THE SOCIALIST WOMEN AND THE SEX STRUGGLE
The entire tone and content of The Socialist Woman's analysis of marriage and the family implied a major revision in Socialist doctrine and practice. Women's struggle was not merely against capitalism and the capitalists, but against patriarchy and men. Women--including the wives of working-class and even Socialist men--struggled against their husbands in the home as well as against employers and their state in the public sphere. The Socialist Woman posited the existence of a "sex struggle" older than the class struggle and of equal or greater contemporary importance; this struggle was related to the class struggle against capitalism, and yet also independent of it. Foreshadowing radical feminists of the 1970s, the Socialist women conceived of women as a "sex class" with common interests transcending economic class lines and bringing them into conflict with men of all classes.
Conger-Kaneko cited Bebel, Kautsky, Darwin, Engels, and Spencer in support of her contention that a "sex war" had always existed. She insisted that the time had arrived "for Socialist women to come out not only as a class, but as a sex also, and make themselves known as positive advocates for both sex and class freedom." May Walden similarly complained that "Woman is doubly a slave. First to industrial conditions, and second to man." Stern agreed that "as surely as there is a class struggle, there is also a sex struggle" and that woman was "doubly exploited--as a worker and as a woman." This sentiment contravened the orthodox Socialist belief that all oppressions resolved into issues of class, and that other exploited groups, such as blacks and women, had no special grievances. Conger-Kaneko and her comrades did not ignore or downplay the class struggle; they merely insisted that women wage the "sex struggle" simultaneously and in conjunction with the it. In this they disagreed even with Eugene Debs, a frequent contributor to The Socialist Woman. Debs somewhat inconsistently acknowledged the special disabilities of the female sex and asserted that only self-activity could liberate women, but usually ended his articles with homilies dissolving gender oppressions into those of class.[1]
According to the Socialist women, however, patriarchy was not reducible to capitalism. As Whitehead said, woman must struggle "against the autocracy of man, as well as against the autocracy of capital." Parce, scornful of men who complained that women were stirring up sex hostility, concluded that "men are so sex-conscious that there is no reason to expect that they will modify laws that give them any advantage over women no matter how despicable." Conger-Kaneko cited Bebel, the doyen of German Social Democracy, as making the same point; according to Bebel's seminal Woman Under Socialism, women had as little to hope for from men as did workmen from the middle classes. Malkiel agreed that women could not rely on men for their deliverance because men were too selfish and were themselves unfree. "Man through his blindness will not see that he cannot be free as long as woman is dependent," she said. Stern, in a statement closely paralleling that which Socialists often made about class, said that women were "not citizens of a republic, but subjects to a government of men."[2]
The Socialist women, therefore, recognized that they would fight for their liberation mostly alone. Yet they asked for the support of Socialist men because the international Socialist movement had always supported, at least in theory, full rights for women. Moreover, as the Socialist women never tired of repeating, the labor movement and the working-class struggle stemmed from the same basic causes, and were natural allies. As a practical matter, the Socialist women could make an impact in and through the Socialist party only if they convinced a significant number of Socialist men that their cause was worth supporting.
The Socialist women also asserted that women, as any oppressed class, must emancipate themselves; they could not win genuine freedom as a gift from a superior group. That they fought their hard battle largely alone was, therefore, in some sense an advantage. Wilson averred, again in terms familiar to Socialists, that "just as the wage slave cannot be freed, but must of himself attain to freedom, so must women come into her larger life of social and political equality through her own efforts." Conger-Kaneko was even more explicit. Referring to Socialist men whose utopia consisted of a male breadwinner supporting a house-bound wife, she compared the efforts of men in the cause of women with those of the liberal bourgeoisie in favor of the working class. In either case, she disdained charity from the class or sex enemy. Reforms "may be made by men which will alleviate the physical condition of women, political rights may be thrust upon them, by the sex that has held them in bondage for so long, but these would not mean to women what self-emancipation would mean." Women who did not recognize their slavery and overthrow it could not wisely use their freedom. Male socialism "might bring to woman ease and comfort, but not necessarily an awakened social consciousness.... Robbed by the factory of her old-time home employment, and unawakened to political and civic issues, woman would be reduced to a luxury, dependent through her sex upon the whims of men for support."[3]
The Socialist women contravened Marxist doctrine when they asserted that contemporary women could attain independence by earning their own living. This implied a definition of autonomy focused on freedom from men, particularly husbands, rather than from capitalists. It implicitly privileged the sex struggle over that of class. Parce asserted that women had an advantage over men in that they were accustomed to caring for themselves and others; any woman who found renumerative work could live on her own. A man had greater difficulty doing this. To succeed, "he will have to take to the simple life and learn to wait on himself, for one thing." If he learned to make coffee and sew on buttons, "which he can if he is very, very clever, he will know the joys and dignity, not of mastery, but of independence. After which he will be worthy to marry one of the bachelor women above described.... Then the mutual helpfulness of the home will be given and accepted as courtesy, not as duty or as service."[4]
Conger-Kaneko compared the "sex struggle" to the class struggle in another way. Many critics routinely blamed the Socialist party for fomenting social upheaval and class hatred. Party theorists and publicists replied that the SP was not responsible for these phenomena, but merely recognized their existence; capitalism generated the class struggle and the concomitant dislocations of traditional lifestyles and values. The SP, far from causing these evils, offered the only possible solution: the democratic control of the means of production by the workers and the abolition of class society. The IWW adapted this argument when propounding its version of revolutionary industrial unionism, and Conger-Kaneko similarly used it to bolster Socialist feminism. She warned the SP:
So vital, so fundamental is woman's place in the grand scheme of things that for her to move, or readjust her position even in the slightest, is to threaten the very foundations upon which our social structure is built. And because this is a fact, some of our otherwise revolutionists religiously refrain from all mention of the sex struggle for fear the movement will be saddled with having caused it. The bugaboo of "breaking up the home" is fraught with intense terror to some who merely smile at the accusation of breaking up the government. And since woman is the pivot of the home, they are willing to relegate to her the adjusting of her own affairs, and the fighting of her own battles....
So the sex struggle is here. If it is too big for the Socialist movement, then it will be settled outside the movement. But having an economic basis, the Socialist movement is the legitimate place for its discussion, and it should not be left to outsiders. It is not a matter of foisting it upon the movement. It is a matter of the movement recognizing and explaining it, as it recognizes and explains the class struggle. If it has a deeper significance than the class struggle, we needn't be afraid of that. The moment we become afraid of any social phenomena, that moment we begin to lose our power, and another stronger than we will come after us, and will oust us from our place as revolutionary leaders.[5]
In a similar passage, Parce enlisted science in the cause of women as well as of Socialism. Science was dissolving "our most cherished dreams, our most sacred institutions, our most solemn trivialities.... No loyal Socialist will claim for the Socialist party or any members of it, responsibility for the evolutionary changes in the social structure."[6]
Many Socialist women, acting on these premises, advocated the forging of a transclass gender alliance of all women, from the respectable rich to the outcasts of the streets. The Socialist women boldly asserted that for women, class mattered less than sex. "Women are all women under this system, and they are all subject to its tyranny," Conger-Kaneko said. "The fact that a woman has a rich master does not make her any less a slave, either economically or sexually." Another writer asserted that the wives of professional men were menials "who must constantly perform servants' tasks, who cook and scrub and mend.... Is it not true that women as a sex are almost universally a servant class, a working class, economically, as well as politically, dependent?" Indeed, housework was so dirty, tiresome, unappreciated, and health-destroying that many women with a choice preferred a salaried job in industry. Meta Stern pointed out that the wife of a rich man suffered from the drunkenness and dissipation of their husbands just as poor women did because "immense wealth, with its idleness and self-indulgence, lead to intemperance" as surely as did poverty. The wife of a rich man was property as surely as the wife of a poor one. "Her womanhood was wrecked by him whom she called husband. Either she was living a life of outward glamour and inward despair, or she was cold and depraved like her environment, and continued to live with the man, though she loathed him, for his gold."[7]
Most Socialist women, therefore, believed that they could win bourgeois women for their cause. Club women, bourgeois to the core, were praised for their social consciousness and earnestness; if they were not yet Socialists, that was because Socialists had not yet reached them with "the deeper truth about things." Downing wrote an eloquent "Plea to Club Women," urging that they could not escape the evils of the world by vapid self-cultivation. Referring to characters in Harriet Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Downing said that Elizas were still separated from their children, Legrees yet claimed their victims. She told club women:
You have cultivated a literature that deals with pleasanter themes--you are devoted to an art which gives you quiet beauty for contemplation, but despite all this your soul is not serene.... [Your compositions] though they have cost you much pains, have some way left you without the joys of having created.... They have neither added to the sum of human knowledge nor sought to apply knowledge already found to any real human need.... The unrest in your soul is but the reflection of the discord and pain in the world.... You cannot pass over them and find happiness outside of them.[8]
Taking a somewhat different approach, Corinne Brown said that the women's clubs had bogged down in endless meetings and reports. "This club movement is dead," she claimed, and "must be superseded by something more intellectual in scope, wide a wider human interest." Socialist women could organize such a revivified women's club movement, and use it as a springboard from which they would revolutionize society. Brown said that "the woman who drudges the hardest, who is oppressed and brow-beaten by her employer of her husband, the woman who suffers the most at the hands of society, is the woman to whom the message of Socialism must be taken. Its worth is measured by the depths it reaches. It must reach down to the most unfortunate black baby girl in benighted Georgia... or it is worth nothing."[9]
And indeed some elite women did involve themselves in social reform, settlement work, or even support of striking workers. Unlike IWW leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Parce adduced the 1909 Shirtwaist strike as "a splendid example of sex-class solidarity" because rich women in the Women's Trade Union League aided the strikers, even bailing them out of jail. Parce admitted that the Socialists maintained a low profile during the strike lest they alienate public opinion, while the deeds of the rich garnered headlines. "This was undoubtedly a necessary precaution," she argued. "The public flocked to follow the wealthy women where it would have been inexpressibly shocked to discover a wicked socialist. However, the support of this same public helped to win the strike and that was what the Socialist women wanted. Thus a combination of the class struggle and the sex struggle won the day."[10] As described above, Parce similarly argued that Socialists should actively cooperate with the bourgeois suffrage movement for the same reason it allied with the anti-Socialist AFL: to achieve goals the two movements shared in common.
