we have made have their economic basis, and the only solution is an economic one." Debates over infant damnation, the relative merits of dunking versus sprinkling as a method of baptism, and the literal reality of hell, obscured the important issues and benefitted nobody.[48]
O'Hare touted Socialism as the panacea for the ills besetting marriage and the family, and systematically argued that it would resolve all the problems she described. Here again the substance of her arguments resembled those of The Socialist Woman, but her rhetorical style and emphasis vastly differed. O'Hare placed blame for marital problems squarely on capitalism, and hardly mentioned men or the male's privileged role in the patriarchal household. "Economic dependence is the fundamental cause for much of our marital unrest," she said. "There can be no cure except through economic independence, and that can come only with Socialism." Under capitalism, women were economically dependent either upon "the masters of commerce and industry" or upon men who were dependent upon those capitalist masters; in the latter case, women were "doubly dependent." (The Socialist Woman called such a woman "the slave of a slave.") Socialism would eliminate both kinds of dependence. "When women have an equal ownership and an equal voice in the control of the industrial activities of the world the frightful horrors of woman labor as we know it now will not exist. Either women will be released from productive labor and allowed to turn their attention to the work of home-making, wifehood and motherhood and artistic pursuits, or the shorter hours of labor, improved machinery, and sanitary, wholesome conditions in the productive trades will make work fit for women's hands and brains to do.... With men and women of that type, marital happiness and divorce will cease to be a problem."[49] Divorce would not only occur far less frequently, but would be devoid of all its evils. In a passage which Lida Parce or Josephine Conger-Kaneko could easily have penned, she totally redefined marriage and the family:
Socialism will give back to women all the freedom and security of the savage fraternal culture and add to it all the advantages of our more civilized life; will make her an equal owner and give her an equal voice in the management of all wealth, that supplied by Nature as well as produced by men's [sic] hands. She will have an equal opportunity to have access to the means of life, receive equal returns for her labor, and will thus be enabled to lift herself above the necessity of selling her virtue for bread..... Socialism will shear man of his economic power to force woman to submit either in marriage or prostitution to his sensual desires. A few generations of free women will produce a race free from sensuality, and that old falsehood of the male's greater need of sexual expression and its natural result, a double standard of morals, will cease to carry weight.[50]
O'Hare asserted that Socialism, by securing for the worker the complete product of his or her labor, would ensure that women (and men) could support themselves with only a few hours of wholesome labor each day. But women who were nursing or raising young children might collect a mother's pension and leave the workforce altogether. Taking the more conservative, traditional side in the debate between Walter Lensfersiek and Belle Oury, O'Hare said that "under Socialism "the nation will see in every mother the bearer of a future citizen and will look carefully after her comfort and well being. The farmer to-day feels that his brood mare is doing productive labor when she brings him a good colt. Under Socialism woman will be on at least as high a plane as brood mares. Under capitalism she is not."[51] Under socialism and women suffrage,
it will in all probability be unnecessary for women to perform manual labor during the years of maternal cares. Then when a woman takes upon herself the task of bearing and rearing a child it will not be upon her own labor, or the bounty of her husband, that she will depend for sustenance, but upon the whole people, or the state to which she is giving a new citizen and future worker. The future mother will not have to rely upon her own puny strength or the insecure support of her husband to stand between her and want. The combined strength and wealth-producing capacity of the whole human race will be a bulwark to shield and a foundation to support her. Then no woman will have reason to shrink from or dread motherhood.[52]
Men would also earn a decent living and would not marry out of practical considerations. With unemployment, endless tramping in search of work, and capitalist slaughter-pens all abolished, men could marry with confidence. Both sexes, therefore, would marry for love and love alone. Marriage under capitalism was "the barter of a woman's body for a man's purse..... When Socialism takes marriages from the sordid, mercenary basis on which capitalism places it, makes it really the union of two hearts drawn together by love and entirely free from pecuniary considerations we will have forever settled the divorce problem, or at least the evils of divorce." O'Hare answered anarchist complaints that monogamy was unnatural and repressive by asserting that "we have never had a true and widespread monogamic marriage system and monogamy has not been given a fair test.... It is only to the extent that the social consciousness of man has been developed, social production evolved, and social distribution outlined that even the dream of an ideal marriage has been conceived in the minds of mankind."[53]
Socialism would also help ensure that married couples would remain in love. Housework, which spoiled the figure, health, and happiness of most wives, would be transformed by the "application of scientific knowledge to domestic duties." Socialism's development of machinery for the common good would mechanize housework, taking some it out of the home altogether and making the rest of it pleasant. "To how many a woman's youth and beauty has the song of your steam and the monotonous rub-a-dub of your board sung the funeral march!" A few men with machinery could now bake far more and better bread than mother did. "Under Socialism all the scientific discoveries, methods and machinery of the world will work together to relieve women of the burden of housekeeping drudgery.... With machinery and science to shoulder the burden of drudgery, and freed from the necessity of feeding, sheltering and clothing an idle, useless class, women could readily and easily do the necessary work for domestic life and find ample time for education, recreation, culture and refinement. Such women demand and create men fitted to be husbands."[54] Such an arrangement would benefit both sexes while leaving the home as primarily the woman's sphere.
Under Socialism both men and women would have far more leisure, "the opportunity to live." Both would cultivate the art of human relations, of loving and appreciating the thoughts and feelings of others.[55] Men would help out around the home, women participate in wage labor, and both understand the other, while maintaining men's emphasis on paid labor and women's duties in the home.
Shorter hours of labor for men would give them an opportunity to share home life with their wives and children. I believe that there is nothing quite so broadening to a masculine mind as to share for even a time in the work of his wife..... I am sure that if we could force the men of the country to do the woman's work, shoulder her cares, and endure her pains and aches for a single week, a revolution such as the world has never witnessed would take place.
Freedom from economic dependence, relief from domestic drudgery, and the opportunity for sharing the industrial, intellectual and political life of the world, would give woman a breath of mind and heart that would make it possible for her to be a real companion and helpmate instead of merely a household drudge and childbearing machine.[56]
Socialism would also transform education, which under capitalism treated persons as objects. Capitalism increasingly replaced skilled workers with skilled machines. "The workers need not have brains--they are in the machine. The worker needs only the capacity for endless labor and unquestioning obedience. A man or woman is more docile and contented without an education than with one." Under Socialism, schools "will not grind all children through the same mill, turning them out like link sausages, all the same size and thickness, mentally ready to be devoured by the sateless maw of the factory.... Education is unfoldment. To be educated is to live the fullest, broadest life, to create with body and brain." Socialist schools, she said, "will not cram knowledge in, but aim at drawing expression out." Students will learn by doing, receiving an education based on "unfoldment from within, not merely veneering from without." O'Hare praised Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist icon executed by his government, for creating schools which offered a secular, scientific, and child-centered curriculum..[57]
O'Hare advocated sex education in Socialist schools, although she blamed Christianity, rather than capitalism, for debilitating sexual ignorance and shame. "The longing to know ourselves is inborn in each human being, and much, if not all the suffering incident to sex life is because that longing is thwarted and perverted," she said, extolling a mother who told her four daughters the secret of life, using a lily as an illustration. O'Hare declared that sex was "the link between man and God.... that vital spark of life that has lifted us from star dust to man!"[58]
So long as we look upon sex and the creation functions of mankind as unclean, so long will they be unclean....
We talk of woman's suffrage, of woman's wrong, of woman's servitude; the mother of all woman's wrongs is that mankind is ashamed....[Shame]... has turned love into lust, companionship into servitude, men into beasts of prey and women into cowering victims..... We deem it improper for boys and girls to romp and play together like lambs and colts and puppies....
Ashamed, vicious, unclean? Is the flower ashamed when it raises its face to the sun, or the roses when they open their hearts to the dew?[59]
O'Hare believed that women and men were created for parenthood, and that capitalism, by depriving couples and their offspring of all security of life, distorted and destroyed that natural desire. In an apotheosis of a biological determinism anathema to Socialist Woman writers, O'Hare claimed that
The desire for motherhood is imbibed by the babe with her mother's milk. It is interwoven in the innermost fibre of her nature at conception.... Babies have always been and will always be the crowning glory of existence.... [It is] not until a woman has gone down in the valley of the shadow of death, and a man has stood by her side to call her back, that they have really lived..... In each rounded curve of a woman's body, in the pink of her cheeks, the rose of her lips, the intoxication of her presence, has nature prepared for motherhood. In the strong arm, square shoulder, the rough hewn face and that encompassing cry of life for love has nature fashioned men for fatherhood. In the dreams of men and women will baby faces ever float.[60]
Under Socialism, everyone biologically capable of marriage and parenthood would enjoy them. Blessedly, however, "the child-mother of other days" would disappear; couples would have fewer children, and care for them better. Marriage would entail "an intelligent reproduction and not the mere result of unrestrained passion on the part of the father and enforced submission of the mother." Under Socialism, "children will come, welcomed, desired, loved into being, endowed by the parents with a vigorous body and a healthy mind at birth, and insured in the security of means of life by the state."[61]
O'Hare, in sum, argued that Socialism would bolster marriage and the family, restoring them from the ravages of capitalism. But amidst her hosannas to traditional values lurked incendiary demands for change. In many respects, her actual proposals reflected those of the more radical Socialist Women; her language and emphasis differed more than her concrete demands. She blamed capitalism almost exclusively, and men hardly at all. In her new Socialist family, however, gender roles would blur as many wives worked outside the home and fathers performed significant household chores. All women would enjoy economic independence from men as a fundamental human right, either through guaranteed participation in free and healthful labor, or by receiving a mother's pension. O'Hare made the scandalous suggestion that under the new dispensation, "woman will own her own body, and owning it, will study and know it unashamed." Divorce, while infrequent, would entail no stigma. Finally, she proclaimed that "what particular form marriage will take under Socialism, no one can say; forms and ideals change so rapidly that we can no more foresee what will be pleasing to our grandchildren than our grandfathers could foresee our lives." Marriage, in short, was not an eternal and unchanging norm, but rather one which had in the past reflected the social relations of power, and in the future would fulfill the desires of its participants.[62]
O'Hare insisted that moralism and preaching would not end capitalism any more than they would abolish the particular evils (prostitution, intemperance, incompatible marriages) spawned by capitalism. She told the story of an exploiter of child labor who recognized the devastation he wrecked upon the lives of his workers, but who claimed that if he acted humanely his competitors would bankrupt him. Laws against child labor, this capitalist said, would avail nothing, for some companies would violate them (with the connivance of corrupt governments) and drive law-abiding companies out of business.[63] "The owners of these factories cannot individually change conditions and neither can individual workers," O'Hare exclaimed. "The most successful capitalist is the most selfish, the sharpest and the deadliest competitor of all."[64]
Only the socialist reconstruction of society, O'Hare said, could permanently improve matters. Human brotherhood was impossible in a class society, which generated different and incompatible ethical standards appropriate for the contending classes. Only a classless society could generate ethical harmony. In a statement redolent of those often made by members of the IWW, O'Hare asserted that
There never has, never can and never will be any identity of interests between the workingman as a wage-earner and the capitalist as an owner of the machinery of production..... Religion, ethics and morals to the contrary, might is right. When the working class has developed its might, it will by right control the means of wealth production and end the class war.[65]
Private ownership of the means of production, O'Hare thundered, made slaves of the workers: "whether chains or hunger enslaves him, he is a slave just the same." Chattel slaves were at least fed, and their families broken up no more often than those of the "free" working class. "The slave market now is not bounded by four walls; it was enlarged until it covers our whole industrial system.... The workingmen to-day who go out to sell their labor power must carry their auction block with them and be their own auctioneers. There is no group of eager bidders pitted against each other in the contest for this slave, but there are plenty of eager slaves bidding for a master." O'Hare told a vivid tale of a succession of wage slaves, each underbidding the other. "To-day man is pitted against man, woman against both, the child against man and woman and the machine against all." The wonders of modern production, "from the stone hammer of the savage to the mighty world trust, is the combined handiwork of all ages of men.... An equal, indivisible share is the natural birthright of all."[66]
O'Hare assured her readers that
The progress of the race has always been forward. Progress comes through struggle. Therefore the whole history of humanity is one of continual struggle.... The wrongs of each system have been inherent in that system, yet each system has been a necessary step in human progress.... The student who reads the story of the future from the history of the past, who is able to discern the shadow which coming events casts before, calls himself a Socialist. He knows that the wage system is following the natural path of worn-out social orders and is passing away.... [and] that these changes will take place without his help, whether he wishes it or not; that it is written in the immutable law of progress.[67]
Echoing Emma Goldman and the Wobblies, O'Hare--in a statement that boded ill for a proletarian revolution achieved peacefully and democratically through the ballot box--sadly asserted that "Every forward step in the march of human progress has been met with the bitterest antagonism by the great mass of people because they honestly believed that the old ways were God's ways and that all innovations were of the Devil. All history is stained with the blood of great men who have discovered new truths and principles in Nature and dared to stand before the world and proclaim them."[68] Socialists suffered the opprobrium commonly heaped upon scientists and world-benefactors of all kinds. However, their triumph was inevitable:
When Karl Marx first expounded his theory of social evolution he did not patent a new nostrum for civic ills; he simply traced with the accuracy of a scientist the natural growth and development of the means of producing the things necessary for life.... Society is a living organism and can not be cut to pattern like a garment. Scientists may gather in one vessel all the chemical atoms necessary to construct a human body, but it would not be a living body. It would be only a mass of chemicals. Reformers may construct a plan for the reconstruction of society, but it will not be the society reconstructed; it will only be a lot of words on paper..... The embryo of a new form is always developing in the body of the old and in due time must be born by the natural process by which all living organisms reach earth.[69]
O'Hare likened the birth of a new society to a mother's travail, and again like the growing of kernel into cornstalk. In either case, human hands must assist the new birth, or tend and gather the harvest. "Socialism is not a dream of dreamers, or the finished plan of a reformer," she said, but an organic growth.[70]
For the most part, O'Hare apotheosized men and marriage as the actual and proper (even in contemporary capitalist society) goal of women's lives. Observing the English suffrage movement while attending the International Socialist Bureau meeting in 1914, O'Hare said that English women needed not the vote but "a beau, a new corset and a well-fitting dress.... Women in England are plentiful, more plentiful than coal, or dirt, or any other substance on earth, and there is nothing in the heaven above or on the earth below that is so cheap and valueless as woman life."[71]
O'Hare described the systematized mass murder and torture of working women, and the discarding of them upon the scrap heap when old and unprofitable. She found upper class woman as appalling, "stunted and warped in the gilded cage of idleness." Multitudes of English men went abroad for economic opportunity because a few landlords monopolized the land; others garrisoned England's empire, and returned diseased, crippled, or not at all. Each such man "leaves the woman God and Nature intended should be his wife to become one of the brutalized workers to wither and dry up into pitiful spinsterhood;" for each emigrant, "another sweated wretch of withered 'old maid' is added to England's surplus of women." The two million surplus women in England debased the relations between the sexes. "The effect of the surfeiting surplus of women upon the men of England is just as marked and just as demoralizing as upon the women. The power to dominate always breeds tyranny, and familiarity breeds contempt."[72] O'Hare then exalted conventional marriage in a manner that would have appalled any regular Socialist Woman contributor:
God knows that the robbery of English bodies is appalling, but the robbery of English hearts and souls is hellish. If a system steals my bread it wrongs me, but if it steals my love it curses me with the most fiendish curse of man or devil.
Frightful to me were the poverty-warped bodies, hunger knawed stomachs, and cold, pinched flesh of the English working class, but far more terrible were the souls and hearts starved for love. Like some frightful vision of a man-made hell comes to me still the memory of those million women who know not love, and never can know it; women who have never had a lover; who have never been a sweetheart; women who have never waited under the moonlight or in the long, dreamy hours of the gleaming for the man of her choice; who have never felt the handclasp of love or the kiss of passion; women who will never know the glory of giving to her love; never know that sweet agony of waiting for the coming of her child, never know the joy of sacrifice which comes with travail, and never know the touch of a baby's lips upon her breast.
And the men! I see them also.... [in dreary wastes around the world, scratching out a living]. Alone, heart hungry, living and dying without the touch of a woman's hand or the blessing of a woman's love. Men deadening the longing for love [by] burning and cheating nature in searing vice. The barren women of England and the vice-cursed men driven to alien lands are the most tragic sights of earth today, and the wail of their unborn children reaches to the ears of God.[73]
English women, O'Hare continued, were "the most awkwardly dressed and least artistic looking women, from the palace to the slum, of any women I know.... The typical English woman has lost her waist line, sags, stoops, drags her heels, sinks her chin on her chest, and dresses in frightful taste. And why not? Every woman has a God-given desire to be beautiful, but she craves beauty only that she may appear pleasing to the man she loves. Every normal woman loves beautiful dresses, soft laces and artistic lines, but every woman dresses for a man; when there are no men to love and no man to dress for, the very mainspring of life is snapped and life drags and trails in the dust."[74]
O'Hare championed "the Right to be Beautiful." In accordance with her materialistic philosophy, she exclaimed that "the human body is the temple of the soul, and when that body is not garnished and beautiful the soul must suffer also. I don't think a woman can have a great brain under a dowdy hat, or a disorderly, badly brushed head of hair; or a great heart under a frumpy, inartistic, unbeautiful dress; or do great work in the world with sagging shoulders and dragging steps; or ever ripen into full fruition without a man's love. I think there is more moral tonic to brace up a woman's life in a first-class corset than in all the stuffy sermons that were ever preached; a smart shoe will keep a woman's feet nearer the path of rectitude and virtue than pious platitudes; beauty has more saving grace than prayers, and a lover's kiss will come nearer opening the doors of Heaven to a woman's soul than all the priests and preachers who have mouthed cant creeds."[75]
O'Hare asserted that "the master theme of a woman's life is love, and when practically a whole nation of women know that their chance for love, companionship, wifehood, and motherhood is almost nil, it is but natural that their bodies should lose poise and their souls the beacon light of life."[76] English women, once enfranchised, would vote for Socialism if only to reclaim their lost men.
