Woman under socialism

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WOMAN UNDER SOCIALISM

[Illustration: AUGUST BEBEL]


Woman Under Socialism

_By_

AUGUST BEBEL


Translated from the Original
German of the 33d Edition
_By_
DANIEL DE LEON.


1917
NEW YORK LABOR NEWS COMPANY
NEW YORK


     "The end of social development resembles the beginning of human
     existence. The original equality returns. The mother-web of
     existence starts and rounds up the cycle of human
     affairs."--Bachofen.

     "Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has
     been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding
     and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners,
     that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable
     power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own
     creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence
     will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of
     the State to the property it protects, as well as the obligations
     and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of
     society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be
     brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career
     is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law
     of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed
     away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past
     duration of man's existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to
     come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the
     termination of a career of which property is the end and aim;
     because such a career contains the elements of
     self-destruction."--Morgan.


Copyright 1904, by the New York Labor News Company




TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.


Bebel's work, "Die Frau und der Socialismus," rendered in this English
version with the title "Woman under Socialism," is the best-aimed shot
at the existing social system, both strategically and tactically
considered. It is wise tactics and strategy to attack an enemy on his
weakest side. The Woman Question is the weakest link in the capitalist
mail.

The workingman, we know, is a defenceless being; but it takes much
sharpening of the intellect to appreciate the fact that "he cannot speak
for himself." His sex is popularly coupled with the sense of strength.
The illusion conceals his feebleness, and deprives him of help, often of
sympathy. It is thus even with regard to the child. Proverbially weak
and needing support, the child, nevertheless, is not everywhere a victim
in the existing social order. Only in remote sense does the child of the
ruling class suffer. The invocation of the "Rights of the Child" leaves
substantially untouched the children of the rich. It is otherwise with
woman. The shot that rips up the wrongs done to her touches a nerve that
aches from end to end in the capitalist world. There is no woman,
whatever her station, but in one way or other is a sufferer, a victim in
modern society. While upon the woman of the working class the cross of
capitalist society rests heaviest in all ways, not one of her sisters in
all the upper ranks but bears some share of the burden, or, to be
plainer, of the smudge,--and what is more to the point, they are aware
of it. Accordingly, the invocation of the "Rights of Woman" not only
rouses the spirit of the heaviest sufferers under capitalist society,
and thereby adds swing to the blows of the male militants in their
efforts to overthrow the existing order, it also lames the adversary by
raising sympathizers in his own camp, and inciting sedition among his
own retinue. Bebel's exhaustive work, here put in English garb, does
this double work unerringly.

I might stop here. The ethic formula commands self-effacement to a
translator. More so than well-brought-up children, who should be "seen
and not heard," a translator should, where at all possible, be neither
seen nor heard. That, however, is not always possible. In a work of this
nature, which, to the extent of this one, projects itself into
hypotheses of the future, and even whose premises necessarily branch off
into fields that are not essentially basic to Socialism, much that is
said is, as the author himself announces in his introduction, purely the
personal opinion of the writer. With these a translator, however, much
in general and fundamental accord, may not always agree. Not agreeing,
he is in duty bound to modify the ethic formula to the extent of marking
his exception, lest the general accord, implied in the act of
translating, be construed into specific approval of objected-to passages
and views. Mindful of a translator's duties as well as rights, I have
reduced to a small number, and entered in the shape of running footnotes
to the text, the dissent I thought necessary to the passages that to me
seemed most objectionable in matters not related to the main question;
and, as to matters related to the main question, rather than enter
dissent in running footnotes, I have reserved for this place a summary
of my own private views on the family of the future.

It is an error to imagine that, in its spiral course, society ever
returns to where it started from.