Parce elided a key distinction, however. The AFL was arguably a working-class organization; in aiding it, the Socialists allied with their class allies against the capitalists. According to Socialist theory, members of the AFL were a natural SP constituency, held back only by timidity or ignorance; when Socialists taught them the truth, in large part by their example in fighting for labor's cause, AFL workers would flock to the party of their class. The aims of the bourgeois suffragists, however, could never coincide for long with those of their class enemies, the workers; their opposition to Socialism stemmed not from ignorance but from a correct understanding of their class interests. Bourgeois women could not be "natural socialists" in any significance sense, however much they pursued their own interests as a sex.
Illustrating the difficulties of a women's alliance across class lines, a decree of the Socialist International concerning such alliances also discomfited the Socialist women. The 1907 International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart had mandated that Socialist women found their own suffrage movement rather than cooperating with bourgeois organizations. This resolution resulted from a European situation irrelevant in the United States: many bourgeois European feminists from nations which had a property requirement for voting sought not a universal franchise, but suffrage for women on the same terms as it existed for men. Because this excluded most workers, the Socialist International demanded that its members push for universal suffrage for women and men, even if this temporarily postponed equal suffrage for women. In the United States, however, almost no one advocated a class-based suffrage (although NAWSA despicably compromised with advocates of a race-based suffrage in the South).
Socialist women often debated the Stuttgart resolution, which was, according to the rules of the International, binding on its member parties. Josephine Cole bitterly criticized the Stuttgart resolution for its weasel-worded escape clause, which did not demand immediate action on woman's suffrage, but rather stated that each member party could defer such agitation until it thought it proper. Cole denied that the International's resolutions bound member parties, and claimed that they were merely advisory. She recommended that Socialist women in the United States violate the Stuttgart resolution, enter the mainstream suffrage movement "in such numbers and with such good will and intelligence that they will conquer and control the movement, lead it into new paths," and refashion it into "a working-class movement." Women should no more wait for the ballot until the advent of Socialism as unions should defer the eight-hour day until Socialism's victory. She concluded, "'If this be treason, make the most of it.'"[11] Similarly, just as New York Socialists had cooperated with bourgeois women in the Shirtwaist strike, so Socialist women in Oklahoma violated the Stuttgart decree. Parce exulted that "now we have twice cooperated, and the Stuttgart resolution is smashed and we have violated party discipline."[12] Parce, and other Socialist women, argued that conditions differed so much from country to country that the Socialist International could not reasonably dictate rules binding on all.
Lena Morrow Lewis, sometimes considered an intransigent opponent of any special consideration for women's issues, agreed with Parce. Limited suffrage in Europe was not a class ploy, she asserted; the suffragists were ignorant of class issues. "They do not seek a limited franchise in order to discriminate against other women, but only for the purpose of breaking down the barriers that are based wholly on sex.... The American Woman Suffrage association is not a class movement, it is a woman's movement.... The social problem of today is a complicated one. Let us be sure that we include every factor necessary to its solution. The woman movement, the class struggle, the awakening of a social consciousness, all these are factors in the establishing of a new social system." Although women naturally focused on winning the vote, Lewis confidently predicted that they would fragment into their respective class parties once they secured it. This could only benefit the cause of Socialism. In the meantime, however, Socialists must energetically seek women's full rights.[13]
Socialist opponents of women's suffrage claimed that women, like men, voted on class rather than sex lines, and that women had won no benefits in the suffrage states. The Socialist Woman spent considerable time debunking this argument. It variously claimed that women were vastly outnumbered in the few sparsely-populated Western states that had granted them suffrage; that non-suffrage states, anxious to stem the tide of suffragism, made important concessions to defuse agitation for the vote; and that voting was virtually meaningless without control of the means of production. But on the whole The Socialist Woman, as described above, touted the immense benefits women had won for themselves and the population at large in the states where they voted. Conger-Kaneko acknowledged that women, like men, voted their class interests (or those of their masters) when class issues were at stake, but claimed that "they also stand together on sex lines, irrespective of class, when a particular issue regarding women and children comes up."[14]
Conger-Kaneko echoed Parce and Lewis in her evaluation of the suffrage movement as a transclass women's insurgency.
To the student of history the woman's movement must appeal as something more than a bourgeois movement. It is the movement of a class of people longer and more abjectly oppressed than any other on the face of the earth. It is the serious struggle of a sex for the attainment of natural and legal rights. In the woman's movement there is the realization that every woman, from the highest to the lowest, suffers in common this thing--disinheritance. Disinheritance from the best things of life.... Forcibly enslaved, forcibly debauched, forcibly weakened until threatened with unfitness both mentally and physically, bound down by every law conceivable to the mind of man for holding her in the place he has made for her; the butt of prejudice, of superstition, of scorn, of passions and infidelities; bearing meanwhile the world's people in her body.... And not only for the woman, but also for the child, does the woman's movement stand. And through the child, for the race.[15]
Like Parce, Conger-Kaneko said that the women's movement was "a movement of an oppressed class towards political and sex freedom" and that "not until it has gained that freedom can it very well divide along economic class lines. Individual members of the movement may be class conscious in individual relations. But not the movement itself."[16] The policy of the Socialist International, demanding as it did a distinctly Socialist and class-conscious suffrage movement, therefore ran athwart the necessities of history.
The Socialist Woman not only proclaimed the sex struggle and the necessity of a transclass alliance of women, but also asserted that women were intrinsically different from and superior to men. This idea had become common among bourgeois feminists, supplementing or replacing the earlier feminist claims of the essential identity of the sexes. However, it presented special organizational and doctrinal problems for a Socialist version of feminism.
The Socialist women often asserted that gender roles were socially rather than biologically constructed: women, socialized differently from men and encountering unique experiences, developed the qualities appropriate for a house-bound, servile class whose survival depended on attracting men. The Socialist Woman justified its own existence and that of the Woman's National Committee on the basis of this man-made difference: women, currently less rational, socially aware, and class conscious than men, required a separate appeal to their distinct sensibilities, issues, and interests. Qualities which the Socialist women considered antithetical to full personhood for women and which obstructed their conversion to Socialism--their frivolity, obsession with their sexuality, and individualistic fixation on their own children--stemmed from the oppression of women. Her male-imposed isolation in the home, starvation wages, enforced economic dependence, and the immense force of man-made religion, custom, and law all warped her and stunted her natural growth. Woman's contemporary nature, then, was the unnatural result of an enormous apparatus of oppression and of an assiduous and unrelenting effort that bound and constrained her at every turn. The development of capitalism and the forced march of women into the industrial maelstrom had lessened the differences between the sexes; Socialism would completely obliterate them. The need for a separate appeal to women, and a separate institutional structure catering to their specific needs, would evaporate when the advance of capitalism and, ultimately, the triumph of Socialism, rendered the experiences of both sexes identical.
But The Socialist Woman, in a paradox it shared with the mainstream suffrage movement, simultaneously proclaimed women's essential difference. Conger-Kaneko and Parce, in particular, posited an original matriarchy, based on production for use rather than profit, when women had founded civilization by creating agriculture and the crafts. Household production for use was, Parce exclaimed, "a system in accordance with the woman nature; a practical, sober, workable scheme. But men were not satisfied with this way," which did not allow exploitation, so they replaced joyous, communal production for the satisfaction of human needs with production for profit. Men enslaved and debased women, "ground [children] into dividends", reduced people from ends to means, and instituted profit and war.[17]
The Socialist women sometimes located this sexual difference in woman's role as mother. Helen Untermann maintained that "the psychology of woman is different from that of man because the function of each is different. Woman carries life, and bears life, while the function of man is merely that of fertilization.... It is this difference which accounts for the individualistic nature of man and the communistic nature of woman.... If fertilization has taken root, her life is at once inseparably connected with the life of another. This creates a bond of mutuality in physical feeling of which man has no connection. The desire to protect life, to do for it, becomes so ingrained into woman's nature that it affects her whole psychic being."[18]
In a subtle yet important difference in emphasis, Parce stressed woman's role as caregiver, as child rearer as well as bearer. "The scientists tell us that the nature of woman is altruistic. They say it was her function of motherhood, and of the protector of the young, that formed and fixed her mental traits.... In the essence of her nature, then, women are opposed to the present system." On another occasion she said that the mother-child relationship was "one of complete reciprocity and because all mothers have always been in this position toward children, ever since there were mothers, the habit of the woman mind and the woman attitude have been formed by this experience.... The readiness of the mother to act in this way toward the child has stamped itself upon her very constitution." This reciprocity "expresses itself in all the other relations of life," including those in which "the productive work of the world is carried on.... Man does not have the same relation with any one that the mother has with the child. He does not have the same training that the mother does, and so he never forms the same habit of being ready to respond to human needs that she forms.... Fighting has formed the attitude of the male mind," and man is always ready to fight "to get something for himself" and "to get the better of every transaction he enters into." This has caused misunderstandings between the sexes and "infinite anguish to woman, since human life began." Conger-Kaneko added that women protected babies and infants not only against the ravages of nature, but against predatory males; women nurtured what "male nature--inanimate nature--so unhesitatingly destroys."[19]
Women created not only civilization, many Socialist women asserted, but human society itself. Women were the original sex; men evolved as an afterthought, as providers of genetic diversity for the race and sex interest for women. In other species, the male preened himself to attract the female; only humans perverted this natural order. The male was the derivative, exclusively "sex creature" who learned what rudiments of civilization he assimilated from women. "When nature first invented the male animal, his only occupation in life and reason for being was competition for the female," Parce claimed. Conger-Kaneko, turning the tables on men, similarly proclaimed that "the mother-creature existed before the inauguration of sex, while the male came in later purely and simply as a sex function, and had no other place in nature for aeons of time. So if there is a distinctly 'sex' creature in the human race, it is the man. But we are willing to forget it, if the woman can be given a rest on the subject."[20] Men, the Socialist women claimed, joined human society only when they belatedly learned that they participated in the begetting of children.
Parce, responding to an article in the International Socialist Review by conservative Socialist Joseph Cohen, turned the traditional, patriarchal evaluations of male and female capacities on its head and summarized the historical, ethical, and political case for Socialist feminism.
What we are pleased, somewhat whimsically, to call civilization has been a distinctly masculine affair. It has been singularly deficient in the "perception of relations." Means have been considered of more importance than the end; the symbol more important than the fact. The external has been more important than the internal, the artificial than the real. Man has thought that ways of doing things were of more importance than the people who do them. He has thought that property is more valuable than life, that capital is of more importance than labor. The capitalist system is the masculine system of production.
The prehistoric system, the feminine system of production was co-operative. It was an expression of woman's "perception of relations." It was necessary to subjugate woman--to put her perception of relations literally out of business, before the competitive system, the profit system, the system of exclusive ownership of the necessaries of life could be established. No wonder the capitalists have cold fits about "feminism." It is organically opposed to their wild Utopian scheme of the private and exclusive ownership of the necessaries of life.