O'Hare also argued for suffrage in a non-feminist vein, most often stressing the camaraderie of the sexes and propounding women's suffrage as a class rather than a sex demand. However, she occasionally acknowledged the trans-class, gender-based nature of the suffrage movement. For example, he marched in the massive 1913 District of Columbia suffrage parade, an "outpouring of womanhood" where "the toil-worn women of the working class" marched side by side with the "sheltered, cultured women of the capitalist class." The District of Columbia police, she said, actively encouraged the small number of male bystanders who rioted and attacked the suffrage marchers, not realizing that "sex lines are stronger than class lines and that a sex movement will include women of all classes." But O'Hare, simultaneously with celebrating this gender solidarity, stressed that the police-instigated riot caused an uproar only because upper-class women found themselves treated with the brutality commonly inflicted upon striking women workers. "I have been in many strikes and I have seen insults and indignities heaped upon working girls while policemen clubbed and beat and murdered women asking for a living wage," O'Hare said. "This has been the general and accepted condition of affairs in every strike in the United States and no one of importance made any objection. Leading suffragists never asked Congress to investigate and congressmen and senators and judges accepted mob brutality and police bestiality as a matter of course." Thousands of men in town for the inauguration festivities--"old men with one foot in the grave and young boys of 16 wearing the uniforms of schools and colleges"--lined up for blocks, awaiting their turn at the numerous make-shift brothels created for the occasion. The police protected these men, and displayed genuine solicitude for the drunks among them.[77]
O'Hare, however, usually stressed suffrage as a Socialist and therefore a class-based goal. The working class, she said, constituted 93% of the population, and half of this number were women. "I as a Socialist most emphatically state that I demand Equal Suffrage not merely as a SEX right but also as a CLASS RIGHT.... I want the women of my class enfranchised not alone that they may help me fight the battles of my SEX but also of my CLASS." Ignoring the structure of patriarchal law which virtually enslaved women, she agreed that all legislation in interests of men was also in the interests of women; she would vote to improve the condition of men, "that as a woman I might be helped." Women's votes would help peacefully inaugurate the social revolution, achievable only by the vote. The machinery of production was now "a charnel house of poverty, misery, disease, degradation, and death," and women's jobs were even more dangerous than men's. Working women, as working men, demanded control over that machinery. While participating in the New York suffrage campaign of 1915, O'Hare gave the same speech before suffragist and Socialist audiences. "I never knew whether it was the Socialist Party or the Suffrage Campaign Committee I was speaking for and which ever it was I talked the same kind of Socialism I talk in Oklahoma and the people ate it up in just the same way."[78]
O'Hare said that women did not have and did not want protection without responsibility; "that is the position of the slave, the child and the mentally incompetent, and we deny that we are any of these." Incredibly, she insisted that "I am not asking for better laws for women.... I merely demand equal opportunity for all." Shortly afterwards, however, she listed some laws which directly oppressed women: men need not support their illegitimate children; the age of consent was low, only 10 years in some states; and "the sons of the rich may prey with impunity upon the daughters of toil and the laws of our states will protect them."[79] O'Hare virtually ignored patriarchal marriage laws, which legally a husband's rape, abuse, and exploitation of his wife.
O'Hare also conservatively assumed the immutable nature of traditional gender roles and tasks in her "social motherhood" argument for suffrage. "Home is the logical location of womanly activity," she said; "biology and the natural division of labor have placed her there, and all the ologies and isms can never remove her from the home as long as the human family arrives in the vale of tears in the manner now in vogue" rather than in incubators. Today, however, everything used in the home was produced elsewhere, not in the home under mother's watchful eye as before; women had no control over the food, clothing, other goods that entered the home. "We cannot expect men to usurp woman's natural place in the scheme of things and do the work of women in caring for and protecting the family" because they had their own work. "Our prehistoric ancestors settled the question of man's and woman's place in life back in the far past when instinctively the men went out to hunt the game and left the women and children to tend the fires, prepare the food and dress the skins."[80] O'Hare argued that "simply because the industries have left the four walls of a cabin and gone to a factory and workshop" is no reason to expect that men "upset the natural order of life....
Cooking, cleaning and clothing, sewage and smoke, dirt, disease and death always have been and are still woman's problems and must be dealt with by women.... But these problems have ceased to be individual problems of individual women and become the civic problems of motherhood collectively, just as the loom, smokehouse and preserving kettle have ceased to be the individual property of individual women and become the collectively operated means of production....
Our responsibilities as mothers are just the same, but the methods of meeting them have changed. Women cannot cope individually with their responsibilities, only collectively can women solve the problems of the wider home. This collective action is political.[81]
O'Hare asserted that "woman's suffrage will be one more lever with which the working class can overthrow the accursed [capitalist] system.... The place to settle labor problems is at the ballot box and not merely at the factory gate." Women were fighting together with men at the factory gate, and wanted also to fight at their side "in the wise, saner, more civilized place--the voting booth." Men and women together will achieve "the higher destiny of mankind."[82]
O'Hare's class-based arguments for suffrage would, she hoped, reconcile a demand for gender justice with orthodox Marxist analysis, and mollify suspicious male Socialists who believed women's suffrage a distraction from, or even (given women's alleged conservatism) obstacle to, Socialism. Yet her ad hoc arguments made little sense. Although she claimed that she favored the vote for working-class women, and would enfranchise the middle class only for reasons of practicality, she seldom explained why working-class women would vote more wisely than their male relatives. O'Hare, in fact, conceded that if women voted as stupidly as men did, they would derive little benefit from suffrage. When an opponent asked her how women's votes would increase their wages and better their working conditions, O'Hare had no convincing answer.[83] Yet despite occasional statements that mothers recognized the value of human life as business-oriented men never could ("my dream is a woman's dream, the longing cry of a mother heart.... my dream is Socialism"),[84] she seldom claimed that women were in any sense superior to men. Such an argument would have undermined her class-based analysis and demanded a greater stress on the "sex struggle" emphasized by Socialist Woman writers.
O'Hare, like the Socialist women, strongly supported legalized birth control. As in her advocacy of suffrage, she uneasily combined arguments based on class with those based upon her genuine, if largely unacknowledged, anger at the insensate brutality of men. Amidst the very suffrage article in which she denied any conflict between the sexes, she exclaimed that "Ninety men of every hundred came into the world not in answer to his mother's wish but because of his father's unleashed desire." She praised Margaret Sanger and said that all must agree with her that "the most sacred thing in life is the creation of life and that the creator should have the right and power to say WHEN a life shall be called into being." O'Hare asserted that "motherhood is too sacred to be abused, that the power to give life is a sacred responsibility and that its control should be in the hands of the woman who gives life rather than at the caprice of the man whose only responsibility is the gratification of physical passion."[85]
O'Hare criticized the elites who practiced birth control themselves, but denied the working class their own knowledge. The Catholic Church and the capitalists, she charged, viewed women as merely the "breeders of child slaves to perish in capitalism's shambles." If the Catholic church sincerely opposed birth control, it should demand maternity compensation, widow's pensions, secure and well-paying jobs for the family bread winner, and the abolition of child labor and of the tenant system and of monopoly. "When the church has used its power to make society as a whole responsible for the welfare of all children... then and not until then has any male biped without feathers the right to forbid to any women the scientific knowledge that will enable her to decide when and under what conditions she shall call a new life into being."[86]
When the National Rip-Saw first publicized the crusade for birth control, it was deluged with heartrending letters, "enough to break a heart of stone," from women asking for information. O'Hare raged that
If there is anything on earth that would make a real woman hold law, law makers and judges in contempt, it would be to read the heartbreaking pleas of women for help that will free them from the crime of bringing unwelcome, sub-normal, hunger pinched children into this capitalist jungle and then gaze [at] the average type of fat paunched, bull necked, sensually marked law maker and judge who declares such help a crime.[87]
(Even here, however, she omitted the word "male" before the phrase "lawmakers and judges.")
O'Hare also read one of Sanger's leaflets to see if it was as bad as depicted, and concluded that "the vilest mind could find nothing vicious there. Yet these simple, scientific facts; this great boon; this humane knowledge that would save hundreds of thousands of men and women untold anguish and save the world from numberless unwelcome, sub-normal children and save society the heavy burden of supporting almshouses, prisons, insane asylums and imbecile homes is denied the people and its education made a crime." O'Hare noted that very many of the piteous letters were from the South, where pellagra raged because of malnutrition.[88]
O'Hare also used traditional values and rhetoric, even while implicitly criticizing them, when addressing racial questions. Just as her discussions of gender relied on customary beliefs even as she subtly undermined them, so she employed racist notions in her appeal to whites. O'Hare utilized white prejudices while also partly subverting them in the cause of a trans-race working-class alliance. Mirroring the effect of her quasi-feminist writings, however, her racial analysis re-enforced the very traditional shibboleths which most required demolition.
O'Hare said that social equality was both impossible and undesirable because "men and women always form social groups according to their various tastes"; individuals (and, she implied, peoples) also differed in physical and mental capacities. Socialists desired only equal opportunity, not equality of condition, and would place the Negro "WHERE HE CANNOT COMPETE WITH THE WHITE MAN"--in his own territory. In an argument based on the self-interest of whites (an argument echoed, without its racist overtones, by black Socialists), O'Hare exclaimed that blacks must be accorded equal access to natural resources and the machinery of production
not because we love the "nigger," but because we know that every chain of economic servitude that is shackled on the ankle of the "nigger" is riveted on the wrists of the white workers. Just as long as a "nigger" can be robbed of the product of his labor by the capitalist class by being shut out from access to the means of life, just that long he can be made the club and chain that will drag and beat the white workers down into the mire of poverty.... No, we Socialists don't love the "nigger" any better than he loves us; we don't admire the shape of his nose or the color of his skin any more than he likes our insolence and intolerant attitude, but we have sense enough to know that capitalism chains us to the negro with iron chains of economic servitude and we would rather have the negro free from his chains. Because if the black man is chained it spells slavery for the white man and woman and girl--we must share it.[89]
O'Hare said that the capitalists used the scarecrow of racial equality to reinforce their own domination, which resulted in the mingling of blacks and whites on the job and the replacement of white workers by lower-paid blacks. O'Hare described a bi-racial crew, "as nicely placed as the stripes on a calico apron," digging a sewer and drinking water from the same pail. "In the laundries of [an] aristocratic southern city the daughters of white Democrats work side by side with big, black negro men; in the cotton mills, the white children compete with negro children." Children of both races worked side-by-side in cotton fields and coal mines; white sharecroppers were kicked off the best land because blacks cost less. In Kansas City blacks replaced some whites in the packing houses "and the white daughters of both Republican and Democratic voters are forced to associate with them in terms of shocking intimacy." O'Hare exclaimed that "God knows we have had enough" of such racial equality: "'nigger' equality would be better than the Democratic 'equality' which you have now, with the nigger getting the best of it all around, which best, God knows is bad enough."[90]
O'Hare said that "I neither love nor hate a negro. I am no more anxious to associate with him than he is to associate with me. I don't want to associate on terms of social equality with him and I know he is just as willing to dispense with my society as I am with his, but capitalism forces us into a social, economic and physical relation which is just as revolting to the negro as it is to me." O'Hare's racist, conservative solution--which ironically became a badge of radicalism when adopted by the Communist party in the 1920s--was segregation. "Let us give the blacks one section in the country where every condition is best fitted for them.... Let them work out their own salvation." Revealing her own doubts about black capacities, O'Hare commented that "if the negro rises to such an opportunity, and develops his own civilization, well and good; if not, and he prefers to hunt and fish and live idly, no one will be injured but him and that will be his business." O'Hare urged that black men vote Socialist to "free your wives and daughters from the despoliation of your white masters"; for whites, voting Socialism would "free your womenkind from the debasement of wage slavery yoked to Negro Equality."[91]
O'Hare was well aware of the double exploitation endured by black men, and the triple oppression inflicted upon black women. Yet she also blamed the offspring of mixed unions for their alleged vicious sensualism. "The women of a subject people are always the ones violated by the men of the master class and the long, long story of the violation of the black women by the white man need not be written in words. It's there written ineffaceably, in terms that goad and sear in the faces of the 'yellow negroes' everywhere. Conceived in lust and born to shame and servitude they are vampires that can not be shaken off." O'Hare blamed white rapists for the allegedly vicious, depraved yellow girls who corrupted southern white boys, and claimed that the yellow men "in whom the white father planted deep the seed of lust is an ever constant menace to womanhood."[92]
When a plague which started among poor blacks spread among whites, O'Hare thundered that this was but partial payment for the centuries-long white exploitation of blacks. Black revenge would ravage whites "without [the black] even raising his hand" as long as this oppression continued because "nature knows no distinction, no race or color, and her only law is that of cause and effect."
'Only a Nigger!' Yes, only a negro with black skin, vicious, depraved; ignorant and diseased, the product of our system, but his blood is red, he is a human being and he is bound with ties that can not be severed to every other human being of earth, black and white. We may not be "our brother's keeper" but he is ours. Nature has forged a chain that binds us together and whatever his station in life, whatever his fate, he keeps us to it also. We push the negro down. He draws us with him; we deprave him, he returns it to our children; we rob him of the product of his labor, he robs our soil and wields his ruthless if unconscious sabotage; we disease him and he scatters the seeds of death broadcast.... Microbes are no respecters of persons; they never consult the social register and the blue-blood up at the 'big-house' or on the Avenue is just as satisfactory [a] breeding place as the red blood of the brat down in the alley.[93]
These passages display O'Hare simultaneously at her best and worst. She employed racist stereotypes which would please her white readers, but laced her analysis with condemnations of white prejudice and oppression. Except for the tone, little in these writings would have offended black radicals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph, who also complained about the allegedly pathological nature of many black communities while also blaming such conditions on white racism. While in prison for her anti-war stance, O'Hare displayed genuine sympathy for black inmates, and offered them very real material and emotional support. She herself treated each person, of whatever race, as an individual. Her public pronouncements on race most likely represented "Aesopian language"--the conscious use of traditional rhetoric as an instrument of subversion--while simultaneously expressing her own unacknowledged racism. Her enlistment of white racist stereotypes in the cause of a trans-race class alliance symbolizes the treacherous nature of the entire conservative Socialist enterprise: it is doubtful whether her efforts undermined or re-enforced a white racism which was not only execrable in its own right, but an intractable obstacle impeding Socialism. In this regard, her racial language paralleled her language of gender, which also reflects both a genuinely conservative acceptance of traditional roles and an equally important emphasis on transforming, while not abolishing, those roles. While serving on the NEC, O'Hare did advocate SP recruitment among blacks; the mutual indifference of the SP and of blacks was, she said, "a problem we have to meet."[94]
O'Hare similarly utilized traditional religious language for her cause. Here, the disjunction between her actual beliefs and her public rhetoric is more obvious. A close reading of O'Hare's writings indicates that she had shed every particle of orthodox Christianity. She believed that Hell was a state of mind rather than a place, that God merely symbolized human goodness or cosmic forces, that votes counted more than prayers, and that the reality of Christ's resurrection was irrelevant. Yet she publicly extolled Jesus Christ as a proletarian rebel and communist. She claimed that the social teachings of the Catholic and Protestant churches were identical with the SP program, and that church anti-Socialist animus was based merely on ignorance. "The fundamentals of Socialism and real Christianity are the same," she said, adding that Socialists welcomed people of all creeds. "A man may be a Socialist and not be a Christian, but no man can be a Christian and not be a Socialist if he knows what Socialism is, for the one is the basis of the other."[95]
O'Hare's religious strategy strongly resembled that of IWW editor and philosopher Ben Williams: she urged that Socialists ignore religious issues and focus on the class interests which united all workers. She attacked religious sectarianism, but also disliked anti-religious agitation, except when evoked by Christian attacks on Socialism. "I was born, reared and educated as a Protestant," she said. "An accident of life that I had no more power of controlling than I had of choosing my parents. I was religiously taught to hate the Catholic and despise the Jew" and ambled contently along in ignorance "until a dawning knowledge of Socialism prodded me out of the rut. As I grasped the [socialist] philosophy, I ceased to be provincial, and claimed the world for my country, lost my creed consciousness and acquired cosmic consciousness."[96] O'Hare said that
I absolutely refuse to waste any words on any man or woman's individual creed simply because I know he got his creed just like I got mine and will lose it the same way. A man does his religious thinking with the same brains with which he does his economic thinking, and if I can get him to think correctly on economics his religious thinking will take care of itself.[97]
O'Hare denounced all divisions which set worker against worker, including virtually every traditional source of personal and community identity. "The very basic cornerstone of the mastery of the master class and the slavery of the working class has always been the division of the workers," she said. "Get the workers to fighting over any question on earth and the masters win. Patriotism, race prejudice, craft jealousies, sectional pride, any old thing on earth will do.... It makes no difference at all where the line of cleavage comes, if we divide anywhere the master class wins and we lose."[98] This analysis--which could have been penned by the most incendiary Wobbly--demanded the annihilation of all personal and community identities based on non-class criteria, and the creation of a universal working-class sisterhood and brotherhood. A person seeking such destruction could pursue one of three strategies: ignoring such traditional sources of identity in favor of a focus on economic issues; utilizing them as weapons against capitalism; or directly assaulting them as direct impediments which thwarted working-class unity. O'Hare usually pursued the first two strategies, while most Wobblies became convinced that parochial, self-destructive identities required direct assault. This disagreement, however, concerned strategy rather than fundamental goals or underlying philosophy.
O'Hare practiced the tolerance she preached. She was a pragmatic, non-dogmatic SP loyalist who took no part in intra-party factional struggles. This was truly unusual for someone who held so many important party offices. (Eugene Debs, the SP's Presidential candidate in many elections, similarly eschewed infighting, did not attend conventions or hold party offices.) She privately detested rightist leaders Hillquit and Berger as contemptuous of mainstream America, excessively focused on their narrow ethnic communities, and too doctrinaire and theoretical. She also accused them of incessantly plotting against Debs.[99] Yet she worked amicably with both rightist leaders, even as she was on much better terms with leftist firebrand Debs, a co-editor of the Rip-Saw in the years before its wartime suppression.
O'Hare's moderation is evident in her attitude towards the 1912 amending of Article II, Section 6 of the SP Constitution. This amendment proscribed the Wobblies by making advocacy of sabotage, violence, or illegal action an offense evoking expulsion from the party. O'Hare almost certainly approved of this amendment when it was adopted, and cited it when talking with St. Louis Archbishop Glennon about SP policy; yet she did not publicly endorse or campaign for it. After its deleterious effect in fomenting party discord and factionalism had become obvious, she implicitly criticized it. However, she did so in her usual subtle way, in the course of a 1914 article extolling Jean Jaures, the recently assassinated French Socialist leader. O'Hare, as SP representative on the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) in 1914, had dutifully asked that the ISB condemn sabotage, violence, and illegality in terms strongly resembling those of Section 6. However, she approvingly quoted Jaures as exclaiming: "My God! Comrade, don't we have enough of war and hate thrust on us by the capitalist class without hunting an opportunity to fight in our own ranks? If we would successfully fight the enemy we must have peace at home."[100]
Typically, O'Hare, in writing about her ISB experiences, condemned European radicals in terms she seldom applied to their American counterparts, thus softening her implicit criticisms of those counterparts. The Dublin strike, she averred, taught British workers that "syndicalism and direct action are all right to talk about, but that an organized, disciplined, trained working class are necessary to fight the battles of the working class;" that "the man who is not educated to vote right is rarely educated to strike right"; and that "political education and political organization must keep pace with industrial development." The strike revealed the stark difference "between a soapbox oration on the beauties of direct action and syndicalism and the conduct of a great strike according to their principles." Similarly, O'Hare condemned the direct-action wing of English suffragism: "The militant movement is largely made up of rich women from the idle, useless class who have never had any training in useful service or intelligent action, so quite naturally their struggle for the ballot took the eminently sane and practical turn of throwing bricks through windows, burning houses and shouting at the King through a megaphone."[101] She also casually remarked that although she was treated well, "it was easy to see that the idea of accepting a woman as an absolute equal, even in a Socialist Bureau meeting, was quite startling to the European male mind, particularly the Englishmen."[102] O'Hare made her points about certain American tactics, attitudes, and comrades indirectly, by criticizing their European counterparts.
