Woman under socialism

by August Bebel

On the domain of navigation especially, and aided by the difficulty of control, many unpardonable wrongs are committed. Through the revelations made during the seventies by Plimsoll in the British Parliament, the fact has become notorious that many shipowners, yielding to criminal greed, take out high insurances for vessels that are not seaworthy, and unconscionably expose them, together with their crews, to the slightest weather at sea,—all for the sake of the high insurance. These are the so-called "coffin-ships," not unknown in Germany, either. The steamer "Braunschweig," for instance, that sank in 1881 near Helgoland, and belonged to the firm Rocholl & Co., of Bremen, proved to have been put to sea in a wholly unseaworthy condition. The same fate befell, in 1889, the steamer "Leda" of the same firm; hardly out at sea, she went to the bottom. The boat was insured with the Russian Lloyd for 55,000 rubles; the prospect of 8,500 rubles were held out to the captain, if he took her safe to Odessa; and the captain, in turn, paid the pilot the comparatively high wage of 180 rubles a month. The verdict of the Court of Admiralty was that the accident was due to the fact that the "Leda" was unseaworthy and unfit to be taken to Odessa. The license was withdrawn from the captain. According to existing laws, the real guilty parties could not be reached. No year goes by without our Court of Admiralty having to pass upon a larger number of accidents at sea, to the effect that the accident was due to vessels being too old, or too heavily loaded, or in defective condition, or insufficiently equipped; sometimes to several of these causes combined. With a good many of the lost ships, the cause of accident can not be established: they have gone down in midocean, and no survivor remains to tell the tale. Likewise are the coast provisions for the saving of shipwrecked lives both defective and insufficient; they are dependent mainly upon private charity. The case is even more disconsolate along distant and foreign coasts. A commonwealth that makes the promotion of the well-being of all its highest mission will not fail to so improve navigation, and provide it with protective measures that these accidents would be of rare occurrence. But the modern economic system of rapine, that weighs men as it weighs figures, to the end of whacking out the largest possible amount of profit, not infrequently destroys a human life if thereby there be in it but the profit of a dollar. With the change of society in the Socialist sense, immigration, in its present shape, also would drop; the flight from military service would cease; suicide in the Army would be no more.

The picture drawn from our political and economic life shows that woman also is deeply interested therein. Whether the period of military service be shortened or not; whether the Army be increased or not; whether the country pursues a policy of peace or one of war; whether the treatment allotted to the soldier be worthy or unworthy of human beings; and whether as a result thereof the number of suicides and desertions rise or drop;—all of these are questions that concern woman as much as man. Likewise with the economic and industrial conditions and in transportation, in all of which branches the female sex, furthermore, steps from year to year more numerously as working-women. Bad conditions, and unfavorable circumstances injure woman as a social and as a sexual being; favorable conditions and satisfactory circumstances benefit her.

But there are still other momenta that go to make marriage difficult or impossible. A considerable number of men are kept from marriage by the State itself. People pucker up their brows at the celibacy imposed upon Roman Catholic clergymen; but these same people have not a word of condemnation for the much larger number of soldiers who also are condemned thereto. The officers not only require the consent of their superiors, they are also limited in the choice of a wife: the regulation prescribes that she shall have property to a certain, and not insignificant, amount. In this way the Austrian corps of officers, for instance, obtained a social "improvement" at the cost of the female sex. Captains rose by fully 8,000 guilders, if above thirty years of age, while the captains under thirty years of age were thenceforth hard to be had, in no case for a smaller dower than 30,000. "Now a 'Mrs. Captain,'" it was thus reported in the "Koelnische Zeitung" from Vienna, "who until now was often a subject of pity for her female colleagues in the administrative departments, can hold her head higher by a good deal; everybody now knows that she has wherewith to live. Despite the greatly increased requirements of personal excellence, culture and rank, the social status of the Austrian officer was until then rather indefinite, partly because very prominent gentlemen stuck fast to the Emperor's coat pocket; partly because many poor officers could not make a shift to live without humiliation, and many families of poor officers often played a pitiful role. Until then, the officer who wished to marry had, if the thirty-year line was crossed, to qualify in joint property to the amount of 12,000 guilders, or in a 600-guilder side income, and even at this insignificant income, hardly enough for decency, the magistrates often shut their eyes, and granted relief. The new marriage regulations are savagely severe, though the heart break. The captain under thirty must forthwith deposit 30,000 guilders; over thirty years of age, 20,000 guilders; from staff officers up to colonels, 16,000 guilders. Over and above this, only one-fourth of the officers may marry without special grace, while a spotless record and corresponding rank is demanded of the bride. This all holds good for officers of the line and army surgeons. For other military officials with the rank of officer, the new marriage regulations are milder; but for officers of the general staff still severer. The officer who is detailed to the captain of the general staff may not thereafter marry; the actual captain of the staff, if below thirty, is required to give security in 36,000 guilders, and later 24,000 more." In Germany and elsewhere, there are similar regulations. Also the corps of under-officers is subject to hampering regulations with regard to marriage, and require besides the consent of their superior officers. These are very drastic proofs of the purely materialistic conception that the State has of marriage.