The age of masculinism has been an age of religious martyrdoms, of tribal and national wars for personal ends, and of sex enslavement. A little of woman's intuition would not have come amiss at any time during the last four or five thousand years. The perception and establishment of proper social and economic relations is the whole keynote of the Socialist philosophy.... Socialism proposes to reestablish the co-operative, the feminine system of production, with those improvements in process which men have been enabled to make by reason of their greater freedom and leisure.[21]
Parce's view has problems, however, which far transcend the paucity of historical evidence for any primordial matriarchy. Socialist women often asserted that women per se had no special aptitude for raising children; this underlay their argument that the professionalization of childcare would vastly benefit children as well as liberating women. Socialist women also pointed out that the biological functions of bearing and giving birth to a child were distinct from the social functions of nurturing and raising offspring. They demanded that men fulfill an equal share of childrearing tasks, a demand predicated on the man's ability to nurture children. Conger-Kaneko, for example, sardonically remarked that woman's chief function was not motherhood but maid service, the dirtiest and most dangerous paid occupation, which wives performed for free. Belle Oury similarly differentiated between motherhood and "the duties which have hitherto attended motherhood," including "the care of children." Elsa Untermann asked "will not the babe sleep as well if lulled to rest by its father, in a cradle earned by its mother, as vice versa?"[22]
Gender essentialism confronted other difficulties. Stern argued that women's pregnancy and nursing of children initially allowed men to enslave them; ironically, this located the source of woman's superior virtue at the very source of their oppression. Further, The Socialist Woman often claimed that much of woman's contemporary nature had resulted from her millennia of enslavement. This, however, opened the possibility that liberation might obliterate her alleged moral superiority. Socialist women often complained that women were socialized for dependence upon men and taught that pleasing men was their reason for being. In this reading, women's capacity for self-sacrifice, far from constituting her moral superiority, was instead her badge of slavery. Women were fixated on serving others because they lacked the power to attend to their own needs, and lived by proxy, through others. And indeed, slaves must cultivate an extremely sensitive "perception of relations" because their survival depends on divining and predicting the moods of their masters, while masters can with impunity remain indifferent to the feelings of their subordinates. One author said that men, physically stronger, assured their own intellectual development while stunting that of the women. "But life, which is more than intellect, was in the keeping of the woman--of the Race Mother. She had her silences.... Loving much, she learned the law of life.... She came to know that love is giving; that as love pours out in service, the deeper understanding pours in and widens and deepens the soul."[23] To what extent, therefore, were women's altruistic, nurturing qualities the result of enslavement and of forcible reduction to objects for serving the passions and needs of others? Conger-Kaneko unwittingly raised just this issue in her breathless apotheosis of the latent powers of women:
The mind of the woman, the emotions, the sentiments, which are the outgrowth of untold ages of experience, ages in which suffering such as none but enslaved women know, ages of submission, of bending the will to necessity, of discipline and self-abnegation, of love and devotion to child and mate, this mind, with its basis in material experience, is rich beyond all our dreams, is worthy beyond our highest ambitions, and will color and accelerate the social life into which it is one day cast, free from every bondage, to the end that heights of civilization are made possible which could never come save through the freeing of womankind.[24]
What would become, in a free society, of the qualities forged in slavery?
Although Conger-Kaneko asked this question on one occasion, she provided no definite answer. Conger-Kaneko asserted that woman's chastity, gentleness, patience, fortitude, and tact had "been grounded into her until they have become a part of her, and are called 'feminine virtues.'" For this women "paid the price in blood and tears and agony." Civilization was founded upon her subjugation as well as upon private property. "But the question has been raised," she said, "as to what her character will become once she is allowed freedom again, is given full social rights with man." Some believed that woman will discard "all her acquired virtue and modesty, and precipitate a return to the swamp age"; others averred that "if woman carries the results of her age-long discipline into the wider social sphere" she would cleanse society of its evils. Conger-Kaneko, however, pronounced no definitive judgment on this issue.[25]
Conger-Kaneko and Parce both pointed to the difference between girls' and boys' play and games as illuminating essential sex differences. Conger-Kaneko asserted that "the nature of woman is altruistic or social," as her play as a girl demonstrated. Her games were based on cooperation, unlike the competitive contests for mastery that characterized boys' games. Parce pointed out that the Boy Scouts trained boys for combat and war, while girls practiced the healing arts of nurses. Yet surely such games result from social conditioning, not genes. Braverman highlighted a prominent (and contradictory) aspect of the Socialist-feminist philosophy when he complained that boys and girls were differently socialized for their respective adult roles. They were dressed differently, given different toys, and taught different standards of conduct, all long before the hapless children were aware of what was being done to them, and long before any alleged biological sex traits could manifest themselves.[26]
The apotheosis of women's special virtues raised yet other problems. Opponents of feminism argued that woman's superior virtue would be polluted by female participation in political and economic life. According to this view, woman's special nature suited her to preside over the home, the bastion of morality and nurture. The Socialist woman countered this with their argument for social motherhood. Conger-Kaneko also asserted that women "will not become unsexed, because sex is so intricately woven into the fibre of our lives that the performance of certain mental and physical duties cannot eradicate it." Furthermore, "there is no sex in industry, science and art.... Labor is sexless, and, through the intervention of science can be adjusted to the powers of men, women, and children."[27] When Socialism placed the industries under democratic control, the workers would provide creative, productive work for all.
Most Socialist women, therefore, argued not for an androgynous society where sexual roles and identities blended, but for a society which cultivated the distinctive gender identities of both sexes and arrived at a fruitful and harmonious balance between the two. Criticizing Charlotte Perkins Gilman for allegedly preaching the identity of the sexes, Conger-Kaneko replied that "we do not see the necessity of wiping out sex lines, sex differences, in men and women, in order to gain our goal. Why not bring our various contributions, the results of our maleness and femaleness, chastened and perfected in their own way, to the common cause?" Workers "will go on being men and women forever.... It is not less femaleness we want. It is femaleness undebased." Many other Socialist women joined the chorus for a balanced society combining the distinctive excellences of both sexes. Stern averred that the "competitive and combative qualities are pre-eminently male. Creative and protective qualities are pre-eminently female. True progress necessitates a blending of the male and female qualities." Malkiel also spoke of "the existing complementary qualities of both sexes which are absolutely necessary to bring about a perfect state of society."[28]
In practice, however, the Socialist women accorded female qualities a far higher moral and intellectual status than those of the male. Parce, who occasionally made perfunctory references to the ideal of balance, also asserted that "for thousands of years man has devastated the earth and drenched it in blood to further [his] exploitation.... Isn't it time for women to begin to defend their work and their way of doing it?.... Women may well take pride in doing their work in a woman's way." Braverman unintentionally highlighted this paradox when he stated that "the violent social conditions today are the results of one-half the human race, with one-half its wisdom and hardly any of its moral power," managing affairs.[29] But if women, despite their subordination, retained so much wisdom and virtue, what role would men retain in a just world? This point attains even greater urgency because the Socialist women repeatedly asserted that women were more practical, as well as more nurturing, than men; while men wasted their time in idle theoretical debates, women performed the work of the world--and of the Socialist party.
The Socialist Woman's account of the origins of male and female natures undermined any optimistic belief that men could learn women's ways. While women's observed "inferior" qualities could plausibly result from her long enslavement, male brutality and violence could not have resulted from the social conditioning of their role as masters, for Socialist women asserted that men had long ago overthrown the benevolent, nurturing matriarchal state for the very purpose of fastening exploitation and war upon society. Men's unsocial, competitive, exploitative nature, therefore, was biological and innate; it could not be eradicated by any amount of social conditioning.
The Socialist women believed that all worthwhile male qualities already existed in women, awaiting the opportunity for full self-expression; whether the worthwhile feminine qualities existed, or could evolve, within men, was a more dubious prospect. And indeed, the Socialist women expected no such transformation of men; they claimed that men, while learning from women, would retain their age-old qualities in the new society, even as women would partake of male rationality and expertise while retaining and even strengthening their distinctive virtues. Parce proclaimed as much not in The Socialist Woman (where few men would her statement) but in The International Socialist Review. Criticizing "the dominant mental attitude of man" as lusting after wealth and power, Parce said that "Whether the male mind in general will ever adopt feminine standards and aims sufficiently to establish society on the feminine principles may be doubted." But a liberated female mind would definitely express the innate nurturing qualities of women's nature.[30] Socialist men, reading such pronouncements, may well have doubted their role in any Socialist-feminist society. And indeed, Socialist-feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman dispensed with men in her utopian feminist novel, Herland.[31]
The Socialist Woman confronted another perplexing question aside from that of gender essentialism: how could women could attain equality or pre-eminence, given the total male control over the economic, political, ideological, and military forces of society? Utilizing a traditional Socialist claim, Socialist women averred that historical evolution was on their side: the competitive, aggressive virtues which had built modern industrial capitalism were increasingly self-destructive, and destined for replacement by the social, cooperative virtues. Yet Socialist doctrine posited the class struggle as the mechanism of historical evolution; the working class, which vastly outnumbered the capitalists and performed all of society's work, would recognize their oppression, unite as a class, and overthrow capitalism. Male workers also filled the ranks of the army, militia, and police. Socialist women could make no similar claims for women. They only slightly outnumbered men and were still mostly isolated in the home (a condition which undermined gender solidarity); they occupied a less strategic place than men in the large industrial complexes which dominated the economy; and they were almost totally excluded from the exercise of military and police power. They were also mostly disfranchised. Women, therefore, lacked the economic, political, and military power of the male working class. Further, it was unclear how the feminine virtues of peace, nurture, and concern for others could triumph over male militarism, brutality, and selfishness. It appeared that women, unlike the working class, could attain equality, in society or even in the Socialist party, only with the consent of their oppressors, who monopolized all loci of power. The sex struggle, unlike the class struggle, could end only with the consent of the oppressor, for whom exploitation seemed a genetic imperative.
This dilemma was sharpened because most Socialists deeply suspected claims that altruism could significantly influence the course of history. Reliance on moral suasion contradicted the centrality of the class struggle and implied that a transclass alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie could inaugurate Socialism. The SP based its ideology upon the bedrock of the class struggle, and demanded that each applicant for membership sign a profession of belief in the class struggle.[32] This was the only doctrinal statement exacted from prospective recruits. Even when, as a result of the controversy with the IWW, the SP proscribed public advocacy of sabotage, violence, or illegal methods as a mechanism of working-class liberation, it did not require that new members expressedly repudiate such tactics. Any belief in altruism as a meaningful social force, therefore, was anathema to central, defining SP ideology, as well as to the Socialist women's emphasis upon women's self-liberation.