O'Hare's traditionalism embraced political action, which (before the war) she viewed as more efficacious than industrial organization. She clearly shared the traditional American faith that the people could rule, even under capitalism. Her statement in favor of a proposed Missouri minimum wage for girls and women remains a classic expression of incremental Socialism: "I know this law will not be Socialism, it will not bring the co-operative commonwealth, it will not abolish the infernal wage system, but it is an important skirmish in the class war. It is one outpost to be taken from Big Biz and every victory makes the great victory that much nearer." Socialist workers demand all that we produce, not just a minimum wage; but the latter "is another hardtack in our knapsack to fight on and we know that a soldier with two hardtacks will do twice as much fighting as a soldier with one."[103] O'Hare recognized that seeming capitalist benevolence usually stemmed from selfish motives, and that the thin veneer of civility masking capitalist mass murder quickly dissipated during strikes. However, intimately acquainted with the effects a "dying wage" had on workers, she extravagantly praised Henry Ford and his five dollar day because of the concrete benefits they conferred upon individual workers.[104] Yet O'Hare (especially after the United States entered World War I) also defended the IWW; in fact, she said that her arrest and prosecution stemmed largely from her efforts on behalf of an IWW--Non Partisan League alliance. When she revived the National Rip-Saw after the war, she made Covington Hall, an IWW stalwart, a co-editor.
That O'Hare may have sometimes used "Aesopian language"--moderated her genuine feminist beliefs in hopes of securing a hearing for a less incendiary version--is evident from occasional lapses in her moderate, male-friendly tone. Despite her stress on harmonious gender relations, O'Hare occasionally disparaged or contemptuously dismissed men. Her flyer, "Wimmin Ain't Got No Kick," distributed by the WNC, began by describing one of her speeches in "a town just like thousands of other towns," when she was accosted by "a typical man, just like millions of other men," who insisted on remaining "abjectly ignorant."[105] And when the government blatantly neglected children in favor of livestock or warships, she displayed real bitterness against the male (as opposed to the capitalist) state. In a 1912 article, "Pigs Versus Children", O'Hare asked in a tone of utter disgust and contempt: "Can you men understand the blistering humiliation it is to a mother to know that the government you have given us, the government in which you deny us a voice, values the pigs of the nation higher than the babies we went down in the valley and shadow of death to endow with life? Your government (not ours remember) has a Department of Agriculture" whose bulletins said that young pigs must have unbounded freedom in the sunlight and large pastures in which to run and play; yet our children were denied these things and "may rot and fester and die in the capitalistic hog-pens you call Christian cities.... Our babies are classed lower than pigs, [for] pigs have a price and bring a profit in the market while baby ---- has no price, brings no profits and is less valued by your Christian government than little pigs." Babies died from a cholera epidemic and your male government does nothing, "but if a pig gets cholera then 'your' government provides a trained pig doctor who comes post haste with medicines and skill to save the pig. A pig is worth dollars to the packing house trust, but the baby has value to no one but its mother, and mothers have no voice in government."[106] O'Hare said that women
know the price of a child-life and we revolt at its useless waste. If I did not realize that the men of our nation could never know the price of a human life, if I was not convinced that they simply can not comprehend the cost of their own children, I think my soul would be so full of hate that I should be tempted to do murder....[107]
O'Hare exonerated men because they simply could not understand; otherwise "I would be more violent and murderous than any Anarchist that ever lived."[108]
O'Hare also lambasted the male government when she compared the money it allocated for warships with that spent on the welfare of school-children. In "Warships or Children" (1913) she said that women involuntarily produced cannon fodder "because men held the key to our bread and butter and it was up to us to bear the children or have our bread supply cut off." O'Hare cited statistics indicating that 25% of school-children (a relatively privileged group, for millions of poor children could not attend school) suffered from malnutrition, and 75% from physical defects which medical treatment could eliminate or alleviate.[109] Malnutrition and untreated disease in children crippled them for life, and inflicted untold costs upon society, but "your government (not ours)" ignored their plight.
Fifteen million warped, crushed, robbed and ruined lives. Fifteen million useless journeys down into the 'valley and shadow' to bring forth a life to be wasted by preventable disease. All this and yet your government spends hundreds of millions of dollars we [women] create each year, but not one cent to save these fifteen million wasted lives.... Half a billion, a sum so great our minds can not grasp it, spent each year for death, bloodshed and destruction and conquest for profits, but not one cent for health, efficiency and conquest of disease.[110]
O'Hare next displayed real gender bitterness when the SP's National Executive Committee announced the impending abolition of the Women's National Committee and the Woman's Department in the National Office in early 1915. O'Hare wryly commented that "the overzealous protestations of the men" who claimed that abolition of the women's groups only helped women "will be taken with a grain of salt by every woman who has seen active service in the Socialist party." O'Hare quoted with approval another Socialist woman who had complained that whenever a woman wants something that the men desire, she is "no longer a woman... but a raging tiger.... I am afraid that not in our time will women be treated fairly, either by their employers or the men with whom they work."[111]
O'Hare herself asserted that male chauvinism was innate, and would not quickly vanish even in the SP. "Socialist men are just ordinary male animals with the inherited tendencies of long ages of male domination, and a few years in the Socialist party will not change them fundamentally. They may expiate learnedly of class solidarity and woman's inherent equality, but they are speaking academically. Scratch a scientific male Socialist and you will find an ordinary he-man. And that he-man will resent as bitterly and fight as unscrupulously the invasion of women into his domain as possible."[112]
O'Hare said that she herself had "run the whole gamut of masculine jealousy, resentment and hindrance" whenever I "encroached on what some man felt was his job...... My experience on the National Executive Committee gave me an excellent chance to study the antics of the male who feels that his domain has been treacherously invaded by a female." While serving on the NEC she had endured the "paternalistic patronage, the lofty scorn, the fatherly solicitude... lest my weak and faltering feminine footsteps be led astray in the dangerous quagmires of party service." O'Hare said that she had learned much but "I was totally unable to be of any service to the party. I am absolutely sure that my experience has been the experience of every woman in the party who has ever held a position or accomplished a piece of party work that some man has felt it would have been an advantage for him to have held or done."
Her experience, O'Hare thundered, merely demonstrated that "the male members of the Socialist party are men first and Socialists incidentally; and that they have not shed their inherited sex tendencies to dominate the inferior female. They want women in the Socialist party, but they want us to confine our attentions to strictly feminine lines of work (which means work no man wants to do) and not encroach on masculine fields of labor."[113]
O'Hare sardonically claimed that she would "oblige the dear boys" and remain within women's traditional sphere, but was prevented by "industrial evolution... a grim old force" which cared nothing whatever for the desires of either sex. "When he firmly grasped us women by the nape of the neck and tossed us out into the industrial world, he also smashed the old world of feminine retirement and masculine domination, and men and women alike, we must submit whether we like it or not." O'Hare thus used a traditional Socialist argument--that individuals and societies must adapt to the irresistible onslaught of the machine process--as an argument for women's equality, just as male Socialists used Socialism's alleged inevitability as an argument for Socialism. Indeed, just as male Socialists claimed that they mere recognized (and deplored) the class struggle, and that rather than causing it they offered its only resolution, so O'Hare claimed that she did not even particularly advocate women's equality.
Succeed or fail, live or die, we are chained together in the bonds of wage slavery and together we must find emancipation. The [new] conditions are galling to men and embittering to women, but submit we must, and to me it seems to be wise to cultivate a sense of humor of toleration and make the best of what we cannot change. The men Comrades will have to realize that we women are here and they will have to accept us; we women must realize that life and adjustment to changed conditions are just as hard for the "new man" as for the "new woman" and we must be patient while the poor fellows are molting their inherited antipathies.[114]
O'Hare concluded her somewhat bitter piece on a conciliatory note. "Work together we must," she said, "so let's bring good humor, philosophy and tolerance to bear on our problems as much as possible, and keep everlastingly on the job."[115] This letter, while expressing more bitterness than most of O'Hare's pronouncements on gender relations within the Socialist movement, epitomized her method of broaching the subject of gender oppression--and of other sensitive cultural subjects which might offend her constituency. She published it not in her own widely-circulated journal, but in a daily newspaper published thousands of miles away, and most likely read by very few National Rip-Saw subscribers. She expressed genuine bitterness, especially at the outset, and included revealing autobiographical details which she never mentioned anywhere else; but she ended with a plea for reconciliation, and especially for understanding on the part of the superior women for the struggling, burdened-with-prejudice males.
In the years 1916-1917 O'Hare further evinced a genuine anger at men in her series, "The Tale of a Rib," (a sardonic reference to the Biblical tale of woman being created from man's rib), published in the National Rip-Saw. O'Hare grasped an insight that social historians have only recently rediscovered: women's history must be recovered from the study of religion, law, and other non-traditional sources, for women's voices have been silenced by the historical records. "A study of the laws of the nations is the most fertile field for one who cares to delve into the story of woman's past," she said. "For in laws we find woman's position accurately defined, and law, like religion, tells the story with no intention of doing so.... Conventional history is almost worthless for the purpose."[116] In a startling passage which may partly explain her own lack of a militant feminist emphasis, she exclaimed that
Women wrote no history, and men could not if they wished to tell the story, and certainly they had no wish to tell it. No book has ever yet been written that lays bare the woman heart and soul, and no voice has ever spoken the secrets of her mind. No man can know what women feel and no women dare tell it.... We live in a man's world, and in it women speak not by right, but by permission. Men own the publishing houses and the avenues of publicity; men buy and pay for the books published and it is men's tastes and pocketbooks that must be consulted; so naturally this book will be well shaped to masculine thought before it sees the light of day. A few generations hence perhaps, when women own and manage publishing houses, and are economically free enough to buy such literature as they choose, our great-great-grand-daughters may write exactly what they feel to be true, but it is not for the women of my generation.[117]
If women told their true story, society would disintegrate; if O'Hare herself told the full truth, her writing would not see print. Nevertheless the story she did tell was devastating enough: "Barter and sale, rapine and conquest, servitude and degradation was the portion of womankind down all the ages."[118]
According to O'Hare, women nurtured the arts of civilization and ruled peacefully. When they produced a surplus, leisured men introduced the enslavement of war captives, and henceforth made war and enslaving women their principle business. "The collective ownership of property passed away, collective production ceased and society was divided into two classes--those who had forcibly taken the earth, and their slaves, and to the latter class women belonged." The rib story "did not create the slavery of women, it just sanctioned and defended it as did all other religions." Slaves were the first type of private property, which led to all others. Women were enslaved and their chastity enforced so that the father would transmit his property to his own children. Combining a class with a gendered analysis, O'Hare said that "Religion and law both being the servants of the men of the ruling class, joined hands in enforcing the subjugation of women and the mastery of men and naturally before such a combination, women were helpless."[119]
O'Hare subjected the familiar Biblical tales to close, feminist analysis, recognizing that the records were fragmentary and "distorted and emasculated [!] by translator and priesthood." She recounted the story of Moses's demand that his minions kill the Midianite male children and elderly women after they had slaughtered the men, remarking that a man could not covet his neighbor's wife, but could kill without limit. Jesus understood women's plight because he too was an outcast, but Paul was a misogynist suffering from a bad liver, who had consorted with the wrong kind of woman. The church fathers incessantly claimed that "men are naturally chaste and spend the greater part of their blameless lives dodging the seductive females who have designs on their virtue." In general, Christianity "simply grafted on to the brutal laws of Rome the narrow-minded theology of the Hebrew religion which had always counted women of less importance than cattle.... To the brutality of Roman law was added the more brutal attitude of the Church fathers towards women." Nunneries, she said in a strikingly contemporary reading, "offered an opportunity for women to express themselves and have some small measure of control over their lives and work a little more uplifting and spiritual than pandering to the depraved lusts and degraded appetites of men sodden in materialism and debauchery." However, even nuns were "absolutely ruled and controlled by men."[120]
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] The only real biography of O'Hare is From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O'Hare, by Sally Miller (University of Missouri Press, 1993). Unless otherwise indicated, biographical information is from this work. Miller and Philip S. Foner also edited Kate Richards O'Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rogue, 1982). The introduction to this work also contains an analysis and description of O'Hare's life. Miller and Foner include some of the works I have quoted below; but because they often condensed O'Hare's pieces, I have cited the original version, except where the version I have read is in the anthology.
[2] KROH, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," SW, October 1908; also in Miller and Foner.
[3] KROH, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," SW, October 1908; also in Miller and Foner.
[4] KROH, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," SW, October 1908; also in Miller and Foner.
[5] KROH, "The Girl Who Would," Wilshire's Magazine, January 1903, in Miller and Foner, 42-44.
[6] KROH, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," SW, October 1908; also in Miller and Foner.
[7] KROH, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," SW, October 1908; also in Miller and Foner; KROH, "The Girl Who Would," Wilshire's Magazine, January 1903, in Miller and Foner, 41-44.
[8] PW, August 1910, special feature on KROH.
[9] KROH, "Guilty!," SR, February 1918.
[10] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," published by Frank O'Hare, March 1919, p. 45.
[11] KROH letter of April 20, 1919, in Miller, Writings, 208
[12] KROH letter, February 15, 1921, in Miller, Writings, 300.
[13] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 9-12.
[14] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 16-20.
[15] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 28,
[16] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 27.
[17] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 28-30.
[18] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 31-33.
[19] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 34-35.
[20] KROH, "The Wages of Women," NRS, July 1913; KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 40.
[21] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 141-142.
[22] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 142, 116, 41.
[23] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 125, 133, 121-122.
[24] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 42-45.
[25] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 48-50.
[26] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 52.
[27] KROH, "Law and the White Slaver," 2.
[28] KROH, "Law and the White Slaver," 26-7, 17, 2-3; KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 83, 64-5.
[29] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 78, 66; KROH, "Law and the White Slaver," 14, 4-5.
[30] KROH, "Law and the White Slaver," 9, 12, 23, 17-19; KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 91-92, 72.
[31] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 110-111, 99, 96; KROH, "Drink, Its Cause and Cure," NRS, September 1913.
[32] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 101-102.
[33] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 102, 111.
[34] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 111-114.
[35] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 111-114.
[36] KROH, "Common Sense and the Liquor Traffic," 26-28.
[37] KROH, "Drink, Its Cause and Cure," NRS, September 1913.
[38] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 103-106.
[39] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 109-110.
[40] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 107; KROH, "Common Sense and the Liquor Traffic," 11.
[41] KROH, "Common Sense and the Liquor Traffic," 21-25.
[42] KROH, "Common Sense and the Liquor Traffic," 24-27.
[43] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 32-33, 18.
[44] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 4-5.
[45] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 20-21, 8.
[46] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 8-9, 22-23.
[47] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 10-11.
[48] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 10-18.
[49] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 238, 11, 190-1.
[50] KROH, SOC, 214.
[51] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 244.
[52] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 244-245.
[53] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 180-181, 185-186.
[54] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 203-204, 207-208.
[55] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 217.
[56] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 217-218.
[57] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 138-139, 198, 200.
[58] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 193-194.
[59] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 192-195.
[60] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 250-251.
[61] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 251-253, 196.
[62] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 196, 186.
[63] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 258-261, also printed under the chapter title, "As a Bud Unfolds," NRS, November 1912.
[64] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 155-157.
[65] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 157-158.
[66] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 159-164.
[67] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 159, 171-172.
[68] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 173.
[69] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 173-174.
[70] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 175.
[71] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[72] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[73] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[74] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[75] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[76] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[77] KROH, "Suffragists and Slavers," NRS, April 1913.
[78] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", Second Installment, NRS, August 1914; KROH, "Three Weeks," NRS, December 1915.
[79] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", second installment, NRS, August 1914. In the same article she said "I demand not only better laws and better enforcement for MY SEX, but more particularly for MY CLASS."
[80] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", NRS, July 1914.
[81] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", NRS, July 1914.
[82] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", NRS, July 1914; KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", fourth installment, NRS, November 1914.
[83] The series "Shall Women Vote," in the NRS during the summer and fall of 1914, was a debate between O'Hare and a female attorney, Bessie Ruler.
[84] KROH, "Daily Bill of Fare for Hard Times," NRS, December 1914.
[85] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", NRS, July 1914; KROH, "Margaret Sanger," July 1916.
[86] KROH, "Margaret Sanger," NRS, July 1916.
[87] KROH, "Birth Control and Pellagra," NRS, December 1915.
[88] KROH, "Birth Control and Pellagra," NRS, December 1915.
[89] KROH pamphlet, "'Nigger' Equality," in MF, 44-49.
[90] KROH "'Nigger' Equality," MF 44-49.
[91] KROH, "'Nigger' Equality," MF, 44-49.
[92] KROH, "Only a 'Nigger'," NRS, February 1913.
[93] KROH, "Only a 'Nigger'," NRS, February 1913.
[94] Miller, Race, Ethnicity, p. 7.
[95] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 35-36.
[96] KROH, "Religious Warfare," NRS, December 1912.
[97] KROH, "Religious Warfare," NRS, December 1912.
[98] KROH, "Religious Warfare," NRS December 1912.
[99] Miller, 235. The letter on which this assessment is based was written in 1945, well after the demise of the SP. It almost certainly represented O'Hare's longstanding views, however; any particular cause of temporary animosity towards the two men would have long since dissipated.
[100] KROH, "He Beats Around the Bush," NRS May 1913; KROH, "Our Martyred Comrade," NRS, September 1914.
[101] KROH, "The Story of an Irish Agitator," NRS April 1914; KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[102] KROH, "Over the Sea and Back Again," NRS, March 1914.
[103] KROH, "The Wages of Women," NRS July 1913.
[104] KROH, "Socialists and the Little Hookworm," NRS, April 1913; KROH, "War in the Copper Country," NRS December 1913; KROH, "Has Henry Ford Made Good?," NRS, January 1916; KROH, "Some More 'Ford'," NRS February 1916; KROH, "A Conversation With Henry Ford," NRS, March 1916.
[105] KROH, "Wimmin Aint Got No Kick," 1; for a similar comment, see KROH, "Coming Out of the Night," NRS, December 1912.
[106] KROH, "Pigs Versus Children," NRS, August 1912.
[107] KROH, "Pigs Versus Children," NRS, August 1912.
[108] KROH, "Pigs Versus Children," NRS, August 1912.
[109] KROH, "Warships or Children," NRS, January 1913.
[110] KROH, "Warships or Children," NRS, January 1913.