In general, public opinion is agreed that marriage is not advisable for men under twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. Twenty-five is the marriageable age for men fixed by the civil code, with an eye to the civic independence that, as a rule, is not gained before that age. Only with persons who are in the agreeable position of not having to first conquer independence—with people of princely rank—does public opinion consider it proper when occasionally the men marry at the age of eighteen or nineteen, the girls at that of fifteen or sixteen. The Prince is declared of age with his eighteenth year, and considered capable to govern a vast empire and numerous people. Common mortals acquire the right to govern their possible property only at the age of twenty-one.

The difference of opinion as to the age when marriage is desirable shows that public opinion judges by the social standing of the bride and bridegroom. Its reasons have nothing to do with the human being as a natural entity, or with its natural instincts. It happens, however, that Nature's impulses do not yoke themselves to social conditions, nor to the views and prejudices that spring from them. So soon as man has reached maturity, the sexual instincts assert themselves with force; indeed, they are the incarnation of the human being, and they demand satisfaction from the mature being, at the peril of severe physical and mental suffering.

The age of sexual ripeness differs according to individuals, climate and habits of life. In the warm zone it sets in with the female sex, as a rule, at the age of eleven to twelve years, and not infrequently are women met with there, who, already at that age, carry offspring on their arms; but at their twenty-fifth or thirtieth year, these have lost their bloom. In the temperate zone, the rule with the female sex is from the fourteenth to the sixteenth year, in some cases later. Likewise is the age of puberty different between country and city women. With healthy, robust country girls, who move much in the open air and work vigorously, menstruation sets in later, on the average, than with our badly nourished, weak, hypernervous, ethereal city young ladies. Yonder, sexual maturity develops normally, with rare disturbances; here a normal development is the exception: all manner of illnesses set in, often driving the physician to desperation. How often are not physicians compelled to declare that, along with a change of life, the most radical cure is marriage. But how apply such a cure? Insuperable obstacles rise against the proposition.

All this goes to show where the change must be looked for. In the first place, the point is to make possible a totally different education, one that takes into consideration the physical as well as the mental being; in the second place, to establish a wholly different system of life and of work. But both of these are, without exception, possible for all only under wholly different social conditions.

Our social conditions have raised a violent contradiction between man, as a natural and sexual being, on the one hand, and man as a social being on the other. The contradiction has made itself felt at no period as strongly as at this; and it produces a number of diseases into whose nature we will go no further, but that affect mainly the female sex: in the first place, her organism depends, in much higher degree than that of man, upon her sexual mission, and is influenced thereby, as shown by the regular recurrence of her periods; in the second place, most of the obstacles to marriage lie in the way of women, preventing her from satisfying her strongest natural impulse in a natural manner. The contradiction between natural want and social compulsion goes against the grain of Nature; it leads to secret vices and excesses that undermine every organism but the strongest.

Unnatural gratification, especially with the female sex, is often most shamelessly promoted. More or less underhandedly, certain preparations are praised, and they are recommended especially in the advertisements of most of the papers that penetrate into the family circle as especially devoted to its entertainment. These puffs are addressed mainly to the better situated portion of society, seeing the prices of the preparations are so high that a family of small means can hardly come by them. Side by side with these shameless advertisements are found the puffs—meant for the eyes of both sexes—of obscene pictures, especially of whole series of photographs, of poems and prose works of similar stripe, aimed at sexual incitation, and that call for the action of police and District Attorneys. But these gentlemen are too busy with the "civilization, marriage and family-destroying" Socialist movement to be able to devote full attention to such machinations. A part of our works of fiction labors in the same direction. The wonder would be if sexual excesses, artificially incited, besides, failed to manifest themselves in unhealthy and harmful ways, and to assume the proportions of a social disease.

The idle, voluptuous life of many women in the property classes; their refined measures of nervous stimulants; their overfeeding with a certain kind of artificial sensation, cultivated in certain lines on the hothouse plan, and often considered the principal topic of conversation and sign of culture by that portion of the female sex that suffers of hypersensitiveness and nervous excitement;—all this incites still more the sexual senses, and naturally leads to excesses.