Tactically, the SP rigorously eschewed any transclass alliances with middle-class reformers (such as the Progressive party) and vociferously repudiated even the slightest hint of a Labor Party incorporating the AFL, bourgeois reformers, and other non-Socialists. Yet The Socialist Woman not only demanded a transclass gender alliance, but implied that women's altruistic nature, rather than male brutality and struggle, would inaugurate the new age. Indeed, the very concept of a "sex struggle" older than and more important than the class struggle obviously denigrated the importance of class and of the struggle against capitalism. Women, lacking the overwhelming numbers, strategic economic location, political power, and physical and military strength of the male working class, could win in no other way than by such a transclass gender alliance and an appeal to the better nature of their male opponents.
The Socialist women believed that the sex struggle, like the class struggle, must be waged on the ideological front as well as in the economic, political, and family arenas. Men, they asserted, had convinced women of their own inferiority by a process of hegemony directly paralleling that of the capitalists over their workers. Kaneko said that "woman has been miserably oppressed and subjugated by man through their ignorance and superstition, just as the worker has been oppressed and exploited by the capitalist." The Socialist Women of New York proclaimed that woman was "the slave of a slave.... by a thousand brands her slavery has marked her, but none so deeply as her meek acceptance of her condition--her failure to recognize her essential human dignity and to insist upon her rightful place in the human scheme."[33] Just as the objective conditions for Socialism already existed, and required only the will and intelligence of the workers for fruition, so the preconditions of women's freedom only required activation by the conscious awareness of the women themselves. This entailed women's rejection of the male standard of judgment and their formulation of new moral criteria by which to evaluate political, economic, and cultural institutions. Although many Socialist women demanded such a transvaluation of values, its most consistent and forceful advocate was Lida Parce.
Complaining that women were told to learn the ways of men (a key rationale for the existence of The Socialist Woman and the Women's National Committee), Parce asserted that "there seems to be some question of late whether the best methods have yet been found." When the best methods were discovered, "it is quite probable that woman's ways will have some part in them. About half, perhaps." Yet men, even Socialist men, disdained women's qualities and denied that women could make any distinctive social contribution, other than by abandoning their own values and assimilating those of the masculine world. As an example, Parce described a talk with a stalwart Socialist man. "There was no limit to the generosity of this man toward woman. He was willing that woman should be just like men. Certainly a man could have no greater generosity than that. He was very earnest about it. I asked him if he was willing that men should be like women. But he could not take this suggestion seriously. He laughed at it heartily. Too heartily, in fact." Parce asserted that women must demand their liberty "not to use as men use their liberty, but to use as they see fit. Not to adopt 'man's methods,' but to help in working out a human method of doing the world's work and conserving the human race." Socialist women often pointed out that male workers had not used their ballots for their class liberation, and promised that enfranchised women, more disinterested and nurturing, would improve upon this dismal performance. Parce also lamented that the McNamara brothers, in bombing the Los Angeles Times Building, had resorted to the archetypical male methods of violence, and therefore forfeited Socialist victory in the Los Angeles mayoralty campaign of 1911. Women's claim that their work was as valuable as man's was therefore demeaning, for women's work and values were actually far superior. Throughout history woman had performed the constructive tasks, while man had specialized in war and competition. Woman had clothed the race, but man had only taken up the loom and mill when they became instruments of class exploitation. "For thousands of years man has devastated the earth and drenched it in blood to further [his] exploitation.... Isn't it time for women to begin to defend their work and their way of doing it?.... Women may well take pride in doing their work in a woman's way."[34]
Parce believed that even talk of equality actually implied submission to male hegemony. She denounced the shibboleths of companionate marriage and the terms "partner" and "helpmeet," which she equated with servitude. Such talk "still keeps the wife in a position subordinate to her husband, doing tasks for him, under his control." A free, self-supporting woman "will not be a partner nor yet an equal; but she will be an independent individual in marriage, just as she will out of marriage. For after all an equal submits to being judged by the standard of someone else; and why be measured by someone else?" In the future, women and men would not be partners, but "simply comrades and lovers."[35]
All in all, the Socialist women's emphasis on and call for a sex struggle must have alienated Socialist men. Their advocacy of a trans-class alliance of women based upon the common problems of an oppressed sex, their related belief that sex was as important as class and not explicable in class terms, their claims for the innate superiority of women, their demands for women's economic independence from their husbands as well as from the capitalists, all ran athwart the orthodox Marxist doctrines so cherished by the men. The Socialist women did not intentionally repudiate or reformulate received wisdom; rather, their enterprise of gender liberation ineluctably required such creative refashioning of traditional Marxist ideas. However, the Socialist women found that no amount of conciliatory language could reconcile culturally conservative men to genuine female equality. The Socialist women discerned no escape from a dilemma so impossible they scarcely acknowledged its existence, even to themselves.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] JCK, "Why The Socialist Woman Demands Universal Suffrage," SW March 1908; JCK, "What Women Can Do," SW September 1908; Walden, "Woman's Slavery," SW September 1907; Stern, "A Word to Our Comrades at the National Convention," SW May 1908; Debs, "Woman's Day is Dawning," PW February 1911; Debs, "Woman's Place in Politics," PW September 1912. For other Debs articles, see Debs, "Enfranchisement of Womanhood," PW March 1909 and Debs, "Woman: Comrade and Equal," SW November 1909. In the latter article Debs, contrary to his usual views, averred that man would lift up women and make them his equal.
[2] Whitehead, "What About Woman's Suffrage," PW April 1910; Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW June 1910; Bebel, cited by JCK in "Must Woman Emancipate Herself?," PW February 1912 (The exact quote is in August Bebel, Woman Under Socialism (Schocken, NY, 1971) p. 121: "Women should expect as little help from the men as workingmen do from the capitalist class." Malkiel, "Woman and the Socialist Party," SW May 1908; Stern, "A Word to Our Comrades at the National Convention," SW May 1908.
[3] Wilson, "The Woman's Movement," SW July 1908; JCK, "Must Woman Emancipate Herself?," PW February 1912.
[4] Parce, "What a Man Should Learn of a Bachelor Woman," PW February 1912.
[5] JCK, "Socialism and the Sex War," PW August 1909.
[6] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW July 1909.
[7] JCK, "Women and Class Consciousness," SW June 1908; Edith Van Eden, "The Women at the Window," PW April 1913; Stern, "Social Extremes Cause Intemperance," SW December 1908.
[8] Martha Porter, "Club Women: Our Need of Them," PW April 1909; Downing, "A Plea to Club Women," SW August 1908.
[9] Brown, "The New Federation of Women," SW, July 1908.
[10] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW February and March 1910.
[11] Josephine Cole, "The International and Woman Suffrage," SW, November 1907. The Stuttgart resolution was quoted in "Women and the International," SW October 1907. Corinne Brown, in "Votes for Women," SW February 1908, also said that the International had "exceeded its privilege" and could not dictate how or with whom women "shall work for their own enfranchisement."
[12] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW March 1910.
[13] Lewis, "The Woman Suffrage Movement," PW March 1911.
[14] Rolla Myer, "Bok's Paper vs. Women," PW February 1911; Myer, "Where Women Vote," PW January 1911; "To Our Readers," SW August 1907; "Books of Interest to Women," SW September 1907; Parce, "Woman's Place in Politics: Its Basis, III," PW February 1912; JCK, "Action of Woman's Congress," PW October 1910. "Illinois and the Woman Voter," PW August 1913 noted that women had won many reforms by social activism, before they possessed the vote.
[15] JCK, "Action of Woman's Congress," PW October 1910.
[16] JCK, "Action of the Woman's Congress," PW October 1910.
[17] Parce, "Woman's Place in Politics, III," PW March 1912.
[18] Untermann, "Must Woman Fight Her Own Battles?," PW October 1913.
[19] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW December 1909; Parce, "Woman's Place in Politics--Its Basis, III," PW January 1912; JCK, "The Mother Principle," SW October 1908.
[20] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW November 1910; JCK "Forget It," PW July 1909.
[21] Parce, "Women and the Socialist Philosophy," PW September 1909, reprinted from International Socialist Review, August 1909, pp. 125-128. Parce's phrase 'perception of relations' is Lester Ward's definition of intuition, which Cohen had not precisely defined. In installment VII of his "Socialism for Students," serialized in the ISR, Cohen had claimed that "The impulse below intellect is intuition, which is developed further in many animals than in man.... And because woman is nearer to the lower forms than man, intuition is more deeply seated in the female of the race, enabling her to peremptorily pass judgments that the male arrives at only after laborious thought."
Parce ("The Examiner's Glass" SW, July 1909) and JCK (Forget It, SW, July 1909) had briefly criticized Cohen's article.
[22] JCK, "The Unrest of Women: A Reply," PW October 1913; Oury, "Woman's Relation to Society," PW June 1910; Untermann, "Josephine Daskam Bacon, Reactionist," PW February 1910.
[23] NONQUOTE STERN, PREG, NURSING ALLOWS MEN TO ENSLAVE WOMEN; C. B. Hoffman, "The Race Mother," PW September 1912.
[24] JCK, "The Progressive Woman Off the Track," PW May 1912.
[25] "Are Women Better Than Men," PW, April 1909. This unsigned article ended in doubt and in a remarkably unusual (for a self-styled scientific Socialist) invocation of Fate. "Are women better than men? It all depends on the times, and the disposition that Fate wishes to make of them. Today the scales seem to be turning in the woman's favor."
[26] JCK, "Woman and Socialism," PW August 1911; Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW November 1910; cf Mrs. J.F. Kietner, "Universal Scouts of Freedom," PW November 1911; Barnet, "Things in the Making," PW October 1913.
[27] "The Progressive Woman off the Track," PW May 1912.
[28] JCK, "The Progressive Woman Off the Track," PW May 1912; Stern, in "Symposium of New York Women on Suffrage," PW March 1910; Malkiel, in, "Which is Better, the Women Suffrage Movement or the Socialist Party?," PW June 1910. The author of an anthology of Gilman's writings claims that JCK misinterpreted Gilman here.
[29] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW September 1910; Braverman, "The Common Aim of Socialism and Feminism," CN March 1914.
[30] Lida Parce, "The Relation of Socialism to the Woman Question," ISR, November 1909.
[31] CPG, Herland, -----. Gilman described a women-only utopia (procreation was achieved without men) in which women competently performed every necessary social function. She did reintroduce men as the novel's end, however, as interesting diversions for the women.