[111] KROH, "The Eternal Feminine," NYC, June 6, 1915
[112] KROH, "The Eternal Feminine," NYC, June 6, 1915
[113] KROH, "The Eternal Feminine," NYC, June 6, 1915
[114] KROH, "The Eternal Feminine," NYC, June 6, 1915
[115] KROH, "The Eternal Feminine," NYC, June 6, 1915
[116] KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Four, NRS, February 1917.
[117] KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Four, NRS, February 1917.
[118] KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Second Chapter, NRS, November 1916.
[119] KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Two, Continued, NRS, December 1916.
[120] KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Three, NRS, January 1917; KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Two, NRS, November 1916; KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Four, NRS, February 1917.
An orthodox Marxist who emphasized class over gender, O'Hare staunchly upheld traditional values, and apotheosized the family, wifehood, and motherhood. Although she served one term on the Women's National Committee, she usually worked side-by-side with men within mainstream party institutions. For these reasons she became, after the demise of The Socialist Woman and the WNC, the best-known Socialist woman columnist and orator. She addressed problems which particularly afflicted women--alcoholism, prostitution, the pay and working conditions of female workers, and the decline of religion--and usually discussed the impact of more general problems on her sex. However, her readers could easily ignore her distinctly muted form of feminism (unlike the insistent version of The Socialist Woman); O'Hare's feminism became lost in the demands of seemingly "larger" concerns. After the eruption of World War I, O'Hare became far better known for her anti-war stance than for the feminist sentiments she did express. Still later she won renown as a prison reformer and one of the architects of Llano Co-operative Colony and its associated Commonwealth College. To these endeavors she once again brought a feminist analysis which was both omnipresent and yet subdued. By the late 1920s, however, with the both Socialist and feminist movements moribund (and their remnants at loggerheads), O'Hare found yet more mainstream expressions for her enduring radical conscience.
Yet O'Hare, whom her biographer has called an "honorary man," lived a daring and unorthodox life, which diverged sharply from the family-centered ideal which (probably in part for protective coloration), she so strenuously advocated.[1] Before considering her writings, therefore, a brief examination of her life is in order.
O'Hare's earliest memories were "of a Kansas ranch, of the wide stretches of prairie, free herds roaming over the hills.... of the freedom and security and plenty of a well-to-do rancher's home."[2] A financial Panic and a drought in effect confiscated her family's ranch, however, and her father sold their possessions and trekked to the city for work.
He who had always been master of his own domain, who had hewn his destiny bare-handed from the virgin soil, forced to go out and beg some other man for a chance to labor, an opportunity to use his hands. Though I could not comprehend it then the bitterness of it all was seared upon my memory and I never see a strong man vainly seeking and begging for work that my whole soul does not revolt..... The poverty, the misery, the want, the wan-faced women and hunger pinched children, men trampling the streets by day and begging for a place in the police stations or turning footpads by night, the sordid, grinding, pinching poverty of the workless workers and the frightful, stinging, piercing cold of that winter in Kansas City will always stay with me as a picture of inferno such as Dante never painted.[3]
As many other women, Kate threw herself into humanitarian and religious reform. She fought drunkenness and prostitution, which she was told caused poverty, with "the heart-breaking zeal that [only] an intense young girl" could muster. Yet she found that intemperance and vice proliferated, and even controlled governments and churches. Gradually she discovered that the universe was governed by "fixed natural laws... and that prayers would never fill an empty stomach or avoid a panic." Drink and sin resulted from poverty rather than causing it; "poverty was the fundamental cause of the things I abhorred" and must be abolished.[4]
Meanwhile, O'Hare did office work in her father's machine shop, and, in her spare time, "teased, coaxed, and cajoled the men into letting me try my hand at their work." At first she overcame male skepticism and hostility by taking on "the dirtiest, greasiest work in the shop." Soon, however, "when the men realized that I meant to stick, they grumbled long and loud, and finally threatened to revolt.... If one girl learned the machinist trade, others would, and soon the shops would be over-run by women, and wages would go down as they have in every trade that women have entered." Kate persisted, however, and eventually became one of the first women members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM). A "true mechanic," she said, must possess "a touch as tender and as gentle as a mother's."[5]
O'Hare's direct contact with the working class further radicalized her, as she saw misery, degradation, and servitude everywhere. Placing her hopes in the trade union movement, she was quickly disillusioned. When she remonstrated against her union endorsing for mayor a vicious capitalist against whom it had recently struck, she was "unmercifully ridiculed for daring to talk politics to a lot of American Voting Kings." Shortly afterwards she heard Mother Jones tell a crowd "that a scab at the ballot box" was worse than a scab "at the factory door, that a scab ballot could do more harm than a scab bullet; that workingmen must support the political party of their class and that the only place for a sincere union man was in the Socialist party."[6]
Asking for Socialist literature, O'Hare found herself piled high "with Socialist classics enough to give a college professor mental indigestion." (The only one she understood was The Communist Manifesto, which disappointed her by not mentioning Socialism.) Julius Wayland, publisher of the mass-circulation Socialist monthly The Appeal to Reason, gave her some more comprehensible books. "For a time I lived in a dazed dream while my mental structure was being ruthlessly torn asunder and rebuilt upon a new foundation," she reminisced. After this painful process "I awoke in a new world, with new viewpoints, and a new outlook. Recreated, I lived again with new aims, new hopes, new aspirations and the dazzling view of the new and wonderful work to do. All the universe pulsated with new life that swept away the last vestige of the mists of creed and dogma and old ideas and beliefs." Revolted at the horrors of capitalism (and perhaps wearied by male opposition and obstruction at the shop), she "hung up my cap, laid aside my calipers and rule," and joined "the fight for Socialism. And here I stay until the Co-operative Commonwealth is ours." She attended a school for Socialist agitators and publicists in Girard, where she found not only enlightenment "but that crowning, finishing touch of human life, love."[7] She married Frank O'Hare (at Wayland's home) on January 1, 1902, two days after the school term ended.
The newly-weds spent their honeymoon on a grand speaking tour, where the novelty of married Socialist orators attracted great crowds. Frank taught Kate the "tricks of the trade" of an itinerant agitator and speaker. Yet she soon became the more prominent of the two, earning more money and attracting larger crowds. She went undercover as an investigative reporter in New York City in 1902, working at various women's jobs, where she found inadequate pay and death-camp conditions. She created a sensation when she appeared at the SP's 1904 convention with her six-month old son cradled in her arms. She had a girl the next year, and twin boys in 1908. By that time she had become a nationally-known SP speaker and writer, whose lecture tours covered vast distances over long stretches of time. Frank stayed at home and became her publicity agent and manager--a reversal of traditional gender roles resembling that of Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman, but almost unique within the Socialist milieu. Although O'Hare (like Goldman) touted motherhood as the most exalted privilege of womankind, the responsibility for raising the children increasingly devolved upon Frank and relatives. In practice, O'Hare much preferred the adventurous life of travel and verbal combat over the claustrophobic confines of the home.
Kate's actual life, contrasted with her rhetoric, was apparent in a Progressive Woman feature on her at the time of her run for Congress in 1910--an article which obviously adopted O'Hare's own view of her persona. O'Hare, a self-described "union man" because of her membership in the IAM, 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 reassured jittery Socialists that despite her nomination for Congress 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 on 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 "become a candidate for nothing different than what the average woman's life should be."[8] Although She campaigned vigorously, she won only 5% of the vote.
In addition to running for Congress in 1910, O'Hare served on the SP's Woman's National Committee and its National Executive Committee. She also served as the SP's representative to the meeting of the Second International in 1913, beating out party stalwarts Debs, Hillquit, and Berger for that prestigious post. She ran as the SP's Senatorial candidate from Missouri in 1916, before women had even fully won the franchise in that state. She chaired the pivotal Committee on War and Militarism at the SP's Emergency Convention in St. Louis in 1917, which drafted the Majority "Proclamation" vigorously opposing U.S. entry into World War I; she was shortly thereafter arrested for her anti-war stance. Sentenced to five years in prison, she once again extolled her family, including her extended family of Socialist comrades. "Thank God, we Socialists have sources of strength of mind and heart and soul that judges know not of.... No judge on earth can break me, for back of me are my husband and my children and my grey-haired mother whose faith in me and whose loyalty to the cause of humanity will sustain me through any ordeal, even to the laying down of my life. Back of my family are the hundreds of thousands of comrades with whom I have worked and suffered and sacrificed for many years, and no trial can come to me that they will not share."[9] Perhaps feeling that a federal prison was not the most appropriate place for a mother of four children, she reassured audiences (and herself) during her farewell tour en route to the penitentiary that
When I go to prison, I leave four children outside: a boy of fifteen, a girl of twelve, and twins, boys tens years of age.
And to my children, I know no one can take a mother's place, but they too come of good fighting stock, and the will face the loss of their mother with courage worthy of their ancestry. When they are old enough to understand, they will rather have a mother inside prison walls true to her ideals and principles than outside, a craven coward who dared not protest when our rights were wrested from us and when grievous wrongs were thrust upon us.... [My] millions of devoted comrades will never see my children want for anything. If the administration sends my children's mother to prison for her political beliefs, they will not be motherless, a million women will gladly mother them.[10]
In a letter written shortly after her incarceration ostensibly to her family (but which she knew her husband Frank would publicize widely), O'Hare said that she would continue her role as nurturing mother to the lost, the forlorn, and the abandoned, in the federal hell at Jefferson City:
This is Easter, and I think it means more to me that any other Easter in my whole life. I think that I have come just a little nearer the soul of the universe; that I can touch hands across the ages with all who have walked through Gethsemane and who have found peace for their own souls in service for others..... My own [loved ones] have the memories of long years of love and they can afford to lend me for a time to these poor, despoiled, despairing creatures here.... The poor little "dope fiend" in the cell next to me needs me more than my own do.... If I were outside to-day I might be speaking to a great crowd. Perhaps my empty place and silent voice will serve my comrades and my cause better than my presence.... So do not worry about me and do not be sad. I am all right and I will come back to you a better wife, a more tender mother and a wiser and more efficient comrade.[11]
Upon her release from prison she spent a short time with her family before leaving on a long lecture tour on behalf of the remaining political prisons. "It seemed a crime against the children to leave home even for this purpose," she wrote her supporters. But, she claimed, one of her children reminded her that she was free only because of the efforts of others; she owed the remaining prisoners an equal effort on their behalf. "Mr. O'Hare made the first trip with me," she said, "and it was one of those experiences that can come but once in a lifetime--a joyous pageant of love and fellowship and thanksgiving everywhere."[12]
Until her imprisonment for anti-war agitation, O'Hare was best known as an editor of the National Rip-Saw, a hugely influential mass market Socialist publication, and as the author of The Sorrows of Cupid, "a Socialist best-seller." First published in 1904 under the title What Happened to Dan, this work underwent numerous subsequent expanded editions. The Socialist Woman strongly recommended it, and at times offered it as a free premium with a subscription. In this book, and in several contemporaneous pamphlets largely derived from it, Kate expounded upon capitalism's destructive effects on the family, and proffered Socialism as the salvation of traditional values and family structures. Although sometimes criticizing men and masculine dominance and oppression, the book's seeming exaltation of the traditional home appears on balance far distant from the bitter condemnations which filled the pages of The Socialist Woman. Men (including drunks and customers of prostitutes), were viewed more as fellow-victims of capitalism than as oppressors of women. Nevertheless, O'Hare's depiction of marital bliss unobtrusively assumed an egalitarian revolution in the traditional family.
The Sorrows of Cupid accepts the terms of debate established by conservative moralists and "race suicide" theorists: O'Hare views the decline of the traditional home and family (institutions which The Socialist Women described as a patriarchal slave-pens), as an unmitigated disaster. "Love, home and babies are the three graces that make the trials, struggles and suffering of life worthwhile," O'Hare asserted. "Take these things from us and all our vaunted learning, our wonderful handiwork, our sciences and our achievements become valueless, and earth a barren waste indeed." O'Hare asserted that "sex attraction and joy in reproduction are primal; they come down to us from the far-gone past before society existed." For O'Hare, "marriage, or sex union," was natural, and necessary for a full life. However, both sexes were marrying later, and fewer were marrying at all, causing "unnatural sex repression." Unhappy marriages and divorce had reached epidemic proportions, and "motherhood, once the crown of womanhood, has seemingly fallen into disrepute. Far from being looked upon as the acme of human joy, it is now felt by many to be a curse, a thing to be avoided at all costs." Drunkenness, prostitution, and venereal disease were rampant, and religion in decline.[13]
What, O'Hare asked, was the cause of all this, and the solution?
O'Hare emphatically denied that individual moral failings or women's liberation (the standard conservative suspects) undermined the family. Indeed, the cause was "so plain that even a college professor must see it": low wages and the high cost of living meant that couples could not afford marriage and a family. The concentration of productive wealth in few hands meant that capitalists and landlords confiscated most of a worker's product, making most Americans either impoverished tenant farmers or "mere working attachments to machines owned by others." O'Hare asserted that "thousands of young men" were "wrecked mentally, morally and physically each year because the high cost of living and low wages rob them of the opportunity to have the blessing of a woman's love," and an equal number of young women were similarly "robbed of their youth, health, beauty and womanhood because these same young men are not receiving wages enough to marry and take them from the drudgery of the mill, factory and workshop. The wrecking of young men's lives by sex dissipation and the dwarfing and stunting of young women's lives by sex repression are two of the heart-breaking tragedies of modern civilization."[14]
O'Hare lamented that when couples did marry, they faced daunting obstacles for which capitalism was responsible. In her discussion of marriage's travails, however, she unobtrusively assured that egalitarian, companionate marriage was the only marriage of value. Her first grievance against capitalism, for example, was that because of it, the different experiences of men and women both before and during marriage made them alienated strangers to one another rather than equal soul mates. "The competitive struggle must of necessity create men who are mere money-making machines" and women who are "mercenaries."[15] O'Hare charged that
Common ideals and mental equality--the absolutely essential basis on which real marital happiness must rest, are the last things to be considered in the conventional modern marriages.... If a man succeeds in the commercial struggle of our present system of society he must of necessity concentrate and specialize in money making. Naturally the spiritual and emotional qualities of his being become deadened. On the other hand, the conventions of modern life make women largely bundles of emotion, with little real, intelligent understanding of life and its struggles. A marriage between a man all calculating and practical and a woman all sentiment and emotion must end in disaster.[16]
In words reminiscent of those of The Socialist Women, O'Hare charged that capitalist competition and struggle deformed working-class and elite marriages alike. Working men married because they detested boarding-house existence, while working women wanted only escape from the deadening routine of the machine and factory. O'Hare said that "men of the upper class choose a wife very much as they choose a house or automobile--something that is ornate and attractive; a rack upon which they can hang the outward evidences of their prowess in the industrial battlefield; a piece of property of sufficient value, beauty and distinction to create envy in the hearts of their male associates." Elite girls were bartered for money to diseased or depraved men. Neither workers nor capitalists valued companionship or the raising of a family. The men (and women) were "as ignorant as blocks of wood concerning the real basis of marriage."[17]
Marriage also estranged men from women because the man left home for the world of work, while his wife remained chained to the stove and laundry-tub. "An endless round of domestic drudgery of the woman of the working class, the strain of social duties in the leisure class and the conventionalities with which both are bound, retard the mental growth of women and cause them to lag behind their husbands in mind development," O'Hare said. "The vista of life seen from the kitchen window... is not very broad. Neither is there... food for soul development in the contemplation of the butcher's bill.... The wives of the rich are as great slaves to their social duties as the wives of the poor to their cookstoves and washtubs. Neither has time for study or real self-development"; the minds the and figures of the wives of both classes quickly deteriorate, and the man finds "no soul-companionship in marriage." Meanwhile, "the competitive struggle for existence leaves many men with little time for interest or share in the family life."[18]
O'Hare charged that many marriages were initially based on mercenary and sexual considerations, and were thus merely "legalized prostitution," except that men and women suffered equally. In words that could have been penned by Conger Kaneko (or, for that matter, anarchist Emma Goldman), O'Hare said that
A really happy married life demands that husband and wife share their lives fully, grow and develop together mentally, morally and spiritually. This is almost impossible under existing economic conditions.... Of all the bitter tragedies, there is none more bitter than that of two human beings bound together by the chains of economic dependence when love has ceased to hallow their union.... The saddest, the bitterest, the most damnable wrong, is the wrong to little children born to such a union. If there is one right that is sacred and holy, it is that each child shall be born loved and desired.... If there is one sin that God and nature never pardons, that can never be atoned for, it is the sin of begetting unwanted children. And the world is full of them.... If we could bring no accusation against our present social and economic system but that it forces women to become unwilling mothers, that should be enough to forever condemn it in the sight of God and man.[19]
Poor health was another major cause of marital unhappiness, largely because capitalism bred disease at the workplace, in the tenement, and by the poisoned foods and medicines it produced. O'Hare had herself worked at many women's jobs when investigating working conditions in New York in 1902, and exposed women workers' death-camp conditions in St. Louis in 1913. Because girls starting at age 14 or younger worked at a vast array of dangerous jobs, O'Hare charged that "the very foundation of twentieth century civilization rests upon the slender toil-bowed shoulders of working women and children," working at less than survival wages, and unprotected by man-made governments. "THEY ALL WORKED BECAUSE THEY WERE COMPELLED TO WORK," O'Hare thundered. "No feminine unrest there; no struggle for a 'wider life,' no suffragist tendencies, no revolt against home, husbands, and babies. The whole question resolved itself into the problem of BREAD," for the working girl and often enough for her mother and her crippled and\or unemployed father, "whose only value now is to act as a fertilizing machine for a human breeding machine." Half of the female workers, O'Hare asserted, were destroyed by a single year of factory work. Further, "hundreds of thousands of children die each year from impure milk, patent infant foods and soothing syrups, all poisoned in the interests of profit."[20] Children also died in swarms in the slaughter-pens of industrial capitalism. O'Hare said that
We shudder at the tales of babies murdered in the terrible race riots of Russia and the massacre of the Armenians in Turkey. But if the choice were left to you, which would you prefer--that your child die by a Cossack's sword or a Turk's scimitar, or live the long drawn out agony of a living death in a velvet mill or a pearl button factory? We thunder our condemnation of Russian brutality to the defenseless Jews and peasants, but it would be well for us to look into a cotton or velvet mill, packinghouse or tobacco factory before we censure Czar Nicholas and the autocracy of Russia too severely..... Death was short and sharp for them, but for our little ones it is the long-drawn-out agony of never ending want and poverty....[21]
The press, pulpit, and platform were "all owned by the despoilers of childhood" who decried the lack of babies "not because of desolate homes and heart-hungry men and women" but "because child laborers are needed that their flesh and blood may be coined into gold." O'Hare claimed that "the mill, the mine and the factory are killing American children as fast as babies are being born" and concluded that "an economic system which robs men and women of health and the ability to bring healthy children into the existence is certainly unworthy of perpetuation."[22]
If husbands, wives, and children died in the slaughter pens of industrial capitalism, lack of work also destroyed marriages and blighted families. "Unemployment is responsible for thousands of desertions by husbands," O'Hare said. "The American wage earner is fast becoming a nomad who roams about from one town to another seeking a job." In 1904 fifty per cent of the workers were employed only part of the time. Capitalists required a reserve army of unemployed to lower wages and furnish cannon fodder for imperialistic wars. Desperate men and women sometimes killed their offspring; O'Hare charged that "we are fast degenerating into a nation of infanticides or child murderers."[23]
O'Hare also blamed capitalist education and values for poisoning marriages, again much in the style of The Socialist Woman. In particular, ignorance of sex, "the most important and sacred relation of life," ruined many couples. Lack of "rational understanding of the intimate physical relationship of [the marriage] contract" generated misery and disease; yet boys were inculcated with a brutalized double standard, while girls were inoculated with a delicate ignorance. Any woman who discussed sex, children, or the basics of marriage with her prospective mate would be outcast. "Girls reared in ignorance, gaining all the knowledge of life they possess from novels that end at the altar, fall in love with a pair of blue eyes or a bank account, are wooed in a maze of romance, married in a blaze of glory and awake on the first morning of the honeymoon disillusioned, disenchanted victims of innocence and ignorance. Many a woman's love is cold and dead before the flowers that form her marriage wreath are withered and the dawn of the honeymoon looks upon many a shattered ideal and bitterly bruised heart." O'Hare sarcastically said that "The man who has learned all he knows of the sex relation from the courtesan and prostitute is a fit mate for your innocent daughter, isn't he? But, nevertheless, your daughter has a very small chance to have any other kind."[24]
Yet O'Hare's assertion that neither girls nor boys were prepared for the humdrum realities of marriage implicitly, if only partially, accepted the traditional division of labor within the home. "Each stratum of society assiduously apes the one just above, and health, happiness and comfort are sacrificed to mere show," she said. "The object of the average home is to keep up appearances." In a passage that would have horrified Lida Parce, O'Hare apotheosized the domestic arts so essential for a happy home, and strongly implied that they were mostly women's chores. "More homes have been ruined by indigestion than by intoxicating drink," she said. Women were taught fancy dances and complicated musical compositions but not the arts of cooking, sewing, and darning socks; they dabbled in art and science "but entirely ignore the greatest art known to man, that of making a house Home, and giving life to wellborn children.... God pity the poor little defenseless [children] that come into such a travesty on home." O'Hare believed that "all education has but one end--to enable us to really live"; that "the right to a domestic as well as an artistic education is the inalienable right of every woman; that culture and refinement should be the heritage of all."[25]
Yet O'Hare added a significant caveat--one easily ignored by men attracted by her traditional-values rhetoric, but very real nonetheless. "A real home must of necessity being a co-operative thing," she said; unless the husband acknowledged himself "a mere fertilizing agent like a drone in the beehive," he had an important role in the family besides that of breadwinner. "If women need to be trained for the duties of motherhood, men need to be trained for the duties of fatherhood. If mothers must be educated to the possibilities of home making, fathers must be educated to be helpers and sustainers."[26] The very term "helpers," however, conceded that women rightfully shouldered most of the burdens of homemaking.
