The woman movement of the lower classes is socialistic. It has increased in extent and significance in the same measure in which the working woman has given up farming, housework, and domestic service for industry.
This woman movement also worked in two directions. The older program reads: “Full equality of woman with man.” In the “state of the future” both sexes shall have the same duty of work and the same protection of work, while the children are reared in state institutions.
The movement in the other direction purposes to win back the wife to the husband, the mother to the children, and, thereby, the home to all. The old or right wing of the middle-class woman movement, as well as the older direction of socialism just mentioned, still uphold, with arguments of the old liberalism, the “individual freedom” of the working woman against all protecting “exceptional laws.” Increasing numbers of the more radical—that means in this connection more social—feminists of the upper class, however, stand side by side with the less dogmatic trend of socialism in its supreme struggle for the protection of the mother.
In the socialistic woman movement, both efforts for freedom were interwoven—that of the working men and that of women—checked during the French Revolution but soon after revived as the two great forces of the new century. In this intertwining of the woman question with the labour question is found the explanation of the fact that socialists characterise the woman question as an economic question solely; while in reality the woman question, historically, manifestly began as an advocacy of the human right and worth of woman; and that too before any great industry appeared on the horizon. As long as the man was the one who, outside the home, was producer and provider, and the woman the one who, within the home, managed and perfected the raw material, no economic woman question could arise, but on the other hand exactly a question of woman’s rights. For, as some writers demonstrated, as early as the 18th century it was absurd, if woman’s work in the home was so valuable and so faithfully performed, that it should not secure in consequence corresponding rights. And exactly because the middle-class woman movement tried to uphold and defend the right and the freedom of women in the compass of the old society, this movement became, and must still often be, a struggle of women against men. The socialistic woman movement is on the other hand merely a factor in a joint struggle of men and women against the old society and for a new condition. The struggle here cannot be sex against sex, but class against class. Each of these woman movements has been partly right, each has partly misunderstood the other. Only in recent times has a convergence between the middle class and the socialistic woman movements been accomplished for the attainment of a number of common ends; for example, the protection of the mother, mentioned above, and especially the franchise. This convergence has dissolved the prejudice on both sides. In both quarters they begin to understand the power and aim of the other movement.
Socialism and the woman movement are two mighty streams which drag along with them great parts of the firm formations which they touch. But if one wishes to be just toward both, one must not forget that in this way new lands are created.
The socialistic women on their part, as speakers, agitators, journalists, members of special associations, have stood in rank and file beside the men as true comrades, and the middle-class women have much to learn from the feeling of solidarity of the women socialists. The masculine comrades have not always in practice substantiated the principle of equality, for even the socialist is first man and then comrade; but in theory he has generally supported it.
Through socialism, feminism has penetrated to the masses. What the middle-class woman movement would have needed another century to effect, socialism has accomplished in a few decades. Nothing shows better than its fear of socialists how blindly prejudiced was the right wing of middle-class feminism. And nothing so clearly elucidates in what stage of feminism the upper-class movement was than its obstinate adherence to “the principle of personal freedom” in face of the atrocious actual conditions which resulted from the “freedom of work” of the women factory hands.
I will here recall only in brief the progress of the economic woman movement in the class of factory workers. When machines transformed the whole method of production and a host of women no longer found sufficient occupation in the home, while at the same time the possibilities of marriage decreased because of the surplus of women and also for other reasons, the middle-class women looked about them for new fields of labour. The great industries in return looked about them for more “hands.” And since, with the machine, female hands were quite as serviceable as male—with a new machine it was possible to replace thirty men with one woman—and since in addition they were cheaper, then began that exodus of women from the home into the factory, the results of which we are now experiencing.
When the mother is absent from the home, then there is lacking the cohering, supervising, warming force, and the home deteriorates and falls to pieces; the children are neglected, the husband suffers; the street takes possession of the children, the alehouse of the men. Moreover, the women work often for starvation wages, whereby less comes into the home than is lost by the absence and incapacity of the mother. In the middle classes daughters and wives, entirely or partly supported in the home, could be satisfied with smaller wages and have thus become the competitors of men and women wholly self-supporting. For the same reason wives working in these industries have often become the competitors of men, children again the competitors of women, and married women the competitors of unmarried.