[32] Mila Tupper Maynard, "The Socialist Program," PW October 1909.
[33] Kaneko, "Letters to My Sisters in Japan," SW September 1908; "Preamble to the Constitution of the SWS of New York," PW August 1909.
[34] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW July 1909, January 1912, and September 1910.
[35] Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW August 1910.
Conger-Kaneko cited Bebel, Kautsky, Darwin, Engels, and Spencer in support of her contention that a "sex war" had always existed. She insisted that the time had arrived "for Socialist women to come out not only as a class, but as a sex also, and make themselves known as positive advocates for both sex and class freedom." May Walden similarly complained that "Woman is doubly a slave. First to industrial conditions, and second to man." Stern agreed that "as surely as there is a class struggle, there is also a sex struggle" and that woman was "doubly exploited--as a worker and as a woman." This sentiment contravened the orthodox Socialist belief that all oppressions resolved into issues of class, and that other exploited groups, such as blacks and women, had no special grievances. Conger-Kaneko and her comrades did not ignore or downplay the class struggle; they merely insisted that women wage the "sex struggle" simultaneously and in conjunction with the it. In this they disagreed even with Eugene Debs, a frequent contributor to The Socialist Woman. Debs somewhat inconsistently acknowledged the special disabilities of the female sex and asserted that only self-activity could liberate women, but usually ended his articles with homilies dissolving gender oppressions into those of class.[1]
According to the Socialist women, however, patriarchy was not reducible to capitalism. As Whitehead said, woman must struggle "against the autocracy of man, as well as against the autocracy of capital." Parce, scornful of men who complained that women were stirring up sex hostility, concluded that "men are so sex-conscious that there is no reason to expect that they will modify laws that give them any advantage over women no matter how despicable." Conger-Kaneko cited Bebel, the doyen of German Social Democracy, as making the same point; according to Bebel's seminal Woman Under Socialism, women had as little to hope for from men as did workmen from the middle classes. Malkiel agreed that women could not rely on men for their deliverance because men were too selfish and were themselves unfree. "Man through his blindness will not see that he cannot be free as long as woman is dependent," she said. Stern, in a statement closely paralleling that which Socialists often made about class, said that women were "not citizens of a republic, but subjects to a government of men."[2]
The Socialist women, therefore, recognized that they would fight for their liberation mostly alone. Yet they asked for the support of Socialist men because the international Socialist movement had always supported, at least in theory, full rights for women. Moreover, as the Socialist women never tired of repeating, the labor movement and the working-class struggle stemmed from the same basic causes, and were natural allies. As a practical matter, the Socialist women could make an impact in and through the Socialist party only if they convinced a significant number of Socialist men that their cause was worth supporting.
The Socialist women also asserted that women, as any oppressed class, must emancipate themselves; they could not win genuine freedom as a gift from a superior group. That they fought their hard battle largely alone was, therefore, in some sense an advantage. Wilson averred, again in terms familiar to Socialists, that "just as the wage slave cannot be freed, but must of himself attain to freedom, so must women come into her larger life of social and political equality through her own efforts." Conger-Kaneko was even more explicit. Referring to Socialist men whose utopia consisted of a male breadwinner supporting a house-bound wife, she compared the efforts of men in the cause of women with those of the liberal bourgeoisie in favor of the working class. In either case, she disdained charity from the class or sex enemy. Reforms "may be made by men which will alleviate the physical condition of women, political rights may be thrust upon them, by the sex that has held them in bondage for so long, but these would not mean to women what self-emancipation would mean." Women who did not recognize their slavery and overthrow it could not wisely use their freedom. Male socialism "might bring to woman ease and comfort, but not necessarily an awakened social consciousness.... Robbed by the factory of her old-time home employment, and unawakened to political and civic issues, woman would be reduced to a luxury, dependent through her sex upon the whims of men for support."[3]
The Socialist women contravened Marxist doctrine when they asserted that contemporary women could attain independence by earning their own living. This implied a definition of autonomy focused on freedom from men, particularly husbands, rather than from capitalists. It implicitly privileged the sex struggle over that of class. Parce asserted that women had an advantage over men in that they were accustomed to caring for themselves and others; any woman who found renumerative work could live on her own. A man had greater difficulty doing this. To succeed, "he will have to take to the simple life and learn to wait on himself, for one thing." If he learned to make coffee and sew on buttons, "which he can if he is very, very clever, he will know the joys and dignity, not of mastery, but of independence. After which he will be worthy to marry one of the bachelor women above described.... Then the mutual helpfulness of the home will be given and accepted as courtesy, not as duty or as service."[4]
Conger-Kaneko compared the "sex struggle" to the class struggle in another way. Many critics routinely blamed the Socialist party for fomenting social upheaval and class hatred. Party theorists and publicists replied that the SP was not responsible for these phenomena, but merely recognized their existence; capitalism generated the class struggle and the concomitant dislocations of traditional lifestyles and values. The SP, far from causing these evils, offered the only possible solution: the democratic control of the means of production by the workers and the abolition of class society. The IWW adapted this argument when propounding its version of revolutionary industrial unionism, and Conger-Kaneko similarly used it to bolster Socialist feminism. She warned the SP:
So vital, so fundamental is woman's place in the grand scheme of things that for her to move, or readjust her position even in the slightest, is to threaten the very foundations upon which our social structure is built. And because this is a fact, some of our otherwise revolutionists religiously refrain from all mention of the sex struggle for fear the movement will be saddled with having caused it. The bugaboo of "breaking up the home" is fraught with intense terror to some who merely smile at the accusation of breaking up the government. And since woman is the pivot of the home, they are willing to relegate to her the adjusting of her own affairs, and the fighting of her own battles....
So the sex struggle is here. If it is too big for the Socialist movement, then it will be settled outside the movement. But having an economic basis, the Socialist movement is the legitimate place for its discussion, and it should not be left to outsiders. It is not a matter of foisting it upon the movement. It is a matter of the movement recognizing and explaining it, as it recognizes and explains the class struggle. If it has a deeper significance than the class struggle, we needn't be afraid of that. The moment we become afraid of any social phenomena, that moment we begin to lose our power, and another stronger than we will come after us, and will oust us from our place as revolutionary leaders.[5]
In a similar passage, Parce enlisted science in the cause of women as well as of Socialism. Science was dissolving "our most cherished dreams, our most sacred institutions, our most solemn trivialities.... No loyal Socialist will claim for the Socialist party or any members of it, responsibility for the evolutionary changes in the social structure."[6]
Many Socialist women, acting on these premises, advocated the forging of a transclass gender alliance of all women, from the respectable rich to the outcasts of the streets. The Socialist women boldly asserted that for women, class mattered less than sex. "Women are all women under this system, and they are all subject to its tyranny," Conger-Kaneko said. "The fact that a woman has a rich master does not make her any less a slave, either economically or sexually." Another writer asserted that the wives of professional men were menials "who must constantly perform servants' tasks, who cook and scrub and mend.... Is it not true that women as a sex are almost universally a servant class, a working class, economically, as well as politically, dependent?" Indeed, housework was so dirty, tiresome, unappreciated, and health-destroying that many women with a choice preferred a salaried job in industry. Meta Stern pointed out that the wife of a rich man suffered from the drunkenness and dissipation of their husbands just as poor women did because "immense wealth, with its idleness and self-indulgence, lead to intemperance" as surely as did poverty. The wife of a rich man was property as surely as the wife of a poor one. "Her womanhood was wrecked by him whom she called husband. Either she was living a life of outward glamour and inward despair, or she was cold and depraved like her environment, and continued to live with the man, though she loathed him, for his gold."[7]
Most Socialist women, therefore, believed that they could win bourgeois women for their cause. Club women, bourgeois to the core, were praised for their social consciousness and earnestness; if they were not yet Socialists, that was because Socialists had not yet reached them with "the deeper truth about things." Downing wrote an eloquent "Plea to Club Women," urging that they could not escape the evils of the world by vapid self-cultivation. Referring to characters in Harriet Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Downing said that Elizas were still separated from their children, Legrees yet claimed their victims. She told club women:
You have cultivated a literature that deals with pleasanter themes--you are devoted to an art which gives you quiet beauty for contemplation, but despite all this your soul is not serene.... [Your compositions] though they have cost you much pains, have some way left you without the joys of having created.... They have neither added to the sum of human knowledge nor sought to apply knowledge already found to any real human need.... The unrest in your soul is but the reflection of the discord and pain in the world.... You cannot pass over them and find happiness outside of them.[8]
Taking a somewhat different approach, Corinne Brown said that the women's clubs had bogged down in endless meetings and reports. "This club movement is dead," she claimed, and "must be superseded by something more intellectual in scope, wide a wider human interest." Socialist women could organize such a revivified women's club movement, and use it as a springboard from which they would revolutionize society. Brown said that "the woman who drudges the hardest, who is oppressed and brow-beaten by her employer of her husband, the woman who suffers the most at the hands of society, is the woman to whom the message of Socialism must be taken. Its worth is measured by the depths it reaches. It must reach down to the most unfortunate black baby girl in benighted Georgia... or it is worth nothing."[9]
And indeed some elite women did involve themselves in social reform, settlement work, or even support of striking workers. Unlike IWW leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Parce adduced the 1909 Shirtwaist strike as "a splendid example of sex-class solidarity" because rich women in the Women's Trade Union League aided the strikers, even bailing them out of jail. Parce admitted that the Socialists maintained a low profile during the strike lest they alienate public opinion, while the deeds of the rich garnered headlines. "This was undoubtedly a necessary precaution," she argued. "The public flocked to follow the wealthy women where it would have been inexpressibly shocked to discover a wicked socialist. However, the support of this same public helped to win the strike and that was what the Socialist women wanted. Thus a combination of the class struggle and the sex struggle won the day."[10] As described above, Parce similarly argued that Socialists should actively cooperate with the bourgeois suffrage movement for the same reason it allied with the anti-Socialist AFL: to achieve goals the two movements shared in common.
Parce elided a key distinction, however. The AFL was arguably a working-class organization; in aiding it, the Socialists allied with their class allies against the capitalists. According to Socialist theory, members of the AFL were a natural SP constituency, held back only by timidity or ignorance; when Socialists taught them the truth, in large part by their example in fighting for labor's cause, AFL workers would flock to the party of their class. The aims of the bourgeois suffragists, however, could never coincide for long with those of their class enemies, the workers; their opposition to Socialism stemmed not from ignorance but from a correct understanding of their class interests. Bourgeois women could not be "natural socialists" in any significance sense, however much they pursued their own interests as a sex.
