Woman under socialism

by August Bebel

Roses, myrtles, beauty and joy;

Yes, and sugar beans withal—

Aye, sugar beans in bursting pods

For everyone are here,

But they're left to heaven's angels

And the sparrows of the air.

"He who eats little lives well"—that is, long, said the Italian Cornaro in the sixteenth century, as quoted by Niemeyer. In the end chemistry will be active in the preparation and improvement of nourishment to a degree thitherto unknown. To-day the science is greatly abused in the interest of adulterations and fraud. It is obvious that a chemically prepared food that has all the qualities of the natural product will accomplish the same purpose. The form of the preparation is of secondary importance, provided the product otherwise meets all requirements.

As in the kitchen, the revolution will be accomplished throughout domestic life: it will remove numberless details of work that must be attended to to-day. As in the future the domestic kitchen is rendered wholly superfluous by the central institutions for the preparation of food, so likewise are all the former troubles of keeping ranges, lamps, etc., in working order, removed by the central heating and electric apparatuses for lighting. Warm and cold water supplies place bathing within the reach of all at pleasure, and without the aid of any person. The central laundries assume the washing, drying, etc., of clothes; the central cleaning establishments see to the dusting, etc., of clothing and carpets. In Chicago, carpet-cleaning machines were exhibited that did the work in so short a time as to call forth the admiration of the ladies who visited the Exposition. The electric door opens at a slight pressure of the finger, and shuts of itself. Electric contrivances deliver letters and newspapers on all the floors of the houses; electric elevators save the climbing of stairs. The inside arrangement of the houses—floorings, garnishing of the walls, furnitures—will be contrived with an eye to the facility of cleaning and to the prevention of the gathering of dust and bacteria. Dust, sweepings and offal of all sorts will be carried by pipes out of the houses as water, that has been used, is carried off to-day. In the United States, in many a European city—Zurich, for instance—there are to-day tenements, exquisitely equipped, in which numerous affluent families—others could not bear the expense—live and enjoy a large part of the conveniences just sketched.

Here again we have an illustration of how capitalist society breaks the way in revolutionizing human affairs, in this instance in domestic life,—but only for its elect. Domestic life being thus radically transformed, the servant, this "slave of all the whims of the mistress," is no more,—and the mistress neither. "No servants, no culture!" cries the horrified Herr v. Treitschke with comic pathos. He can as little imagine society without servants as Aristotle could without slaves. The matter of surprise is that Herr v. Treitschke looks upon our servants as the "carriers of civilization." Treitschke, like Eugen Richter, is furthermore greatly worried by the shoe-polishing and clothes-dusting question, which neither is able to attend to personally. It so happens, however, that with nine-tenths of the people everyone sees to that himself, or the wife does for her husband, or a daughter or son for the family. We might answer that what the nine-tenths have hitherto done, the remnant tenth may also do. But there is another way out. Why should not in future society the youth of the land, without distinction of sex, be enlisted for such necessary work? Work does not dishonor, even if it consist in polishing boots. Many a member of the old nobility, and officers of the army at that, learned the lesson when, to escape their debts, they ran off to the United States, and there became servants, or shoe-polishers. Eugen Richter, in his pamphlets, goes even so far as to cause the downfall of the "Socialist Imperial Chancellor" on the "Shoe-polishing Question," and the consequent falling to pieces of the "Socialist State." The "Socialist Imperial Chancellor" refuses to polish his own shoes; hence his troubles. The bourgeoisie has hugely enjoyed this description of Richter, and it has thereby furnished evidence of the modesty of its demands upon a criticism of Socialism. But Eugen Richter lived to experience the sorrow of not only seeing one of his own party members in Nuerenberg invent a shoe-polishing machine soon after the appearance of that pamphlet, but of also learning that at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 an electric shoe-polishing machine was exhibited that did the work perfectly. Thus the principal objection, raised by Richter and Treitschke against Socialist society, has been practically thrown overboard by an invention made under the bourgeois social system itself.

The revolutionary transformation, that radically changes all the relations of man, especially the position of woman, is, as we see, going on now under our own eyes. It is only a question of time when society will take the process into its own hands and upon a large scale, thus quickening and perfecting the change and affording to all, without exception, the opportunity to share its innumerable advantages.