O'Hare discussed at length the most blatant threats undermining the traditional home--prostitution, venereal disease, drunkenness, and the decline of religion--which alarmed traditionalist and bourgeois reformers. Eschewing the fashionable moralism of her (and our) time, she focused instead on causes and effects, and blamed these evils squarely on capitalism. Socialism, she claimed, would cure these problems. For example, although she blamed prostitution partly on the economic dependence of women on men (a focus which would condemn patriarchy as well as capitalism),[27] her class analysis blamed it ultimately on capitalism.
Prostitution, O'Hare asserted, originated in private property. "When the ownership of slaves planted in the human heart the passion for the ownership of property, women, being the most prized of man's possessions, became the first thing to be owned." Prostitution originated in "man's mastery of woman's bread, and throughout all the ages that men have controlled the means of life woman has been subject to his will, subservient to his wish and panderer to his passions. Since all existing forms of government are the bulwarks of mastery and privilege, it is but natural that they should be used to strengthen man's mastery and women's servitude." Capitalism fostered prostitution by paying women a dying wage, and men so little that they could not afford a wife and family; it reduced the most sacred aspects of life and personality to mere articles of commerce. The causes of prostitution were "first, the capitalist class, the men who live upon the fruits of her labor and who, because they control the means of life, can place her wages so low that she must submit to be the gratifier of their passions as well as the producer of their wealth; second, the men in the professional and wage-working class who are able to secure so small a share of the wealth they produce as to be unable to properly support a wife." O'Hare asserted that "the prostitute is simply a by-product of any social system in which women are economically dependent"; as a matter of mere survival women "submit their sex as well as their labor to the men who control the machinery of production."[28] This analysis largely ignored the legally-sanctioned depredations of husbands on wives, which formed a cornerstone of patriarchal marriage.
O'Hare exclaimed that prostitution was a death-sentence for its practitioners, who had a life expectancy of five years. Prostitution was "the most brutal, debasing, debauching slavery that the world has ever known. The prostitution of the girl's body, the murder of her soul, the coining of her life into profits for human vampires, then wrecked, ruined and murdered, a grave in the potter's field." Prostitution spread venereal disease, "the black plague of the brothel.... the one incurable disease... That loathsome, nameless horror that has killed more men than war, ruined more women's lives and blasted more babies than all other diseases combined." O'Hare claimed that one of every twenty babies was born afflicted and that one of every 15 wives was "paying the penalty of the husband's transgression."[29]
O'Hare insisted that "we may rant and cant, preach and pray from now until doomsday, but facts are facts just the same. Though we may shut our eyes they are there still. Sex desire and companionship is just as natural, just as necessary as food and drink, and if young men are denied the opportunity for sex companionship in home and marriage they will seek it in the brothel, all the preaching and moralizing we may do to the contrary." Prostitution had become highly organized, and the "independent prostitute, like an independent businessman, is practically a thing of the past." It was run for profit, under the protection of local, state, and national governments. "White slavery could be stamped out in a single year did the powers of government so desire. It exists not in defiance to law and government, but by permission and co-partnership." O'Hare claimed that within two blocks of the White House "white slaves who would consider a harem in Turkey a haven of rest and security" were sold in "slave pens a thousand times more hellish than the slave markets of Constantinople." The "scarlet thread" ran from the lowest prostitute to the White House and back again. The regulation or prohibition of prostitution merely worsened the plight of its victims by making prostitutes victims of police harassment, corruption, and persecution. Only Socialism could end the "social evil" by empowering women, paying workers of both sexes the full product of their labor, and creating the necessary conditions for stable homes based on love. Implicitly criticizing the power of the husband in marriage as well as that of the capitalist in the factory, O'Hare claimed that "Socialism will shear man of his economic power to force women to submit either in marriage or prostitution to his sensual desires, and a few generations of free women will produce a race free from sensuality and that old falsehood of the male's greater need of sexual expression and its natural result, a double standard of morals."[30]
Having been an ardent temperance campaigner herself, O'Hare was well aware of the evils of excessive drink. She recognized that "there is never a drunkard man but there are broken-hearted women and neglected children." Yet she recognized that drunkenness could be solved only "by a rational, scientific study of cause and effect," rather than by preaching or moralism. "Nothing exists without cause, and the scientist can trace the cause of drunkenness as readily and scientifically as the cause of prostitution or any other social disease." Intemperance was "a disease, the fruit of capitalism." It was something of an occupational disease, as black lung disease for miners or tuberculosis for textile workers. It especially afflicted those with enervating, dangerous jobs--workers who knew that their fate was sealed and that it was only a matter of time before they were killed on the job or thrown on scrap heap--and those suffering from vacuous idleness.[31]
Such victims of capitalism "demand stimulants to spur the jaded brains and bodies on to renewed effort, and to provide a substitute for the thrill of life of which they are robbed. Many men seek this in drink, some in sex debauchery and some in religious frenzy." The worker with a hard, dangerous job who returned to a lonely boarding house "is not a bad man--he is just a robbed man, robbed of all that makes life worth while. He has sought the only substitute within his reach and understanding.... The insane religious frenzy of a Gypsy Smith revival or a holiness camp meeting is merely the howling drunk or sex-revel given a religious trend. It has the same cause and the same effect on its victims.... a wrecked body, a warped brain and a murdered soul."[32]
O'Hare viewed creative labor as "the master theme of the universe"; anyone shut out from this by poverty or the gilded bars of idle wealth was doomed to unhappiness. "Man must have companionship and social intercourse, or become a raving maniac or mumbling imbecile. Capitalism has largely robbed the workingman of the opportunity for social life. Family life is broken up," children railroaded into cities, men and women into boarding houses and factories. "It is a law of nature that men and women denied social expression either sour into misanthropes, dry up into moving mummies, or degenerate into vice."[33] The meager earning power of the working class prevented access to culture and its accompanying social life.
O'Hare reminded myopic reformers that "the saloon is always open, full of light and music; it is a common meeting place where soul-starved men may find warmth, welcome and social intercourse. Usually the liquor men drink, is only incidental to the companionship they crave." Church doors were shut all but three hours per week; and when open, recreation was carefully regimented and supervised, with no free discussion allowed. Welfare cranks, ladling out uplift, shoved "kulchure" down the unwilling throats of the church-goers much in the manner as sulphur and molasses.[34] But O'Hare declared that "Art, culture and upliftment must come from within" and "must be the expression of the soul unfolding."
Though there may not be an atmosphere of upliftment about the saloon, there is an atmosphere of democracy. Class, creed and race lines are not so closely drawn.... [The saloon owner] knows that his very existence depends on attracting men to his bar. He knows that the drink he dispenses is not sufficient for this, so he makes his saloon a forum, a social gathering place, where men may expound their philosophy, expiate on their religion or lack of it, and defend their political principles.... The fat, gross saloonkeeper may be neither pious nor godly. Though engaged in a cursed trade, he usually has more real human feeling, more sympathy and understanding of the wrongs, and sorrows of the workers than the mummified preacher wrapped in his moldering garments of theology.[35]
Saloon-keepers also opened their halls for union meetings, while the churches denounced unionism.
Dreadful as the saloon was, O'Hare said, it was but a minor problem spawned by capitalism, only a part of the "larger questions demanding solution." Private ownership of the means of production caused much more misery than did saloons. Private ownership of railroads alone had wrecked more homes, and levied more tribute from working-class paychecks, than all saloons combined. Similarly, private ownership of flour mills and meatpacking plants starved more households, while the private ownership of real estate generated more vagrants, more broken homes, and homeless children. O'Hare claimed that in 1906, 2707 Americans died from alcoholism, but 616,295 were killed or permanently crippled by industry.[36]
O'Hare pointed out that drink was manufactured for profit, and that entire industries and communities depended upon it: not only manufacturers, but distributors, sellers, and other businesses. She claimed that socialism, by abolishing the profits of alcohol, would end its production; then, possibly afraid that this argument would alienate many workers, allowed that under socialism the majority might vote to produce alcohol and sell it at cost. (Even then, she somewhat inconsistently added, it would soon cease to exist, because no one would profit by it.) The craving for alcohol would dissipate when the overworked and the idle were allowed the joys of creative, productive labor; such people "will be too busy with the better things of life to seek the lower.... When men can earn enough to maintain homes, support their families, life will be clean, sane, secure and happy, and few will care to lose a single moment of it in a drunken stupor."[37]
O'Hare worried that hard drugs were overwhelming the United States in an epidemic far worse than alcoholism. For every alcoholic, she averred, there were two drug addicts, whose life expectancy was far shorter even than that of a drunk.
As the strain of life grows more intense, the robbery of life more complete the suffering of mankind grows greater and a stimulant and narcotic more powerful than alcohol is sought.... Capitalism has robbed [the wage-slave] of life, starved [his] body, brain and soul, racked and ruined him, then provides the blessed drug that makes him forget that he is a worn-out wreck on the human scrapheap and brings the sweet belief for a little time that he is a man again. Happiness is all there is in life, and if the only happiness capitalism can insure is the artificial happiness of drunkenness and drugs we can not condemn mankind for grasping the counterfeit when we withhold the real..... From my experience I draw the conclusion that man is made up of nine parts environment and one part heredity, and heredity is the environment of our ancestors. Man is made or marred by his environment, and man can not be saved or uplifted except through it and it alone.[38]
In support of this point, O'Hare told the story of an elderly woman (in this case an alcoholic) whom a restaurant-keeper indignantly and with disgust evicted from his establishment.
Yes, she was drunk, but she was something else also. She was a woman, a mother, a worker, one who had toiled long and hard.... Old and poor, she crept about the streets of the city and begged for the crust of bread she could not buy with her labor power.... As I looked at her, I thought of my own mother, almost the same age.... Two women as far apart as the poles, but made of the same clay, both have loved, sorrowed and joyed, gave birth to children and fulfilled their missions in life. One is a drunkard, one a happy grandmother. One fate cast in a home of comfort, one in a pit of poverty, and had the lives of the women been reversed, the happy grandmother would have been the drunkard and the drunkard the happy matron.[39]
Assailing uplifters who claimed that workers wasted their wages in drink, O'Hare exclaimed that if she lived a workers' hopeless existence, and sent her sons and daughters to the capitalist slaughter pens, "I would get drunk tomorrow and never get sober if I could avoid it." Drunkenness, she said, was far less frequent than one would imagine, given the sordid brutality of life under capitalism; "if man can rise above the animal in such brutalizing environments," creativity, love and happiness would flourish after "we have trod the long, long, weary way and reached real civilization."[40]
O'Hare denied that reform could abolish the evils of drink any more that it could ameliorate those of prostitution. The legions dependent upon the liquor industry for their bread would not "vote themselves out of a job." The Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League were unwitting allies of the liquor interests. In winning a ban on the sale of alcohol in U.S. Army canteens, for example, they "played directly in the hands of the liquor men" and "won a victory, the liquor element could not have won for themselves." However, she then cited the example of Sweden, where the Socialist government had monopolized the liquor industry, taken the profit out of it, and turned the saloons into recreational and cultural centers. Liquor was so cheap, O'Hare claimed, that it is "impossible for a working man to drink up his wages."[41] She said that "as long as there is poverty, and want, and misery, heart-hunger, loneliness and social repression, men will drink.... As long as all political action is controlled by liquor, our nation must be merely an adjunct to the saloon." Drunkenness was just one aspect of "an unscientifically organized society." She concluded:
Just as long as we try to deal with the problem of drunkenness as THE problem and not part of the whole science of life, we must fall short of our ideal. I know the frightful effects of drunkenness, realize the menace of the saloon, comprehend its demoralizing grip on mankind, yet insist that it is only one of the minor problems of capitalism. I dread it no more than I dread many other problems and know that the solution can only come with a better organized system of life.... We have allowed this one phase of the problem of life to obscure our view of the other and larger questions demanding solution.... The private ownership of the means of life has caused more misery, suffering, poverty and prostitution, wrecked more homes, ruined more lives, murdered more men, women and children than the drunk traffic a hundredfold.[42]
O'Hare also asserted that the church, rather than moral decay among the workers, cased the decline of religion among the working class. Religion had dominated American life until very recently, O'Hare said, but then "the church took its stand with the master class and turned its back upon the workers." As a result, "the Christianity dealt out by the church and minister has no saving force; meets no problems; solves no great questions, and is not a living, vital thing, but an old dead theology."[43] When investigating the state of the churches O'Hare found that
Men who occupied the pews were not there for music, nor beauty, nor spiritual uplift; but they were hard-featured, strong-faced men of business, whose hearts and souls are so immersed in the struggle for wealth, and power, and mastery, that their appreciation of the finer things of life are dulled and atrophied, if not completely killed. They were in church because it was popular and fashionable and good for their business to occupy a pew in a wealthy church. The women ... were there... because they wanted to see who could wear the biggest hat, the tightest hobble shirt and the biggest bunch of somebody else's hair. These occupants of mahogany pews did not come there for spiritual uplift; they are so immersed in their own concerns that they would not recognize the spiritual uplift, if they met it on the street.[44]
The church, revealing its class bias, attacked essentially economic problems such as prostitution, intemperance, and poverty, as if they resulted from individual moral failings rather than endemic social injustices. It emphasized charity, which "can only exist in a system of injustice.... As long as Rockefeller can amass five hundred millions to give to charity, then twenty million working men and women will have the need of charity." Charitable institutions have proliferated, "but the flood of wrecked lives, surges down and submerges them all."[45]
O'Hare insisted that "if we could make mankind grasp the real Christianity of the Bible, the real teachings of the Nazarine, that all would be well." She asserted that "the truths of the Christian Bible are just as true today as they every were," and that most people hungered for an authentic and vital religion. Jesus, she said, was a despised working man, born illegitimately, who knew "the heartache and misery of the working class" from which he sprung. He was in fact a proletarian rebel killed by an elite mob and their creature, a corrupt judge.[46]
But O'Hare's own vision emphasized a materialism and a scientific, cause-and-effect determinism at great variance with the prophetic traditions out of which Jesus emerged. The church, she said, had neglected "the science of the being of mankind" and the fact
that man is first physical, an animal, and that the seat and foundation and basis of physical life is in the human stomach; that all civilization rests on a biscuit; religion on a loaf of bread, and morals on a beef steak. The human stomach is the cornerstone of civilization and unless that stomach is well fed, then civilization and everything it means and is, comes tumbling down about our ears like a house of cards. Civilization never did withstand hunger, never can exist in starvation, never will develop as long as there is a hungry man or woman or child.[47]
O'Hare insisted that intellectual and then spiritual needs developed only after the body was satisfied. A person "will never sprout a soul unless there is a soil of a physical and mental well-being in which it can take root and find sustenance and draw its nourishment.... His three natures [material, intellectual, and spiritual] must be developed and brought into force and power in their natural order." Even refined Christians would fight like savages if food and water were scarce; "a man can't be pious on an empty stomach, can't pray when he is hungry, or love his fellow-men when he is out of a job." O'Hare concluded that "the problem the church confronts is an economic problem; the failures we have made have their economic basis, and the only solution is an economic one." Debates over infant damnation, the relative merits of dunking versus sprinkling as a method of baptism, and the literal reality of hell, obscured the important issues and benefitted nobody.[48]
O'Hare touted Socialism as the panacea for the ills besetting marriage and the family, and systematically argued that it would resolve all the problems she described. Here again the substance of her arguments resembled those of The Socialist Woman, but her rhetorical style and emphasis vastly differed. O'Hare placed blame for marital problems squarely on capitalism, and hardly mentioned men or the male's privileged role in the patriarchal household. "Economic dependence is the fundamental cause for much of our marital unrest," she said. "There can be no cure except through economic independence, and that can come only with Socialism." Under capitalism, women were economically dependent either upon "the masters of commerce and industry" or upon men who were dependent upon those capitalist masters; in the latter case, women were "doubly dependent." (The Socialist Woman called such a woman "the slave of a slave.") Socialism would eliminate both kinds of dependence. "When women have an equal ownership and an equal voice in the control of the industrial activities of the world the frightful horrors of woman labor as we know it now will not exist. Either women will be released from productive labor and allowed to turn their attention to the work of home-making, wifehood and motherhood and artistic pursuits, or the shorter hours of labor, improved machinery, and sanitary, wholesome conditions in the productive trades will make work fit for women's hands and brains to do.... With men and women of that type, marital happiness and divorce will cease to be a problem."[49] Divorce would not only occur far less frequently, but would be devoid of all its evils. In a passage which Lida Parce or Josephine Conger-Kaneko could easily have penned, she totally redefined marriage and the family:
Socialism will give back to women all the freedom and security of the savage fraternal culture and add to it all the advantages of our more civilized life; will make her an equal owner and give her an equal voice in the management of all wealth, that supplied by Nature as well as produced by men's [sic] hands. She will have an equal opportunity to have access to the means of life, receive equal returns for her labor, and will thus be enabled to lift herself above the necessity of selling her virtue for bread..... Socialism will shear man of his economic power to force woman to submit either in marriage or prostitution to his sensual desires. A few generations of free women will produce a race free from sensuality, and that old falsehood of the male's greater need of sexual expression and its natural result, a double standard of morals, will cease to carry weight.[50]
O'Hare asserted that Socialism, by securing for the worker the complete product of his or her labor, would ensure that women (and men) could support themselves with only a few hours of wholesome labor each day. But women who were nursing or raising young children might collect a mother's pension and leave the workforce altogether. Taking the more conservative, traditional side in the debate between Walter Lensfersiek and Belle Oury, O'Hare said that "under Socialism "the nation will see in every mother the bearer of a future citizen and will look carefully after her comfort and well being. The farmer to-day feels that his brood mare is doing productive labor when she brings him a good colt. Under Socialism woman will be on at least as high a plane as brood mares. Under capitalism she is not."[51] Under socialism and women suffrage,
it will in all probability be unnecessary for women to perform manual labor during the years of maternal cares. Then when a woman takes upon herself the task of bearing and rearing a child it will not be upon her own labor, or the bounty of her husband, that she will depend for sustenance, but upon the whole people, or the state to which she is giving a new citizen and future worker. The future mother will not have to rely upon her own puny strength or the insecure support of her husband to stand between her and want. The combined strength and wealth-producing capacity of the whole human race will be a bulwark to shield and a foundation to support her. Then no woman will have reason to shrink from or dread motherhood.[52]
Men would also earn a decent living and would not marry out of practical considerations. With unemployment, endless tramping in search of work, and capitalist slaughter-pens all abolished, men could marry with confidence. Both sexes, therefore, would marry for love and love alone. Marriage under capitalism was "the barter of a woman's body for a man's purse..... When Socialism takes marriages from the sordid, mercenary basis on which capitalism places it, makes it really the union of two hearts drawn together by love and entirely free from pecuniary considerations we will have forever settled the divorce problem, or at least the evils of divorce." O'Hare answered anarchist complaints that monogamy was unnatural and repressive by asserting that "we have never had a true and widespread monogamic marriage system and monogamy has not been given a fair test.... It is only to the extent that the social consciousness of man has been developed, social production evolved, and social distribution outlined that even the dream of an ideal marriage has been conceived in the minds of mankind."[53]
Socialism would also help ensure that married couples would remain in love. Housework, which spoiled the figure, health, and happiness of most wives, would be transformed by the "application of scientific knowledge to domestic duties." Socialism's development of machinery for the common good would mechanize housework, taking some it out of the home altogether and making the rest of it pleasant. "To how many a woman's youth and beauty has the song of your steam and the monotonous rub-a-dub of your board sung the funeral march!" A few men with machinery could now bake far more and better bread than mother did. "Under Socialism all the scientific discoveries, methods and machinery of the world will work together to relieve women of the burden of housekeeping drudgery.... With machinery and science to shoulder the burden of drudgery, and freed from the necessity of feeding, sheltering and clothing an idle, useless class, women could readily and easily do the necessary work for domestic life and find ample time for education, recreation, culture and refinement. Such women demand and create men fitted to be husbands."[54] Such an arrangement would benefit both sexes while leaving the home as primarily the woman's sphere.