Illustrating the difficulties of a women's alliance across class lines, a decree of the Socialist International concerning such alliances also discomfited the Socialist women. The 1907 International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart had mandated that Socialist women found their own suffrage movement rather than cooperating with bourgeois organizations. This resolution resulted from a European situation irrelevant in the United States: many bourgeois European feminists from nations which had a property requirement for voting sought not a universal franchise, but suffrage for women on the same terms as it existed for men. Because this excluded most workers, the Socialist International demanded that its members push for universal suffrage for women and men, even if this temporarily postponed equal suffrage for women. In the United States, however, almost no one advocated a class-based suffrage (although NAWSA despicably compromised with advocates of a race-based suffrage in the South).
Socialist women often debated the Stuttgart resolution, which was, according to the rules of the International, binding on its member parties. Josephine Cole bitterly criticized the Stuttgart resolution for its weasel-worded escape clause, which did not demand immediate action on woman's suffrage, but rather stated that each member party could defer such agitation until it thought it proper. Cole denied that the International's resolutions bound member parties, and claimed that they were merely advisory. She recommended that Socialist women in the United States violate the Stuttgart resolution, enter the mainstream suffrage movement "in such numbers and with such good will and intelligence that they will conquer and control the movement, lead it into new paths," and refashion it into "a working-class movement." Women should no more wait for the ballot until the advent of Socialism as unions should defer the eight-hour day until Socialism's victory. She concluded, "'If this be treason, make the most of it.'"[11] Similarly, just as New York Socialists had cooperated with bourgeois women in the Shirtwaist strike, so Socialist women in Oklahoma violated the Stuttgart decree. Parce exulted that "now we have twice cooperated, and the Stuttgart resolution is smashed and we have violated party discipline."[12] Parce, and other Socialist women, argued that conditions differed so much from country to country that the Socialist International could not reasonably dictate rules binding on all.
Lena Morrow Lewis, sometimes considered an intransigent opponent of any special consideration for women's issues, agreed with Parce. Limited suffrage in Europe was not a class ploy, she asserted; the suffragists were ignorant of class issues. "They do not seek a limited franchise in order to discriminate against other women, but only for the purpose of breaking down the barriers that are based wholly on sex.... The American Woman Suffrage association is not a class movement, it is a woman's movement.... The social problem of today is a complicated one. Let us be sure that we include every factor necessary to its solution. The woman movement, the class struggle, the awakening of a social consciousness, all these are factors in the establishing of a new social system." Although women naturally focused on winning the vote, Lewis confidently predicted that they would fragment into their respective class parties once they secured it. This could only benefit the cause of Socialism. In the meantime, however, Socialists must energetically seek women's full rights.[13]
Socialist opponents of women's suffrage claimed that women, like men, voted on class rather than sex lines, and that women had won no benefits in the suffrage states. The Socialist Woman spent considerable time debunking this argument. It variously claimed that women were vastly outnumbered in the few sparsely-populated Western states that had granted them suffrage; that non-suffrage states, anxious to stem the tide of suffragism, made important concessions to defuse agitation for the vote; and that voting was virtually meaningless without control of the means of production. But on the whole The Socialist Woman, as described above, touted the immense benefits women had won for themselves and the population at large in the states where they voted. Conger-Kaneko acknowledged that women, like men, voted their class interests (or those of their masters) when class issues were at stake, but claimed that "they also stand together on sex lines, irrespective of class, when a particular issue regarding women and children comes up."[14]
Conger-Kaneko echoed Parce and Lewis in her evaluation of the suffrage movement as a transclass women's insurgency.
To the student of history the woman's movement must appeal as something more than a bourgeois movement. It is the movement of a class of people longer and more abjectly oppressed than any other on the face of the earth. It is the serious struggle of a sex for the attainment of natural and legal rights. In the woman's movement there is the realization that every woman, from the highest to the lowest, suffers in common this thing--disinheritance. Disinheritance from the best things of life.... Forcibly enslaved, forcibly debauched, forcibly weakened until threatened with unfitness both mentally and physically, bound down by every law conceivable to the mind of man for holding her in the place he has made for her; the butt of prejudice, of superstition, of scorn, of passions and infidelities; bearing meanwhile the world's people in her body.... And not only for the woman, but also for the child, does the woman's movement stand. And through the child, for the race.[15]
Like Parce, Conger-Kaneko said that the women's movement was "a movement of an oppressed class towards political and sex freedom" and that "not until it has gained that freedom can it very well divide along economic class lines. Individual members of the movement may be class conscious in individual relations. But not the movement itself."[16] The policy of the Socialist International, demanding as it did a distinctly Socialist and class-conscious suffrage movement, therefore ran athwart the necessities of history.
The Socialist Woman not only proclaimed the sex struggle and the necessity of a transclass alliance of women, but also asserted that women were intrinsically different from and superior to men. This idea had become common among bourgeois feminists, supplementing or replacing the earlier feminist claims of the essential identity of the sexes. However, it presented special organizational and doctrinal problems for a Socialist version of feminism.
The Socialist women often asserted that gender roles were socially rather than biologically constructed: women, socialized differently from men and encountering unique experiences, developed the qualities appropriate for a house-bound, servile class whose survival depended on attracting men. The Socialist Woman justified its own existence and that of the Woman's National Committee on the basis of this man-made difference: women, currently less rational, socially aware, and class conscious than men, required a separate appeal to their distinct sensibilities, issues, and interests. Qualities which the Socialist women considered antithetical to full personhood for women and which obstructed their conversion to Socialism--their frivolity, obsession with their sexuality, and individualistic fixation on their own children--stemmed from the oppression of women. Her male-imposed isolation in the home, starvation wages, enforced economic dependence, and the immense force of man-made religion, custom, and law all warped her and stunted her natural growth. Woman's contemporary nature, then, was the unnatural result of an enormous apparatus of oppression and of an assiduous and unrelenting effort that bound and constrained her at every turn. The development of capitalism and the forced march of women into the industrial maelstrom had lessened the differences between the sexes; Socialism would completely obliterate them. The need for a separate appeal to women, and a separate institutional structure catering to their specific needs, would evaporate when the advance of capitalism and, ultimately, the triumph of Socialism, rendered the experiences of both sexes identical.
But The Socialist Woman, in a paradox it shared with the mainstream suffrage movement, simultaneously proclaimed women's essential difference. Conger-Kaneko and Parce, in particular, posited an original matriarchy, based on production for use rather than profit, when women had founded civilization by creating agriculture and the crafts. Household production for use was, Parce exclaimed, "a system in accordance with the woman nature; a practical, sober, workable scheme. But men were not satisfied with this way," which did not allow exploitation, so they replaced joyous, communal production for the satisfaction of human needs with production for profit. Men enslaved and debased women, "ground [children] into dividends", reduced people from ends to means, and instituted profit and war.[17]
The Socialist women sometimes located this sexual difference in woman's role as mother. Helen Untermann maintained that "the psychology of woman is different from that of man because the function of each is different. Woman carries life, and bears life, while the function of man is merely that of fertilization.... It is this difference which accounts for the individualistic nature of man and the communistic nature of woman.... If fertilization has taken root, her life is at once inseparably connected with the life of another. This creates a bond of mutuality in physical feeling of which man has no connection. The desire to protect life, to do for it, becomes so ingrained into woman's nature that it affects her whole psychic being."[18]
In a subtle yet important difference in emphasis, Parce stressed woman's role as caregiver, as child rearer as well as bearer. "The scientists tell us that the nature of woman is altruistic. They say it was her function of motherhood, and of the protector of the young, that formed and fixed her mental traits.... In the essence of her nature, then, women are opposed to the present system." On another occasion she said that the mother-child relationship was "one of complete reciprocity and because all mothers have always been in this position toward children, ever since there were mothers, the habit of the woman mind and the woman attitude have been formed by this experience.... The readiness of the mother to act in this way toward the child has stamped itself upon her very constitution." This reciprocity "expresses itself in all the other relations of life," including those in which "the productive work of the world is carried on.... Man does not have the same relation with any one that the mother has with the child. He does not have the same training that the mother does, and so he never forms the same habit of being ready to respond to human needs that she forms.... Fighting has formed the attitude of the male mind," and man is always ready to fight "to get something for himself" and "to get the better of every transaction he enters into." This has caused misunderstandings between the sexes and "infinite anguish to woman, since human life began." Conger-Kaneko added that women protected babies and infants not only against the ravages of nature, but against predatory males; women nurtured what "male nature--inanimate nature--so unhesitatingly destroys."[19]
Women created not only civilization, many Socialist women asserted, but human society itself. Women were the original sex; men evolved as an afterthought, as providers of genetic diversity for the race and sex interest for women. In other species, the male preened himself to attract the female; only humans perverted this natural order. The male was the derivative, exclusively "sex creature" who learned what rudiments of civilization he assimilated from women. "When nature first invented the male animal, his only occupation in life and reason for being was competition for the female," Parce claimed. Conger-Kaneko, turning the tables on men, similarly proclaimed that "the mother-creature existed before the inauguration of sex, while the male came in later purely and simply as a sex function, and had no other place in nature for aeons of time. So if there is a distinctly 'sex' creature in the human race, it is the man. But we are willing to forget it, if the woman can be given a rest on the subject."[20] Men, the Socialist women claimed, joined human society only when they belatedly learned that they participated in the begetting of children.
Parce, responding to an article in the International Socialist Review by conservative Socialist Joseph Cohen, turned the traditional, patriarchal evaluations of male and female capacities on its head and summarized the historical, ethical, and political case for Socialist feminism.
What we are pleased, somewhat whimsically, to call civilization has been a distinctly masculine affair. It has been singularly deficient in the "perception of relations." Means have been considered of more importance than the end; the symbol more important than the fact. The external has been more important than the internal, the artificial than the real. Man has thought that ways of doing things were of more importance than the people who do them. He has thought that property is more valuable than life, that capital is of more importance than labor. The capitalist system is the masculine system of production.
The prehistoric system, the feminine system of production was co-operative. It was an expression of woman's "perception of relations." It was necessary to subjugate woman--to put her perception of relations literally out of business, before the competitive system, the profit system, the system of exclusive ownership of the necessaries of life could be established. No wonder the capitalists have cold fits about "feminism." It is organically opposed to their wild Utopian scheme of the private and exclusive ownership of the necessaries of life.
