CHAPTER V
THE RIGHT OF MOTHERHOOD
Everyone knows that the methods of production of modern society tend more and more to limit woman’s domestic work to directing consumption, whereas at earlier stages she used also to produce a great part of the commodities consumed in the home. Everyone can see too that the most profoundly influential cause of the woman’s movement has thus not been the assertion of woman’s political-juridical rights as a human being, but first and foremost the question of how she is to find employment for her powers of work which are no longer required in the home, and be enabled to find that self-maintenance outside the home which the altered conditions of production have rendered necessary.
Through the ever-increasing connection between the different parts of society, woman’s work has had profound influence in other quarters than those of the labour market. Competition between the sexes has produced—as regards manual labour—for men and women those lower conditions of labour which are the usual result of an overcrowding of the labour market, namely, low wages, long hours, and uncertainty of employment. The possibility of marriage has become dependent on the bread-winning labour of both husband and wife. Those married women who are partly maintained by their husbands, have by their supplementary earnings reduced the wages of the self-supporting unmarried ones, and when these in their turn are married, they lack the desire and capacity to look after the home and waste through negligence more than they earn in the factory. The consequence of the outside employment of wives—as of children—has furthermore been sterility, a high infant mortality, and the degeneration of the surviving children, both physically and psychically; a debased domestic life with its consequences: discomfort, drunkenness, and crime.
Among the middle classes, again, the competition between the sexes has directly reduced man’s chances of marriage, and indirectly diminished the desire of both sexes to contract matrimony.
The apparently inevitable law that one-sidedness alone gives strength has made the champions of woman’s rights left-handed in their treatment of all social questions connected with their “cause.” They have pressed forward woman’s right to work, while overlooking both the conditions and the effects of her work. Women, actuated by the combined motive power of the spirit of the age and of necessity, have looked for employment of any kind and at however low a wage. Among the middle classes, the result has been that many girls, who were in no need of supporting themselves entirely by work, have depressed the conditions of labour for those women who needed it. Thus the latter are held down to a minimum which is dangerous alike to health and to morality. Girls living at home, on the other hand, have been able to satisfy their increased demands, and this has made it still more difficult for a man to offer them acceptable conditions in marriage.
It has already been pointed out that the self-maintenance of women has had and still has a profound influence on love in marriage. The Swedish poet Almquist indicated this when he wrote that only the woman who “in glad activity can provide all that is necessary for her living” makes it possible for the man to whom she gives herself “to say rightly to himself, I am loved.”
But no one can calculate in advance how a new social force is going to work in every respect; how even souls are changed with altered needs, so that new demands and forces arise. The erotic problem of the youth of the present day is one of the most illuminating pieces of evidence of this impossibility.
Woman’s competition with man in the field of labour has, in fact, occasioned a profound ill-feeling between the sexes. Women feel themselves—rightly or wrongly—cheapened and underestimated, and men, on the other hand, consider themselves thrust aside, when woman’s lower demands of wages decide the competition in her favour. But this is still the external side of the matter.