Under Socialism both men and women would have far more leisure, "the opportunity to live." Both would cultivate the art of human relations, of loving and appreciating the thoughts and feelings of others.[55] Men would help out around the home, women participate in wage labor, and both understand the other, while maintaining men's emphasis on paid labor and women's duties in the home.
Shorter hours of labor for men would give them an opportunity to share home life with their wives and children. I believe that there is nothing quite so broadening to a masculine mind as to share for even a time in the work of his wife..... I am sure that if we could force the men of the country to do the woman's work, shoulder her cares, and endure her pains and aches for a single week, a revolution such as the world has never witnessed would take place.
Freedom from economic dependence, relief from domestic drudgery, and the opportunity for sharing the industrial, intellectual and political life of the world, would give woman a breath of mind and heart that would make it possible for her to be a real companion and helpmate instead of merely a household drudge and childbearing machine.[56]
Socialism would also transform education, which under capitalism treated persons as objects. Capitalism increasingly replaced skilled workers with skilled machines. "The workers need not have brains--they are in the machine. The worker needs only the capacity for endless labor and unquestioning obedience. A man or woman is more docile and contented without an education than with one." Under Socialism, schools "will not grind all children through the same mill, turning them out like link sausages, all the same size and thickness, mentally ready to be devoured by the sateless maw of the factory.... Education is unfoldment. To be educated is to live the fullest, broadest life, to create with body and brain." Socialist schools, she said, "will not cram knowledge in, but aim at drawing expression out." Students will learn by doing, receiving an education based on "unfoldment from within, not merely veneering from without." O'Hare praised Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist icon executed by his government, for creating schools which offered a secular, scientific, and child-centered curriculum..[57]
O'Hare advocated sex education in Socialist schools, although she blamed Christianity, rather than capitalism, for debilitating sexual ignorance and shame. "The longing to know ourselves is inborn in each human being, and much, if not all the suffering incident to sex life is because that longing is thwarted and perverted," she said, extolling a mother who told her four daughters the secret of life, using a lily as an illustration. O'Hare declared that sex was "the link between man and God.... that vital spark of life that has lifted us from star dust to man!"[58]
So long as we look upon sex and the creation functions of mankind as unclean, so long will they be unclean....
We talk of woman's suffrage, of woman's wrong, of woman's servitude; the mother of all woman's wrongs is that mankind is ashamed....[Shame]... has turned love into lust, companionship into servitude, men into beasts of prey and women into cowering victims..... We deem it improper for boys and girls to romp and play together like lambs and colts and puppies....
Ashamed, vicious, unclean? Is the flower ashamed when it raises its face to the sun, or the roses when they open their hearts to the dew?[59]
O'Hare believed that women and men were created for parenthood, and that capitalism, by depriving couples and their offspring of all security of life, distorted and destroyed that natural desire. In an apotheosis of a biological determinism anathema to Socialist Woman writers, O'Hare claimed that
The desire for motherhood is imbibed by the babe with her mother's milk. It is interwoven in the innermost fibre of her nature at conception.... Babies have always been and will always be the crowning glory of existence.... [It is] not until a woman has gone down in the valley of the shadow of death, and a man has stood by her side to call her back, that they have really lived..... In each rounded curve of a woman's body, in the pink of her cheeks, the rose of her lips, the intoxication of her presence, has nature prepared for motherhood. In the strong arm, square shoulder, the rough hewn face and that encompassing cry of life for love has nature fashioned men for fatherhood. In the dreams of men and women will baby faces ever float.[60]
Under Socialism, everyone biologically capable of marriage and parenthood would enjoy them. Blessedly, however, "the child-mother of other days" would disappear; couples would have fewer children, and care for them better. Marriage would entail "an intelligent reproduction and not the mere result of unrestrained passion on the part of the father and enforced submission of the mother." Under Socialism, "children will come, welcomed, desired, loved into being, endowed by the parents with a vigorous body and a healthy mind at birth, and insured in the security of means of life by the state."[61]
O'Hare, in sum, argued that Socialism would bolster marriage and the family, restoring them from the ravages of capitalism. But amidst her hosannas to traditional values lurked incendiary demands for change. In many respects, her actual proposals reflected those of the more radical Socialist Women; her language and emphasis differed more than her concrete demands. She blamed capitalism almost exclusively, and men hardly at all. In her new Socialist family, however, gender roles would blur as many wives worked outside the home and fathers performed significant household chores. All women would enjoy economic independence from men as a fundamental human right, either through guaranteed participation in free and healthful labor, or by receiving a mother's pension. O'Hare made the scandalous suggestion that under the new dispensation, "woman will own her own body, and owning it, will study and know it unashamed." Divorce, while infrequent, would entail no stigma. Finally, she proclaimed that "what particular form marriage will take under Socialism, no one can say; forms and ideals change so rapidly that we can no more foresee what will be pleasing to our grandchildren than our grandfathers could foresee our lives." Marriage, in short, was not an eternal and unchanging norm, but rather one which had in the past reflected the social relations of power, and in the future would fulfill the desires of its participants.[62]
O'Hare insisted that moralism and preaching would not end capitalism any more than they would abolish the particular evils (prostitution, intemperance, incompatible marriages) spawned by capitalism. She told the story of an exploiter of child labor who recognized the devastation he wrecked upon the lives of his workers, but who claimed that if he acted humanely his competitors would bankrupt him. Laws against child labor, this capitalist said, would avail nothing, for some companies would violate them (with the connivance of corrupt governments) and drive law-abiding companies out of business.[63] "The owners of these factories cannot individually change conditions and neither can individual workers," O'Hare exclaimed. "The most successful capitalist is the most selfish, the sharpest and the deadliest competitor of all."[64]
Only the socialist reconstruction of society, O'Hare said, could permanently improve matters. Human brotherhood was impossible in a class society, which generated different and incompatible ethical standards appropriate for the contending classes. Only a classless society could generate ethical harmony. In a statement redolent of those often made by members of the IWW, O'Hare asserted that
There never has, never can and never will be any identity of interests between the workingman as a wage-earner and the capitalist as an owner of the machinery of production..... Religion, ethics and morals to the contrary, might is right. When the working class has developed its might, it will by right control the means of wealth production and end the class war.[65]
Private ownership of the means of production, O'Hare thundered, made slaves of the workers: "whether chains or hunger enslaves him, he is a slave just the same." Chattel slaves were at least fed, and their families broken up no more often than those of the "free" working class. "The slave market now is not bounded by four walls; it was enlarged until it covers our whole industrial system.... The workingmen to-day who go out to sell their labor power must carry their auction block with them and be their own auctioneers. There is no group of eager bidders pitted against each other in the contest for this slave, but there are plenty of eager slaves bidding for a master." O'Hare told a vivid tale of a succession of wage slaves, each underbidding the other. "To-day man is pitted against man, woman against both, the child against man and woman and the machine against all." The wonders of modern production, "from the stone hammer of the savage to the mighty world trust, is the combined handiwork of all ages of men.... An equal, indivisible share is the natural birthright of all."[66]
O'Hare assured her readers that
The progress of the race has always been forward. Progress comes through struggle. Therefore the whole history of humanity is one of continual struggle.... The wrongs of each system have been inherent in that system, yet each system has been a necessary step in human progress.... The student who reads the story of the future from the history of the past, who is able to discern the shadow which coming events casts before, calls himself a Socialist. He knows that the wage system is following the natural path of worn-out social orders and is passing away.... [and] that these changes will take place without his help, whether he wishes it or not; that it is written in the immutable law of progress.[67]
Echoing Emma Goldman and the Wobblies, O'Hare--in a statement that boded ill for a proletarian revolution achieved peacefully and democratically through the ballot box--sadly asserted that "Every forward step in the march of human progress has been met with the bitterest antagonism by the great mass of people because they honestly believed that the old ways were God's ways and that all innovations were of the Devil. All history is stained with the blood of great men who have discovered new truths and principles in Nature and dared to stand before the world and proclaim them."[68] Socialists suffered the opprobrium commonly heaped upon scientists and world-benefactors of all kinds. However, their triumph was inevitable:
When Karl Marx first expounded his theory of social evolution he did not patent a new nostrum for civic ills; he simply traced with the accuracy of a scientist the natural growth and development of the means of producing the things necessary for life.... Society is a living organism and can not be cut to pattern like a garment. Scientists may gather in one vessel all the chemical atoms necessary to construct a human body, but it would not be a living body. It would be only a mass of chemicals. Reformers may construct a plan for the reconstruction of society, but it will not be the society reconstructed; it will only be a lot of words on paper..... The embryo of a new form is always developing in the body of the old and in due time must be born by the natural process by which all living organisms reach earth.[69]
O'Hare likened the birth of a new society to a mother's travail, and again like the growing of kernel into cornstalk. In either case, human hands must assist the new birth, or tend and gather the harvest. "Socialism is not a dream of dreamers, or the finished plan of a reformer," she said, but an organic growth.[70]
For the most part, O'Hare apotheosized men and marriage as the actual and proper (even in contemporary capitalist society) goal of women's lives. Observing the English suffrage movement while attending the International Socialist Bureau meeting in 1914, O'Hare said that English women needed not the vote but "a beau, a new corset and a well-fitting dress.... Women in England are plentiful, more plentiful than coal, or dirt, or any other substance on earth, and there is nothing in the heaven above or on the earth below that is so cheap and valueless as woman life."[71]
O'Hare described the systematized mass murder and torture of working women, and the discarding of them upon the scrap heap when old and unprofitable. She found upper class woman as appalling, "stunted and warped in the gilded cage of idleness." Multitudes of English men went abroad for economic opportunity because a few landlords monopolized the land; others garrisoned England's empire, and returned diseased, crippled, or not at all. Each such man "leaves the woman God and Nature intended should be his wife to become one of the brutalized workers to wither and dry up into pitiful spinsterhood;" for each emigrant, "another sweated wretch of withered 'old maid' is added to England's surplus of women." The two million surplus women in England debased the relations between the sexes. "The effect of the surfeiting surplus of women upon the men of England is just as marked and just as demoralizing as upon the women. The power to dominate always breeds tyranny, and familiarity breeds contempt."[72] O'Hare then exalted conventional marriage in a manner that would have appalled any regular Socialist Woman contributor:
God knows that the robbery of English bodies is appalling, but the robbery of English hearts and souls is hellish. If a system steals my bread it wrongs me, but if it steals my love it curses me with the most fiendish curse of man or devil.
Frightful to me were the poverty-warped bodies, hunger knawed stomachs, and cold, pinched flesh of the English working class, but far more terrible were the souls and hearts starved for love. Like some frightful vision of a man-made hell comes to me still the memory of those million women who know not love, and never can know it; women who have never had a lover; who have never been a sweetheart; women who have never waited under the moonlight or in the long, dreamy hours of the gleaming for the man of her choice; who have never felt the handclasp of love or the kiss of passion; women who will never know the glory of giving to her love; never know that sweet agony of waiting for the coming of her child, never know the joy of sacrifice which comes with travail, and never know the touch of a baby's lips upon her breast.
And the men! I see them also.... [in dreary wastes around the world, scratching out a living]. Alone, heart hungry, living and dying without the touch of a woman's hand or the blessing of a woman's love. Men deadening the longing for love [by] burning and cheating nature in searing vice. The barren women of England and the vice-cursed men driven to alien lands are the most tragic sights of earth today, and the wail of their unborn children reaches to the ears of God.[73]
English women, O'Hare continued, were "the most awkwardly dressed and least artistic looking women, from the palace to the slum, of any women I know.... The typical English woman has lost her waist line, sags, stoops, drags her heels, sinks her chin on her chest, and dresses in frightful taste. And why not? Every woman has a God-given desire to be beautiful, but she craves beauty only that she may appear pleasing to the man she loves. Every normal woman loves beautiful dresses, soft laces and artistic lines, but every woman dresses for a man; when there are no men to love and no man to dress for, the very mainspring of life is snapped and life drags and trails in the dust."[74]
O'Hare championed "the Right to be Beautiful." In accordance with her materialistic philosophy, she exclaimed that "the human body is the temple of the soul, and when that body is not garnished and beautiful the soul must suffer also. I don't think a woman can have a great brain under a dowdy hat, or a disorderly, badly brushed head of hair; or a great heart under a frumpy, inartistic, unbeautiful dress; or do great work in the world with sagging shoulders and dragging steps; or ever ripen into full fruition without a man's love. I think there is more moral tonic to brace up a woman's life in a first-class corset than in all the stuffy sermons that were ever preached; a smart shoe will keep a woman's feet nearer the path of rectitude and virtue than pious platitudes; beauty has more saving grace than prayers, and a lover's kiss will come nearer opening the doors of Heaven to a woman's soul than all the priests and preachers who have mouthed cant creeds."[75]
O'Hare asserted that "the master theme of a woman's life is love, and when practically a whole nation of women know that their chance for love, companionship, wifehood, and motherhood is almost nil, it is but natural that their bodies should lose poise and their souls the beacon light of life."[76] English women, once enfranchised, would vote for Socialism if only to reclaim their lost men.
O'Hare also argued for suffrage in a non-feminist vein, most often stressing the camaraderie of the sexes and propounding women's suffrage as a class rather than a sex demand. However, she occasionally acknowledged the trans-class, gender-based nature of the suffrage movement. For example, he marched in the massive 1913 District of Columbia suffrage parade, an "outpouring of womanhood" where "the toil-worn women of the working class" marched side by side with the "sheltered, cultured women of the capitalist class." The District of Columbia police, she said, actively encouraged the small number of male bystanders who rioted and attacked the suffrage marchers, not realizing that "sex lines are stronger than class lines and that a sex movement will include women of all classes." But O'Hare, simultaneously with celebrating this gender solidarity, stressed that the police-instigated riot caused an uproar only because upper-class women found themselves treated with the brutality commonly inflicted upon striking women workers. "I have been in many strikes and I have seen insults and indignities heaped upon working girls while policemen clubbed and beat and murdered women asking for a living wage," O'Hare said. "This has been the general and accepted condition of affairs in every strike in the United States and no one of importance made any objection. Leading suffragists never asked Congress to investigate and congressmen and senators and judges accepted mob brutality and police bestiality as a matter of course." Thousands of men in town for the inauguration festivities--"old men with one foot in the grave and young boys of 16 wearing the uniforms of schools and colleges"--lined up for blocks, awaiting their turn at the numerous make-shift brothels created for the occasion. The police protected these men, and displayed genuine solicitude for the drunks among them.[77]
O'Hare, however, usually stressed suffrage as a Socialist and therefore a class-based goal. The working class, she said, constituted 93% of the population, and half of this number were women. "I as a Socialist most emphatically state that I demand Equal Suffrage not merely as a SEX right but also as a CLASS RIGHT.... I want the women of my class enfranchised not alone that they may help me fight the battles of my SEX but also of my CLASS." Ignoring the structure of patriarchal law which virtually enslaved women, she agreed that all legislation in interests of men was also in the interests of women; she would vote to improve the condition of men, "that as a woman I might be helped." Women's votes would help peacefully inaugurate the social revolution, achievable only by the vote. The machinery of production was now "a charnel house of poverty, misery, disease, degradation, and death," and women's jobs were even more dangerous than men's. Working women, as working men, demanded control over that machinery. While participating in the New York suffrage campaign of 1915, O'Hare gave the same speech before suffragist and Socialist audiences. "I never knew whether it was the Socialist Party or the Suffrage Campaign Committee I was speaking for and which ever it was I talked the same kind of Socialism I talk in Oklahoma and the people ate it up in just the same way."[78]
O'Hare said that women did not have and did not want protection without responsibility; "that is the position of the slave, the child and the mentally incompetent, and we deny that we are any of these." Incredibly, she insisted that "I am not asking for better laws for women.... I merely demand equal opportunity for all." Shortly afterwards, however, she listed some laws which directly oppressed women: men need not support their illegitimate children; the age of consent was low, only 10 years in some states; and "the sons of the rich may prey with impunity upon the daughters of toil and the laws of our states will protect them."[79] O'Hare virtually ignored patriarchal marriage laws, which legally a husband's rape, abuse, and exploitation of his wife.