The age of masculinism has been an age of religious martyrdoms, of tribal and national wars for personal ends, and of sex enslavement. A little of woman's intuition would not have come amiss at any time during the last four or five thousand years. The perception and establishment of proper social and economic relations is the whole keynote of the Socialist philosophy.... Socialism proposes to reestablish the co-operative, the feminine system of production, with those improvements in process which men have been enabled to make by reason of their greater freedom and leisure.[21]
Parce's view has problems, however, which far transcend the paucity of historical evidence for any primordial matriarchy. Socialist women often asserted that women per se had no special aptitude for raising children; this underlay their argument that the professionalization of childcare would vastly benefit children as well as liberating women. Socialist women also pointed out that the biological functions of bearing and giving birth to a child were distinct from the social functions of nurturing and raising offspring. They demanded that men fulfill an equal share of childrearing tasks, a demand predicated on the man's ability to nurture children. Conger-Kaneko, for example, sardonically remarked that woman's chief function was not motherhood but maid service, the dirtiest and most dangerous paid occupation, which wives performed for free. Belle Oury similarly differentiated between motherhood and "the duties which have hitherto attended motherhood," including "the care of children." Elsa Untermann asked "will not the babe sleep as well if lulled to rest by its father, in a cradle earned by its mother, as vice versa?"[22]
Gender essentialism confronted other difficulties. Stern argued that women's pregnancy and nursing of children initially allowed men to enslave them; ironically, this located the source of woman's superior virtue at the very source of their oppression. Further, The Socialist Woman often claimed that much of woman's contemporary nature had resulted from her millennia of enslavement. This, however, opened the possibility that liberation might obliterate her alleged moral superiority. Socialist women often complained that women were socialized for dependence upon men and taught that pleasing men was their reason for being. In this reading, women's capacity for self-sacrifice, far from constituting her moral superiority, was instead her badge of slavery. Women were fixated on serving others because they lacked the power to attend to their own needs, and lived by proxy, through others. And indeed, slaves must cultivate an extremely sensitive "perception of relations" because their survival depends on divining and predicting the moods of their masters, while masters can with impunity remain indifferent to the feelings of their subordinates. One author said that men, physically stronger, assured their own intellectual development while stunting that of the women. "But life, which is more than intellect, was in the keeping of the woman--of the Race Mother. She had her silences.... Loving much, she learned the law of life.... She came to know that love is giving; that as love pours out in service, the deeper understanding pours in and widens and deepens the soul."[23] To what extent, therefore, were women's altruistic, nurturing qualities the result of enslavement and of forcible reduction to objects for serving the passions and needs of others? Conger-Kaneko unwittingly raised just this issue in her breathless apotheosis of the latent powers of women:
The mind of the woman, the emotions, the sentiments, which are the outgrowth of untold ages of experience, ages in which suffering such as none but enslaved women know, ages of submission, of bending the will to necessity, of discipline and self-abnegation, of love and devotion to child and mate, this mind, with its basis in material experience, is rich beyond all our dreams, is worthy beyond our highest ambitions, and will color and accelerate the social life into which it is one day cast, free from every bondage, to the end that heights of civilization are made possible which could never come save through the freeing of womankind.[24]
What would become, in a free society, of the qualities forged in slavery?
Although Conger-Kaneko asked this question on one occasion, she provided no definite answer. Conger-Kaneko asserted that woman's chastity, gentleness, patience, fortitude, and tact had "been grounded into her until they have become a part of her, and are called 'feminine virtues.'" For this women "paid the price in blood and tears and agony." Civilization was founded upon her subjugation as well as upon private property. "But the question has been raised," she said, "as to what her character will become once she is allowed freedom again, is given full social rights with man." Some believed that woman will discard "all her acquired virtue and modesty, and precipitate a return to the swamp age"; others averred that "if woman carries the results of her age-long discipline into the wider social sphere" she would cleanse society of its evils. Conger-Kaneko, however, pronounced no definitive judgment on this issue.[25]
Conger-Kaneko and Parce both pointed to the difference between girls' and boys' play and games as illuminating essential sex differences. Conger-Kaneko asserted that "the nature of woman is altruistic or social," as her play as a girl demonstrated. Her games were based on cooperation, unlike the competitive contests for mastery that characterized boys' games. Parce pointed out that the Boy Scouts trained boys for combat and war, while girls practiced the healing arts of nurses. Yet surely such games result from social conditioning, not genes. Braverman highlighted a prominent (and contradictory) aspect of the Socialist-feminist philosophy when he complained that boys and girls were differently socialized for their respective adult roles. They were dressed differently, given different toys, and taught different standards of conduct, all long before the hapless children were aware of what was being done to them, and long before any alleged biological sex traits could manifest themselves.[26]
The apotheosis of women's special virtues raised yet other problems. Opponents of feminism argued that woman's superior virtue would be polluted by female participation in political and economic life. According to this view, woman's special nature suited her to preside over the home, the bastion of morality and nurture. The Socialist woman countered this with their argument for social motherhood. Conger-Kaneko also asserted that women "will not become unsexed, because sex is so intricately woven into the fibre of our lives that the performance of certain mental and physical duties cannot eradicate it." Furthermore, "there is no sex in industry, science and art.... Labor is sexless, and, through the intervention of science can be adjusted to the powers of men, women, and children."[27] When Socialism placed the industries under democratic control, the workers would provide creative, productive work for all.
Most Socialist women, therefore, argued not for an androgynous society where sexual roles and identities blended, but for a society which cultivated the distinctive gender identities of both sexes and arrived at a fruitful and harmonious balance between the two. Criticizing Charlotte Perkins Gilman for allegedly preaching the identity of the sexes, Conger-Kaneko replied that "we do not see the necessity of wiping out sex lines, sex differences, in men and women, in order to gain our goal. Why not bring our various contributions, the results of our maleness and femaleness, chastened and perfected in their own way, to the common cause?" Workers "will go on being men and women forever.... It is not less femaleness we want. It is femaleness undebased." Many other Socialist women joined the chorus for a balanced society combining the distinctive excellences of both sexes. Stern averred that the "competitive and combative qualities are pre-eminently male. Creative and protective qualities are pre-eminently female. True progress necessitates a blending of the male and female qualities." Malkiel also spoke of "the existing complementary qualities of both sexes which are absolutely necessary to bring about a perfect state of society."[28]
In practice, however, the Socialist women accorded female qualities a far higher moral and intellectual status than those of the male. Parce, who occasionally made perfunctory references to the ideal of balance, also asserted that "for thousands of years man has devastated the earth and drenched it in blood to further [his] exploitation.... Isn't it time for women to begin to defend their work and their way of doing it?.... Women may well take pride in doing their work in a woman's way." Braverman unintentionally highlighted this paradox when he stated that "the violent social conditions today are the results of one-half the human race, with one-half its wisdom and hardly any of its moral power," managing affairs.[29] But if women, despite their subordination, retained so much wisdom and virtue, what role would men retain in a just world? This point attains even greater urgency because the Socialist women repeatedly asserted that women were more practical, as well as more nurturing, than men; while men wasted their time in idle theoretical debates, women performed the work of the world--and of the Socialist party.
The Socialist Woman's account of the origins of male and female natures undermined any optimistic belief that men could learn women's ways. While women's observed "inferior" qualities could plausibly result from her long enslavement, male brutality and violence could not have resulted from the social conditioning of their role as masters, for Socialist women asserted that men had long ago overthrown the benevolent, nurturing matriarchal state for the very purpose of fastening exploitation and war upon society. Men's unsocial, competitive, exploitative nature, therefore, was biological and innate; it could not be eradicated by any amount of social conditioning.
The Socialist women believed that all worthwhile male qualities already existed in women, awaiting the opportunity for full self-expression; whether the worthwhile feminine qualities existed, or could evolve, within men, was a more dubious prospect. And indeed, the Socialist women expected no such transformation of men; they claimed that men, while learning from women, would retain their age-old qualities in the new society, even as women would partake of male rationality and expertise while retaining and even strengthening their distinctive virtues. Parce proclaimed as much not in The Socialist Woman (where few men would her statement) but in The International Socialist Review. Criticizing "the dominant mental attitude of man" as lusting after wealth and power, Parce said that "Whether the male mind in general will ever adopt feminine standards and aims sufficiently to establish society on the feminine principles may be doubted." But a liberated female mind would definitely express the innate nurturing qualities of women's nature.[30] Socialist men, reading such pronouncements, may well have doubted their role in any Socialist-feminist society. And indeed, Socialist-feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman dispensed with men in her utopian feminist novel, Herland.[31]
The Socialist Woman confronted another perplexing question aside from that of gender essentialism: how could women could attain equality or pre-eminence, given the total male control over the economic, political, ideological, and military forces of society? Utilizing a traditional Socialist claim, Socialist women averred that historical evolution was on their side: the competitive, aggressive virtues which had built modern industrial capitalism were increasingly self-destructive, and destined for replacement by the social, cooperative virtues. Yet Socialist doctrine posited the class struggle as the mechanism of historical evolution; the working class, which vastly outnumbered the capitalists and performed all of society's work, would recognize their oppression, unite as a class, and overthrow capitalism. Male workers also filled the ranks of the army, militia, and police. Socialist women could make no similar claims for women. They only slightly outnumbered men and were still mostly isolated in the home (a condition which undermined gender solidarity); they occupied a less strategic place than men in the large industrial complexes which dominated the economy; and they were almost totally excluded from the exercise of military and police power. They were also mostly disfranchised. Women, therefore, lacked the economic, political, and military power of the male working class. Further, it was unclear how the feminine virtues of peace, nurture, and concern for others could triumph over male militarism, brutality, and selfishness. It appeared that women, unlike the working class, could attain equality, in society or even in the Socialist party, only with the consent of their oppressors, who monopolized all loci of power. The sex struggle, unlike the class struggle, could end only with the consent of the oppressor, for whom exploitation seemed a genetic imperative.
This dilemma was sharpened because most Socialists deeply suspected claims that altruism could significantly influence the course of history. Reliance on moral suasion contradicted the centrality of the class struggle and implied that a transclass alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie could inaugurate Socialism. The SP based its ideology upon the bedrock of the class struggle, and demanded that each applicant for membership sign a profession of belief in the class struggle.[32] This was the only doctrinal statement exacted from prospective recruits. Even when, as a result of the controversy with the IWW, the SP proscribed public advocacy of sabotage, violence, or illegal methods as a mechanism of working-class liberation, it did not require that new members expressedly repudiate such tactics. Any belief in altruism as a meaningful social force, therefore, was anathema to central, defining SP ideology, as well as to the Socialist women's emphasis upon women's self-liberation.