O'Hare also conservatively assumed the immutable nature of traditional gender roles and tasks in her "social motherhood" argument for suffrage. "Home is the logical location of womanly activity," she said; "biology and the natural division of labor have placed her there, and all the ologies and isms can never remove her from the home as long as the human family arrives in the vale of tears in the manner now in vogue" rather than in incubators. Today, however, everything used in the home was produced elsewhere, not in the home under mother's watchful eye as before; women had no control over the food, clothing, other goods that entered the home. "We cannot expect men to usurp woman's natural place in the scheme of things and do the work of women in caring for and protecting the family" because they had their own work. "Our prehistoric ancestors settled the question of man's and woman's place in life back in the far past when instinctively the men went out to hunt the game and left the women and children to tend the fires, prepare the food and dress the skins."[80] O'Hare argued that "simply because the industries have left the four walls of a cabin and gone to a factory and workshop" is no reason to expect that men "upset the natural order of life....
Cooking, cleaning and clothing, sewage and smoke, dirt, disease and death always have been and are still woman's problems and must be dealt with by women.... But these problems have ceased to be individual problems of individual women and become the civic problems of motherhood collectively, just as the loom, smokehouse and preserving kettle have ceased to be the individual property of individual women and become the collectively operated means of production....
Our responsibilities as mothers are just the same, but the methods of meeting them have changed. Women cannot cope individually with their responsibilities, only collectively can women solve the problems of the wider home. This collective action is political.[81]
O'Hare asserted that "woman's suffrage will be one more lever with which the working class can overthrow the accursed [capitalist] system.... The place to settle labor problems is at the ballot box and not merely at the factory gate." Women were fighting together with men at the factory gate, and wanted also to fight at their side "in the wise, saner, more civilized place--the voting booth." Men and women together will achieve "the higher destiny of mankind."[82]
O'Hare's class-based arguments for suffrage would, she hoped, reconcile a demand for gender justice with orthodox Marxist analysis, and mollify suspicious male Socialists who believed women's suffrage a distraction from, or even (given women's alleged conservatism) obstacle to, Socialism. Yet her ad hoc arguments made little sense. Although she claimed that she favored the vote for working-class women, and would enfranchise the middle class only for reasons of practicality, she seldom explained why working-class women would vote more wisely than their male relatives. O'Hare, in fact, conceded that if women voted as stupidly as men did, they would derive little benefit from suffrage. When an opponent asked her how women's votes would increase their wages and better their working conditions, O'Hare had no convincing answer.[83] Yet despite occasional statements that mothers recognized the value of human life as business-oriented men never could ("my dream is a woman's dream, the longing cry of a mother heart.... my dream is Socialism"),[84] she seldom claimed that women were in any sense superior to men. Such an argument would have undermined her class-based analysis and demanded a greater stress on the "sex struggle" emphasized by Socialist Woman writers.
O'Hare, like the Socialist women, strongly supported legalized birth control. As in her advocacy of suffrage, she uneasily combined arguments based on class with those based upon her genuine, if largely unacknowledged, anger at the insensate brutality of men. Amidst the very suffrage article in which she denied any conflict between the sexes, she exclaimed that "Ninety men of every hundred came into the world not in answer to his mother's wish but because of his father's unleashed desire." She praised Margaret Sanger and said that all must agree with her that "the most sacred thing in life is the creation of life and that the creator should have the right and power to say WHEN a life shall be called into being." O'Hare asserted that "motherhood is too sacred to be abused, that the power to give life is a sacred responsibility and that its control should be in the hands of the woman who gives life rather than at the caprice of the man whose only responsibility is the gratification of physical passion."[85]
O'Hare criticized the elites who practiced birth control themselves, but denied the working class their own knowledge. The Catholic Church and the capitalists, she charged, viewed women as merely the "breeders of child slaves to perish in capitalism's shambles." If the Catholic church sincerely opposed birth control, it should demand maternity compensation, widow's pensions, secure and well-paying jobs for the family bread winner, and the abolition of child labor and of the tenant system and of monopoly. "When the church has used its power to make society as a whole responsible for the welfare of all children... then and not until then has any male biped without feathers the right to forbid to any women the scientific knowledge that will enable her to decide when and under what conditions she shall call a new life into being."[86]
When the National Rip-Saw first publicized the crusade for birth control, it was deluged with heartrending letters, "enough to break a heart of stone," from women asking for information. O'Hare raged that
If there is anything on earth that would make a real woman hold law, law makers and judges in contempt, it would be to read the heartbreaking pleas of women for help that will free them from the crime of bringing unwelcome, sub-normal, hunger pinched children into this capitalist jungle and then gaze [at] the average type of fat paunched, bull necked, sensually marked law maker and judge who declares such help a crime.[87]
(Even here, however, she omitted the word "male" before the phrase "lawmakers and judges.")
O'Hare also read one of Sanger's leaflets to see if it was as bad as depicted, and concluded that "the vilest mind could find nothing vicious there. Yet these simple, scientific facts; this great boon; this humane knowledge that would save hundreds of thousands of men and women untold anguish and save the world from numberless unwelcome, sub-normal children and save society the heavy burden of supporting almshouses, prisons, insane asylums and imbecile homes is denied the people and its education made a crime." O'Hare noted that very many of the piteous letters were from the South, where pellagra raged because of malnutrition.[88]
O'Hare also used traditional values and rhetoric, even while implicitly criticizing them, when addressing racial questions. Just as her discussions of gender relied on customary beliefs even as she subtly undermined them, so she employed racist notions in her appeal to whites. O'Hare utilized white prejudices while also partly subverting them in the cause of a trans-race working-class alliance. Mirroring the effect of her quasi-feminist writings, however, her racial analysis re-enforced the very traditional shibboleths which most required demolition.
O'Hare said that social equality was both impossible and undesirable because "men and women always form social groups according to their various tastes"; individuals (and, she implied, peoples) also differed in physical and mental capacities. Socialists desired only equal opportunity, not equality of condition, and would place the Negro "WHERE HE CANNOT COMPETE WITH THE WHITE MAN"--in his own territory. In an argument based on the self-interest of whites (an argument echoed, without its racist overtones, by black Socialists), O'Hare exclaimed that blacks must be accorded equal access to natural resources and the machinery of production
not because we love the "nigger," but because we know that every chain of economic servitude that is shackled on the ankle of the "nigger" is riveted on the wrists of the white workers. Just as long as a "nigger" can be robbed of the product of his labor by the capitalist class by being shut out from access to the means of life, just that long he can be made the club and chain that will drag and beat the white workers down into the mire of poverty.... No, we Socialists don't love the "nigger" any better than he loves us; we don't admire the shape of his nose or the color of his skin any more than he likes our insolence and intolerant attitude, but we have sense enough to know that capitalism chains us to the negro with iron chains of economic servitude and we would rather have the negro free from his chains. Because if the black man is chained it spells slavery for the white man and woman and girl--we must share it.[89]
O'Hare said that the capitalists used the scarecrow of racial equality to reinforce their own domination, which resulted in the mingling of blacks and whites on the job and the replacement of white workers by lower-paid blacks. O'Hare described a bi-racial crew, "as nicely placed as the stripes on a calico apron," digging a sewer and drinking water from the same pail. "In the laundries of [an] aristocratic southern city the daughters of white Democrats work side by side with big, black negro men; in the cotton mills, the white children compete with negro children." Children of both races worked side-by-side in cotton fields and coal mines; white sharecroppers were kicked off the best land because blacks cost less. In Kansas City blacks replaced some whites in the packing houses "and the white daughters of both Republican and Democratic voters are forced to associate with them in terms of shocking intimacy." O'Hare exclaimed that "God knows we have had enough" of such racial equality: "'nigger' equality would be better than the Democratic 'equality' which you have now, with the nigger getting the best of it all around, which best, God knows is bad enough."[90]
O'Hare said that "I neither love nor hate a negro. I am no more anxious to associate with him than he is to associate with me. I don't want to associate on terms of social equality with him and I know he is just as willing to dispense with my society as I am with his, but capitalism forces us into a social, economic and physical relation which is just as revolting to the negro as it is to me." O'Hare's racist, conservative solution--which ironically became a badge of radicalism when adopted by the Communist party in the 1920s--was segregation. "Let us give the blacks one section in the country where every condition is best fitted for them.... Let them work out their own salvation." Revealing her own doubts about black capacities, O'Hare commented that "if the negro rises to such an opportunity, and develops his own civilization, well and good; if not, and he prefers to hunt and fish and live idly, no one will be injured but him and that will be his business." O'Hare urged that black men vote Socialist to "free your wives and daughters from the despoliation of your white masters"; for whites, voting Socialism would "free your womenkind from the debasement of wage slavery yoked to Negro Equality."[91]
O'Hare was well aware of the double exploitation endured by black men, and the triple oppression inflicted upon black women. Yet she also blamed the offspring of mixed unions for their alleged vicious sensualism. "The women of a subject people are always the ones violated by the men of the master class and the long, long story of the violation of the black women by the white man need not be written in words. It's there written ineffaceably, in terms that goad and sear in the faces of the 'yellow negroes' everywhere. Conceived in lust and born to shame and servitude they are vampires that can not be shaken off." O'Hare blamed white rapists for the allegedly vicious, depraved yellow girls who corrupted southern white boys, and claimed that the yellow men "in whom the white father planted deep the seed of lust is an ever constant menace to womanhood."[92]
When a plague which started among poor blacks spread among whites, O'Hare thundered that this was but partial payment for the centuries-long white exploitation of blacks. Black revenge would ravage whites "without [the black] even raising his hand" as long as this oppression continued because "nature knows no distinction, no race or color, and her only law is that of cause and effect."
'Only a Nigger!' Yes, only a negro with black skin, vicious, depraved; ignorant and diseased, the product of our system, but his blood is red, he is a human being and he is bound with ties that can not be severed to every other human being of earth, black and white. We may not be "our brother's keeper" but he is ours. Nature has forged a chain that binds us together and whatever his station in life, whatever his fate, he keeps us to it also. We push the negro down. He draws us with him; we deprave him, he returns it to our children; we rob him of the product of his labor, he robs our soil and wields his ruthless if unconscious sabotage; we disease him and he scatters the seeds of death broadcast.... Microbes are no respecters of persons; they never consult the social register and the blue-blood up at the 'big-house' or on the Avenue is just as satisfactory [a] breeding place as the red blood of the brat down in the alley.[93]
These passages display O'Hare simultaneously at her best and worst. She employed racist stereotypes which would please her white readers, but laced her analysis with condemnations of white prejudice and oppression. Except for the tone, little in these writings would have offended black radicals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph, who also complained about the allegedly pathological nature of many black communities while also blaming such conditions on white racism. While in prison for her anti-war stance, O'Hare displayed genuine sympathy for black inmates, and offered them very real material and emotional support. She herself treated each person, of whatever race, as an individual. Her public pronouncements on race most likely represented "Aesopian language"--the conscious use of traditional rhetoric as an instrument of subversion--while simultaneously expressing her own unacknowledged racism. Her enlistment of white racist stereotypes in the cause of a trans-race class alliance symbolizes the treacherous nature of the entire conservative Socialist enterprise: it is doubtful whether her efforts undermined or re-enforced a white racism which was not only execrable in its own right, but an intractable obstacle impeding Socialism. In this regard, her racial language paralleled her language of gender, which also reflects both a genuinely conservative acceptance of traditional roles and an equally important emphasis on transforming, while not abolishing, those roles. While serving on the NEC, O'Hare did advocate SP recruitment among blacks; the mutual indifference of the SP and of blacks was, she said, "a problem we have to meet."[94]
O'Hare similarly utilized traditional religious language for her cause. Here, the disjunction between her actual beliefs and her public rhetoric is more obvious. A close reading of O'Hare's writings indicates that she had shed every particle of orthodox Christianity. She believed that Hell was a state of mind rather than a place, that God merely symbolized human goodness or cosmic forces, that votes counted more than prayers, and that the reality of Christ's resurrection was irrelevant. Yet she publicly extolled Jesus Christ as a proletarian rebel and communist. She claimed that the social teachings of the Catholic and Protestant churches were identical with the SP program, and that church anti-Socialist animus was based merely on ignorance. "The fundamentals of Socialism and real Christianity are the same," she said, adding that Socialists welcomed people of all creeds. "A man may be a Socialist and not be a Christian, but no man can be a Christian and not be a Socialist if he knows what Socialism is, for the one is the basis of the other."[95]
O'Hare's religious strategy strongly resembled that of IWW editor and philosopher Ben Williams: she urged that Socialists ignore religious issues and focus on the class interests which united all workers. She attacked religious sectarianism, but also disliked anti-religious agitation, except when evoked by Christian attacks on Socialism. "I was born, reared and educated as a Protestant," she said. "An accident of life that I had no more power of controlling than I had of choosing my parents. I was religiously taught to hate the Catholic and despise the Jew" and ambled contently along in ignorance "until a dawning knowledge of Socialism prodded me out of the rut. As I grasped the [socialist] philosophy, I ceased to be provincial, and claimed the world for my country, lost my creed consciousness and acquired cosmic consciousness."[96] O'Hare said that
I absolutely refuse to waste any words on any man or woman's individual creed simply because I know he got his creed just like I got mine and will lose it the same way. A man does his religious thinking with the same brains with which he does his economic thinking, and if I can get him to think correctly on economics his religious thinking will take care of itself.[97]
O'Hare denounced all divisions which set worker against worker, including virtually every traditional source of personal and community identity. "The very basic cornerstone of the mastery of the master class and the slavery of the working class has always been the division of the workers," she said. "Get the workers to fighting over any question on earth and the masters win. Patriotism, race prejudice, craft jealousies, sectional pride, any old thing on earth will do.... It makes no difference at all where the line of cleavage comes, if we divide anywhere the master class wins and we lose."[98] This analysis--which could have been penned by the most incendiary Wobbly--demanded the annihilation of all personal and community identities based on non-class criteria, and the creation of a universal working-class sisterhood and brotherhood. A person seeking such destruction could pursue one of three strategies: ignoring such traditional sources of identity in favor of a focus on economic issues; utilizing them as weapons against capitalism; or directly assaulting them as direct impediments which thwarted working-class unity. O'Hare usually pursued the first two strategies, while most Wobblies became convinced that parochial, self-destructive identities required direct assault. This disagreement, however, concerned strategy rather than fundamental goals or underlying philosophy.
O'Hare practiced the tolerance she preached. She was a pragmatic, non-dogmatic SP loyalist who took no part in intra-party factional struggles. This was truly unusual for someone who held so many important party offices. (Eugene Debs, the SP's Presidential candidate in many elections, similarly eschewed infighting, did not attend conventions or hold party offices.) She privately detested rightist leaders Hillquit and Berger as contemptuous of mainstream America, excessively focused on their narrow ethnic communities, and too doctrinaire and theoretical. She also accused them of incessantly plotting against Debs.[99] Yet she worked amicably with both rightist leaders, even as she was on much better terms with leftist firebrand Debs, a co-editor of the Rip-Saw in the years before its wartime suppression.
O'Hare's moderation is evident in her attitude towards the 1912 amending of Article II, Section 6 of the SP Constitution. This amendment proscribed the Wobblies by making advocacy of sabotage, violence, or illegal action an offense evoking expulsion from the party. O'Hare almost certainly approved of this amendment when it was adopted, and cited it when talking with St. Louis Archbishop Glennon about SP policy; yet she did not publicly endorse or campaign for it. After its deleterious effect in fomenting party discord and factionalism had become obvious, she implicitly criticized it. However, she did so in her usual subtle way, in the course of a 1914 article extolling Jean Jaures, the recently assassinated French Socialist leader. O'Hare, as SP representative on the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) in 1914, had dutifully asked that the ISB condemn sabotage, violence, and illegality in terms strongly resembling those of Section 6. However, she approvingly quoted Jaures as exclaiming: "My God! Comrade, don't we have enough of war and hate thrust on us by the capitalist class without hunting an opportunity to fight in our own ranks? If we would successfully fight the enemy we must have peace at home."[100]
Typically, O'Hare, in writing about her ISB experiences, condemned European radicals in terms she seldom applied to their American counterparts, thus softening her implicit criticisms of those counterparts. The Dublin strike, she averred, taught British workers that "syndicalism and direct action are all right to talk about, but that an organized, disciplined, trained working class are necessary to fight the battles of the working class;" that "the man who is not educated to vote right is rarely educated to strike right"; and that "political education and political organization must keep pace with industrial development." The strike revealed the stark difference "between a soapbox oration on the beauties of direct action and syndicalism and the conduct of a great strike according to their principles." Similarly, O'Hare condemned the direct-action wing of English suffragism: "The militant movement is largely made up of rich women from the idle, useless class who have never had any training in useful service or intelligent action, so quite naturally their struggle for the ballot took the eminently sane and practical turn of throwing bricks through windows, burning houses and shouting at the King through a megaphone."[101] She also casually remarked that although she was treated well, "it was easy to see that the idea of accepting a woman as an absolute equal, even in a Socialist Bureau meeting, was quite startling to the European male mind, particularly the Englishmen."[102] O'Hare made her points about certain American tactics, attitudes, and comrades indirectly, by criticizing their European counterparts.