Tactically, the SP rigorously eschewed any transclass alliances with middle-class reformers (such as the Progressive party) and vociferously repudiated even the slightest hint of a Labor Party incorporating the AFL, bourgeois reformers, and other non-Socialists. Yet The Socialist Woman not only demanded a transclass gender alliance, but implied that women's altruistic nature, rather than male brutality and struggle, would inaugurate the new age. Indeed, the very concept of a "sex struggle" older than and more important than the class struggle obviously denigrated the importance of class and of the struggle against capitalism. Women, lacking the overwhelming numbers, strategic economic location, political power, and physical and military strength of the male working class, could win in no other way than by such a transclass gender alliance and an appeal to the better nature of their male opponents.
The Socialist women believed that the sex struggle, like the class struggle, must be waged on the ideological front as well as in the economic, political, and family arenas. Men, they asserted, had convinced women of their own inferiority by a process of hegemony directly paralleling that of the capitalists over their workers. Kaneko said that "woman has been miserably oppressed and subjugated by man through their ignorance and superstition, just as the worker has been oppressed and exploited by the capitalist." The Socialist Women of New York proclaimed that woman was "the slave of a slave.... by a thousand brands her slavery has marked her, but none so deeply as her meek acceptance of her condition--her failure to recognize her essential human dignity and to insist upon her rightful place in the human scheme."[33] Just as the objective conditions for Socialism already existed, and required only the will and intelligence of the workers for fruition, so the preconditions of women's freedom only required activation by the conscious awareness of the women themselves. This entailed women's rejection of the male standard of judgment and their formulation of new moral criteria by which to evaluate political, economic, and cultural institutions. Although many Socialist women demanded such a transvaluation of values, its most consistent and forceful advocate was Lida Parce.
Complaining that women were told to learn the ways of men (a key rationale for the existence of The Socialist Woman and the Women's National Committee), Parce asserted that "there seems to be some question of late whether the best methods have yet been found." When the best methods were discovered, "it is quite probable that woman's ways will have some part in them. About half, perhaps." Yet men, even Socialist men, disdained women's qualities and denied that women could make any distinctive social contribution, other than by abandoning their own values and assimilating those of the masculine world. As an example, Parce described a talk with a stalwart Socialist man. "There was no limit to the generosity of this man toward woman. He was willing that woman should be just like men. Certainly a man could have no greater generosity than that. He was very earnest about it. I asked him if he was willing that men should be like women. But he could not take this suggestion seriously. He laughed at it heartily. Too heartily, in fact." Parce asserted that women must demand their liberty "not to use as men use their liberty, but to use as they see fit. Not to adopt 'man's methods,' but to help in working out a human method of doing the world's work and conserving the human race." Socialist women often pointed out that male workers had not used their ballots for their class liberation, and promised that enfranchised women, more disinterested and nurturing, would improve upon this dismal performance. Parce also lamented that the McNamara brothers, in bombing the Los Angeles Times Building, had resorted to the archetypical male methods of violence, and therefore forfeited Socialist victory in the Los Angeles mayoralty campaign of 1911. Women's claim that their work was as valuable as man's was therefore demeaning, for women's work and values were actually far superior. Throughout history woman had performed the constructive tasks, while man had specialized in war and competition. Woman had clothed the race, but man had only taken up the loom and mill when they became instruments of class exploitation. "For thousands of years man has devastated the earth and drenched it in blood to further [his] exploitation.... Isn't it time for women to begin to defend their work and their way of doing it?.... Women may well take pride in doing their work in a woman's way."[34]
Parce believed that even talk of equality actually implied submission to male hegemony. She denounced the shibboleths of companionate marriage and the terms "partner" and "helpmeet," which she equated with servitude. Such talk "still keeps the wife in a position subordinate to her husband, doing tasks for him, under his control." A free, self-supporting woman "will not be a partner nor yet an equal; but she will be an independent individual in marriage, just as she will out of marriage. For after all an equal submits to being judged by the standard of someone else; and why be measured by someone else?" In the future, women and men would not be partners, but "simply comrades and lovers."[35]
All in all, the Socialist women's emphasis on and call for a sex struggle must have alienated Socialist men. Their advocacy of a trans-class alliance of women based upon the common problems of an oppressed sex, their related belief that sex was as important as class and not explicable in class terms, their claims for the innate superiority of women, their demands for women's economic independence from their husbands as well as from the capitalists, all ran athwart the orthodox Marxist doctrines so cherished by the men. The Socialist women did not intentionally repudiate or reformulate received wisdom; rather, their enterprise of gender liberation ineluctably required such creative refashioning of traditional Marxist ideas. However, the Socialist women found that no amount of conciliatory language could reconcile culturally conservative men to genuine female equality. The Socialist women discerned no escape from a dilemma so impossible they scarcely acknowledged its existence, even to themselves.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] JCK, "Why The Socialist Woman Demands Universal Suffrage," SW March 1908; JCK, "What Women Can Do," SW September 1908; Walden, "Woman's Slavery," SW September 1907; Stern, "A Word to Our Comrades at the National Convention," SW May 1908; Debs, "Woman's Day is Dawning," PW February 1911; Debs, "Woman's Place in Politics," PW September 1912. For other Debs articles, see Debs, "Enfranchisement of Womanhood," PW March 1909 and Debs, "Woman: Comrade and Equal," SW November 1909. In the latter article Debs, contrary to his usual views, averred that man would lift up women and make them his equal.
[2] Whitehead, "What About Woman's Suffrage," PW April 1910; Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW June 1910; Bebel, cited by JCK in "Must Woman Emancipate Herself?," PW February 1912 (The exact quote is in August Bebel, Woman Under Socialism (Schocken, NY, 1971) p. 121: "Women should expect as little help from the men as workingmen do from the capitalist class." Malkiel, "Woman and the Socialist Party," SW May 1908; Stern, "A Word to Our Comrades at the National Convention," SW May 1908.
[3] Wilson, "The Woman's Movement," SW July 1908; JCK, "Must Woman Emancipate Herself?," PW February 1912.
[4] Parce, "What a Man Should Learn of a Bachelor Woman," PW February 1912.
[5] JCK, "Socialism and the Sex War," PW August 1909.
[6] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW July 1909.
[7] JCK, "Women and Class Consciousness," SW June 1908; Edith Van Eden, "The Women at the Window," PW April 1913; Stern, "Social Extremes Cause Intemperance," SW December 1908.
[8] Martha Porter, "Club Women: Our Need of Them," PW April 1909; Downing, "A Plea to Club Women," SW August 1908.
[9] Brown, "The New Federation of Women," SW, July 1908.
[10] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW February and March 1910.
[11] Josephine Cole, "The International and Woman Suffrage," SW, November 1907. The Stuttgart resolution was quoted in "Women and the International," SW October 1907. Corinne Brown, in "Votes for Women," SW February 1908, also said that the International had "exceeded its privilege" and could not dictate how or with whom women "shall work for their own enfranchisement."
[12] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW March 1910.
[13] Lewis, "The Woman Suffrage Movement," PW March 1911.
[14] Rolla Myer, "Bok's Paper vs. Women," PW February 1911; Myer, "Where Women Vote," PW January 1911; "To Our Readers," SW August 1907; "Books of Interest to Women," SW September 1907; Parce, "Woman's Place in Politics: Its Basis, III," PW February 1912; JCK, "Action of Woman's Congress," PW October 1910. "Illinois and the Woman Voter," PW August 1913 noted that women had won many reforms by social activism, before they possessed the vote.
[15] JCK, "Action of Woman's Congress," PW October 1910.
[16] JCK, "Action of the Woman's Congress," PW October 1910.
[17] Parce, "Woman's Place in Politics, III," PW March 1912.
[18] Untermann, "Must Woman Fight Her Own Battles?," PW October 1913.
[19] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW December 1909; Parce, "Woman's Place in Politics--Its Basis, III," PW January 1912; JCK, "The Mother Principle," SW October 1908.
[20] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW November 1910; JCK "Forget It," PW July 1909.
[21] Parce, "Women and the Socialist Philosophy," PW September 1909, reprinted from International Socialist Review, August 1909, pp. 125-128. Parce's phrase 'perception of relations' is Lester Ward's definition of intuition, which Cohen had not precisely defined. In installment VII of his "Socialism for Students," serialized in the ISR, Cohen had claimed that "The impulse below intellect is intuition, which is developed further in many animals than in man.... And because woman is nearer to the lower forms than man, intuition is more deeply seated in the female of the race, enabling her to peremptorily pass judgments that the male arrives at only after laborious thought."
Parce ("The Examiner's Glass" SW, July 1909) and JCK (Forget It, SW, July 1909) had briefly criticized Cohen's article.
[22] JCK, "The Unrest of Women: A Reply," PW October 1913; Oury, "Woman's Relation to Society," PW June 1910; Untermann, "Josephine Daskam Bacon, Reactionist," PW February 1910.
[23] NONQUOTE STERN, PREG, NURSING ALLOWS MEN TO ENSLAVE WOMEN; C. B. Hoffman, "The Race Mother," PW September 1912.
[24] JCK, "The Progressive Woman Off the Track," PW May 1912.
[25] "Are Women Better Than Men," PW, April 1909. This unsigned article ended in doubt and in a remarkably unusual (for a self-styled scientific Socialist) invocation of Fate. "Are women better than men? It all depends on the times, and the disposition that Fate wishes to make of them. Today the scales seem to be turning in the woman's favor."
[26] JCK, "Woman and Socialism," PW August 1911; Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW November 1910; cf Mrs. J.F. Kietner, "Universal Scouts of Freedom," PW November 1911; Barnet, "Things in the Making," PW October 1913.
[27] "The Progressive Woman off the Track," PW May 1912.
[28] JCK, "The Progressive Woman Off the Track," PW May 1912; Stern, in "Symposium of New York Women on Suffrage," PW March 1910; Malkiel, in, "Which is Better, the Women Suffrage Movement or the Socialist Party?," PW June 1910. The author of an anthology of Gilman's writings claims that JCK misinterpreted Gilman here.
[29] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW September 1910; Braverman, "The Common Aim of Socialism and Feminism," CN March 1914.
[30] Lida Parce, "The Relation of Socialism to the Woman Question," ISR, November 1909.
[31] CPG, Herland, -----. Gilman described a women-only utopia (procreation was achieved without men) in which women competently performed every necessary social function. She did reintroduce men as the novel's end, however, as interesting diversions for the women.
[32] Mila Tupper Maynard, "The Socialist Program," PW October 1909.
[33] Kaneko, "Letters to My Sisters in Japan," SW September 1908; "Preamble to the Constitution of the SWS of New York," PW August 1909.
[34] Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," PW July 1909, January 1912, and September 1910.
[35] Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW August 1910.