O'Hare's traditionalism embraced political action, which (before the war) she viewed as more efficacious than industrial organization. She clearly shared the traditional American faith that the people could rule, even under capitalism. Her statement in favor of a proposed Missouri minimum wage for girls and women remains a classic expression of incremental Socialism: "I know this law will not be Socialism, it will not bring the co-operative commonwealth, it will not abolish the infernal wage system, but it is an important skirmish in the class war. It is one outpost to be taken from Big Biz and every victory makes the great victory that much nearer." Socialist workers demand all that we produce, not just a minimum wage; but the latter "is another hardtack in our knapsack to fight on and we know that a soldier with two hardtacks will do twice as much fighting as a soldier with one."[103] O'Hare recognized that seeming capitalist benevolence usually stemmed from selfish motives, and that the thin veneer of civility masking capitalist mass murder quickly dissipated during strikes. However, intimately acquainted with the effects a "dying wage" had on workers, she extravagantly praised Henry Ford and his five dollar day because of the concrete benefits they conferred upon individual workers.[104] Yet O'Hare (especially after the United States entered World War I) also defended the IWW; in fact, she said that her arrest and prosecution stemmed largely from her efforts on behalf of an IWW--Non Partisan League alliance. When she revived the National Rip-Saw after the war, she made Covington Hall, an IWW stalwart, a co-editor.
That O'Hare may have sometimes used "Aesopian language"--moderated her genuine feminist beliefs in hopes of securing a hearing for a less incendiary version--is evident from occasional lapses in her moderate, male-friendly tone. Despite her stress on harmonious gender relations, O'Hare occasionally disparaged or contemptuously dismissed men. Her flyer, "Wimmin Ain't Got No Kick," distributed by the WNC, began by describing one of her speeches in "a town just like thousands of other towns," when she was accosted by "a typical man, just like millions of other men," who insisted on remaining "abjectly ignorant."[105] And when the government blatantly neglected children in favor of livestock or warships, she displayed real bitterness against the male (as opposed to the capitalist) state. In a 1912 article, "Pigs Versus Children", O'Hare asked in a tone of utter disgust and contempt: "Can you men understand the blistering humiliation it is to a mother to know that the government you have given us, the government in which you deny us a voice, values the pigs of the nation higher than the babies we went down in the valley and shadow of death to endow with life? Your government (not ours remember) has a Department of Agriculture" whose bulletins said that young pigs must have unbounded freedom in the sunlight and large pastures in which to run and play; yet our children were denied these things and "may rot and fester and die in the capitalistic hog-pens you call Christian cities.... Our babies are classed lower than pigs, [for] pigs have a price and bring a profit in the market while baby ---- has no price, brings no profits and is less valued by your Christian government than little pigs." Babies died from a cholera epidemic and your male government does nothing, "but if a pig gets cholera then 'your' government provides a trained pig doctor who comes post haste with medicines and skill to save the pig. A pig is worth dollars to the packing house trust, but the baby has value to no one but its mother, and mothers have no voice in government."[106] O'Hare said that women
know the price of a child-life and we revolt at its useless waste. If I did not realize that the men of our nation could never know the price of a human life, if I was not convinced that they simply can not comprehend the cost of their own children, I think my soul would be so full of hate that I should be tempted to do murder....[107]
O'Hare exonerated men because they simply could not understand; otherwise "I would be more violent and murderous than any Anarchist that ever lived."[108]
O'Hare also lambasted the male government when she compared the money it allocated for warships with that spent on the welfare of school-children. In "Warships or Children" (1913) she said that women involuntarily produced cannon fodder "because men held the key to our bread and butter and it was up to us to bear the children or have our bread supply cut off." O'Hare cited statistics indicating that 25% of school-children (a relatively privileged group, for millions of poor children could not attend school) suffered from malnutrition, and 75% from physical defects which medical treatment could eliminate or alleviate.[109] Malnutrition and untreated disease in children crippled them for life, and inflicted untold costs upon society, but "your government (not ours)" ignored their plight.
Fifteen million warped, crushed, robbed and ruined lives. Fifteen million useless journeys down into the 'valley and shadow' to bring forth a life to be wasted by preventable disease. All this and yet your government spends hundreds of millions of dollars we [women] create each year, but not one cent to save these fifteen million wasted lives.... Half a billion, a sum so great our minds can not grasp it, spent each year for death, bloodshed and destruction and conquest for profits, but not one cent for health, efficiency and conquest of disease.[110]
O'Hare next displayed real gender bitterness when the SP's National Executive Committee announced the impending abolition of the Women's National Committee and the Woman's Department in the National Office in early 1915. O'Hare wryly commented that "the overzealous protestations of the men" who claimed that abolition of the women's groups only helped women "will be taken with a grain of salt by every woman who has seen active service in the Socialist party." O'Hare quoted with approval another Socialist woman who had complained that whenever a woman wants something that the men desire, she is "no longer a woman... but a raging tiger.... I am afraid that not in our time will women be treated fairly, either by their employers or the men with whom they work."[111]
O'Hare herself asserted that male chauvinism was innate, and would not quickly vanish even in the SP. "Socialist men are just ordinary male animals with the inherited tendencies of long ages of male domination, and a few years in the Socialist party will not change them fundamentally. They may expiate learnedly of class solidarity and woman's inherent equality, but they are speaking academically. Scratch a scientific male Socialist and you will find an ordinary he-man. And that he-man will resent as bitterly and fight as unscrupulously the invasion of women into his domain as possible."[112]
O'Hare said that she herself had "run the whole gamut of masculine jealousy, resentment and hindrance" whenever I "encroached on what some man felt was his job...... My experience on the National Executive Committee gave me an excellent chance to study the antics of the male who feels that his domain has been treacherously invaded by a female." While serving on the NEC she had endured the "paternalistic patronage, the lofty scorn, the fatherly solicitude... lest my weak and faltering feminine footsteps be led astray in the dangerous quagmires of party service." O'Hare said that she had learned much but "I was totally unable to be of any service to the party. I am absolutely sure that my experience has been the experience of every woman in the party who has ever held a position or accomplished a piece of party work that some man has felt it would have been an advantage for him to have held or done."
Her experience, O'Hare thundered, merely demonstrated that "the male members of the Socialist party are men first and Socialists incidentally; and that they have not shed their inherited sex tendencies to dominate the inferior female. They want women in the Socialist party, but they want us to confine our attentions to strictly feminine lines of work (which means work no man wants to do) and not encroach on masculine fields of labor."[113]
O'Hare sardonically claimed that she would "oblige the dear boys" and remain within women's traditional sphere, but was prevented by "industrial evolution... a grim old force" which cared nothing whatever for the desires of either sex. "When he firmly grasped us women by the nape of the neck and tossed us out into the industrial world, he also smashed the old world of feminine retirement and masculine domination, and men and women alike, we must submit whether we like it or not." O'Hare thus used a traditional Socialist argument--that individuals and societies must adapt to the irresistible onslaught of the machine process--as an argument for women's equality, just as male Socialists used Socialism's alleged inevitability as an argument for Socialism. Indeed, just as male Socialists claimed that they mere recognized (and deplored) the class struggle, and that rather than causing it they offered its only resolution, so O'Hare claimed that she did not even particularly advocate women's equality.
Succeed or fail, live or die, we are chained together in the bonds of wage slavery and together we must find emancipation. The [new] conditions are galling to men and embittering to women, but submit we must, and to me it seems to be wise to cultivate a sense of humor of toleration and make the best of what we cannot change. The men Comrades will have to realize that we women are here and they will have to accept us; we women must realize that life and adjustment to changed conditions are just as hard for the "new man" as for the "new woman" and we must be patient while the poor fellows are molting their inherited antipathies.[114]
O'Hare concluded her somewhat bitter piece on a conciliatory note. "Work together we must," she said, "so let's bring good humor, philosophy and tolerance to bear on our problems as much as possible, and keep everlastingly on the job."[115] This letter, while expressing more bitterness than most of O'Hare's pronouncements on gender relations within the Socialist movement, epitomized her method of broaching the subject of gender oppression--and of other sensitive cultural subjects which might offend her constituency. She published it not in her own widely-circulated journal, but in a daily newspaper published thousands of miles away, and most likely read by very few National Rip-Saw subscribers. She expressed genuine bitterness, especially at the outset, and included revealing autobiographical details which she never mentioned anywhere else; but she ended with a plea for reconciliation, and especially for understanding on the part of the superior women for the struggling, burdened-with-prejudice males.
In the years 1916-1917 O'Hare further evinced a genuine anger at men in her series, "The Tale of a Rib," (a sardonic reference to the Biblical tale of woman being created from man's rib), published in the National Rip-Saw. O'Hare grasped an insight that social historians have only recently rediscovered: women's history must be recovered from the study of religion, law, and other non-traditional sources, for women's voices have been silenced by the historical records. "A study of the laws of the nations is the most fertile field for one who cares to delve into the story of woman's past," she said. "For in laws we find woman's position accurately defined, and law, like religion, tells the story with no intention of doing so.... Conventional history is almost worthless for the purpose."[116] In a startling passage which may partly explain her own lack of a militant feminist emphasis, she exclaimed that
Women wrote no history, and men could not if they wished to tell the story, and certainly they had no wish to tell it. No book has ever yet been written that lays bare the woman heart and soul, and no voice has ever spoken the secrets of her mind. No man can know what women feel and no women dare tell it.... We live in a man's world, and in it women speak not by right, but by permission. Men own the publishing houses and the avenues of publicity; men buy and pay for the books published and it is men's tastes and pocketbooks that must be consulted; so naturally this book will be well shaped to masculine thought before it sees the light of day. A few generations hence perhaps, when women own and manage publishing houses, and are economically free enough to buy such literature as they choose, our great-great-grand-daughters may write exactly what they feel to be true, but it is not for the women of my generation.[117]
If women told their true story, society would disintegrate; if O'Hare herself told the full truth, her writing would not see print. Nevertheless the story she did tell was devastating enough: "Barter and sale, rapine and conquest, servitude and degradation was the portion of womankind down all the ages."[118]
According to O'Hare, women nurtured the arts of civilization and ruled peacefully. When they produced a surplus, leisured men introduced the enslavement of war captives, and henceforth made war and enslaving women their principle business. "The collective ownership of property passed away, collective production ceased and society was divided into two classes--those who had forcibly taken the earth, and their slaves, and to the latter class women belonged." The rib story "did not create the slavery of women, it just sanctioned and defended it as did all other religions." Slaves were the first type of private property, which led to all others. Women were enslaved and their chastity enforced so that the father would transmit his property to his own children. Combining a class with a gendered analysis, O'Hare said that "Religion and law both being the servants of the men of the ruling class, joined hands in enforcing the subjugation of women and the mastery of men and naturally before such a combination, women were helpless."[119]
O'Hare subjected the familiar Biblical tales to close, feminist analysis, recognizing that the records were fragmentary and "distorted and emasculated [!] by translator and priesthood." She recounted the story of Moses's demand that his minions kill the Midianite male children and elderly women after they had slaughtered the men, remarking that a man could not covet his neighbor's wife, but could kill without limit. Jesus understood women's plight because he too was an outcast, but Paul was a misogynist suffering from a bad liver, who had consorted with the wrong kind of woman. The church fathers incessantly claimed that "men are naturally chaste and spend the greater part of their blameless lives dodging the seductive females who have designs on their virtue." In general, Christianity "simply grafted on to the brutal laws of Rome the narrow-minded theology of the Hebrew religion which had always counted women of less importance than cattle.... To the brutality of Roman law was added the more brutal attitude of the Church fathers towards women." Nunneries, she said in a strikingly contemporary reading, "offered an opportunity for women to express themselves and have some small measure of control over their lives and work a little more uplifting and spiritual than pandering to the depraved lusts and degraded appetites of men sodden in materialism and debauchery." However, even nuns were "absolutely ruled and controlled by men."[120]
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] The only real biography of O'Hare is From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O'Hare, by Sally Miller (University of Missouri Press, 1993). Unless otherwise indicated, biographical information is from this work. Miller and Philip S. Foner also edited Kate Richards O'Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rogue, 1982). The introduction to this work also contains an analysis and description of O'Hare's life. Miller and Foner include some of the works I have quoted below; but because they often condensed O'Hare's pieces, I have cited the original version, except where the version I have read is in the anthology.
[2] KROH, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," SW, October 1908; also in Miller and Foner.
[3] KROH, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," SW, October 1908; also in Miller and Foner.
[4] KROH, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," SW, October 1908; also in Miller and Foner.
[5] KROH, "The Girl Who Would," Wilshire's Magazine, January 1903, in Miller and Foner, 42-44.
[6] KROH, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," SW, October 1908; also in Miller and Foner.
[7] KROH, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," SW, October 1908; also in Miller and Foner; KROH, "The Girl Who Would," Wilshire's Magazine, January 1903, in Miller and Foner, 41-44.
[8] PW, August 1910, special feature on KROH.
[9] KROH, "Guilty!," SR, February 1918.
[10] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," published by Frank O'Hare, March 1919, p. 45.
[11] KROH letter of April 20, 1919, in Miller, Writings, 208
[12] KROH letter, February 15, 1921, in Miller, Writings, 300.
[13] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 9-12.
[14] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 16-20.
[15] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 28,
[16] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 27.
[17] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 28-30.
[18] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 31-33.
[19] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 34-35.
[20] KROH, "The Wages of Women," NRS, July 1913; KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 40.
[21] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 141-142.
[22] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 142, 116, 41.
[23] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 125, 133, 121-122.
[24] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 42-45.
[25] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 48-50.
[26] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 52.
[27] KROH, "Law and the White Slaver," 2.
[28] KROH, "Law and the White Slaver," 26-7, 17, 2-3; KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 83, 64-5.
[29] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 78, 66; KROH, "Law and the White Slaver," 14, 4-5.
[30] KROH, "Law and the White Slaver," 9, 12, 23, 17-19; KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 91-92, 72.
[31] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 110-111, 99, 96; KROH, "Drink, Its Cause and Cure," NRS, September 1913.
[32] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 101-102.
[33] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 102, 111.
[34] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 111-114.
[35] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 111-114.
[36] KROH, "Common Sense and the Liquor Traffic," 26-28.
[37] KROH, "Drink, Its Cause and Cure," NRS, September 1913.
[38] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 103-106.
[39] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 109-110.
[40] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 107; KROH, "Common Sense and the Liquor Traffic," 11.
[41] KROH, "Common Sense and the Liquor Traffic," 21-25.
[42] KROH, "Common Sense and the Liquor Traffic," 24-27.
[43] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 32-33, 18.
[44] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 4-5.
[45] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 20-21, 8.
[46] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 8-9, 22-23.
[47] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 10-11.
[48] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 10-18.
[49] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 238, 11, 190-1.
[50] KROH, SOC, 214.
[51] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 244.
[52] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 244-245.
[53] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 180-181, 185-186.
[54] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 203-204, 207-208.
[55] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 217.
[56] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 217-218.
[57] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 138-139, 198, 200.
[58] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 193-194.
[59] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 192-195.
[60] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 250-251.
[61] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 251-253, 196.
[62] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 196, 186.
[63] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 258-261, also printed under the chapter title, "As a Bud Unfolds," NRS, November 1912.
[64] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 155-157.
[65] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 157-158.
[66] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 159-164.
[67] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 159, 171-172.
[68] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 173.
[69] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 173-174.
[70] KROH, The Sorrows of Cupid, 175.
[71] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[72] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[73] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[74] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[75] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[76] KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[77] KROH, "Suffragists and Slavers," NRS, April 1913.
[78] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", Second Installment, NRS, August 1914; KROH, "Three Weeks," NRS, December 1915.
[79] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", second installment, NRS, August 1914. In the same article she said "I demand not only better laws and better enforcement for MY SEX, but more particularly for MY CLASS."
[80] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", NRS, July 1914.
[81] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", NRS, July 1914.
[82] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", NRS, July 1914; KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", fourth installment, NRS, November 1914.
[83] The series "Shall Women Vote," in the NRS during the summer and fall of 1914, was a debate between O'Hare and a female attorney, Bessie Ruler.
[84] KROH, "Daily Bill of Fare for Hard Times," NRS, December 1914.
[85] KROH, "Shall Women Vote?", NRS, July 1914; KROH, "Margaret Sanger," July 1916.
[86] KROH, "Margaret Sanger," NRS, July 1916.
[87] KROH, "Birth Control and Pellagra," NRS, December 1915.
[88] KROH, "Birth Control and Pellagra," NRS, December 1915.
[89] KROH pamphlet, "'Nigger' Equality," in MF, 44-49.
[90] KROH "'Nigger' Equality," MF 44-49.
[91] KROH, "'Nigger' Equality," MF, 44-49.
[92] KROH, "Only a 'Nigger'," NRS, February 1913.
[93] KROH, "Only a 'Nigger'," NRS, February 1913.
[94] Miller, Race, Ethnicity, p. 7.
[95] KROH, "The Church and the Social Problem," 35-36.
[96] KROH, "Religious Warfare," NRS, December 1912.
[97] KROH, "Religious Warfare," NRS, December 1912.
[98] KROH, "Religious Warfare," NRS December 1912.
[99] Miller, 235. The letter on which this assessment is based was written in 1945, well after the demise of the SP. It almost certainly represented O'Hare's longstanding views, however; any particular cause of temporary animosity towards the two men would have long since dissipated.
[100] KROH, "He Beats Around the Bush," NRS May 1913; KROH, "Our Martyred Comrade," NRS, September 1914.
[101] KROH, "The Story of an Irish Agitator," NRS April 1914; KROH, "Husbandless Women," NRS, March 1914.
[102] KROH, "Over the Sea and Back Again," NRS, March 1914.
[103] KROH, "The Wages of Women," NRS July 1913.
[104] KROH, "Socialists and the Little Hookworm," NRS, April 1913; KROH, "War in the Copper Country," NRS December 1913; KROH, "Has Henry Ford Made Good?," NRS, January 1916; KROH, "Some More 'Ford'," NRS February 1916; KROH, "A Conversation With Henry Ford," NRS, March 1916.
[105] KROH, "Wimmin Aint Got No Kick," 1; for a similar comment, see KROH, "Coming Out of the Night," NRS, December 1912.
[106] KROH, "Pigs Versus Children," NRS, August 1912.
[107] KROH, "Pigs Versus Children," NRS, August 1912.
[108] KROH, "Pigs Versus Children," NRS, August 1912.
[109] KROH, "Warships or Children," NRS, January 1913.
[110] KROH, "Warships or Children," NRS, January 1913.
[111] KROH, "The Eternal Feminine," NYC, June 6, 1915
[112] KROH, "The Eternal Feminine," NYC, June 6, 1915
[113] KROH, "The Eternal Feminine," NYC, June 6, 1915
[114] KROH, "The Eternal Feminine," NYC, June 6, 1915
[115] KROH, "The Eternal Feminine," NYC, June 6, 1915
[116] KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Four, NRS, February 1917.
[117] KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Four, NRS, February 1917.
[118] KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Second Chapter, NRS, November 1916.
[119] KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Two, Continued, NRS, December 1916.
[120] KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Three, NRS, January 1917; KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Two, NRS, November 1916; KROH, "The Tale of a Rib," Chapter Four, NRS, February 1917.