On this side, the following arguments are heard: woman becomes free only when she can wholly support herself and can devote herself to her work unhampered by duties toward husband and children; only through the reciprocal social obligation of work and the complete individual freedom of both sexes can the present conflicts between the labour of man and woman, between individual happiness and the common weal, finally cease.
Like every canalisation or drainage of the mighty river system of the life of human feeling, this program is direct and conclusive. One may easily understand that masculine brains, dominated by a passion for logic, could devise it; but if we hear it advocated by multitudes of women, then we recognise how harassed by the fourfold burden of family provider, child bearer, child educator, and housekeeper the poor women must be who can smilingly assent to the foregoing picture of the future.
And yet there is another possible ideal of the future which can be realised as soon as production is determined, no longer by private capitalistic interests, but by social-political interests. Women will then be employed in industrial fields of work where their powers are as productive as possible with the least possible loss in time and strength; above all in those fields where the work requires no long preparation and the dexterity does not suffer by interruptions. Before the years in which the occupation is motherhood, and after these years, woman can still be always remunerated by an economic wage; during the years on the contrary in which motherhood is the vocation, she can be remunerated by the state. It is only necessary that women and men will a new order whereby in the future we attain the following conditions:
A Society, in which the welfare of the new generation is the centre to which all social-political plans, at heart, are aiming.
Children born of parents whose souls and bodies are qualified and prepared for a worthy parenthood and who can thus create for their children sound and beautiful conditions of life.
Mothers won back to the husbands, the children, the homes, but under such circumstances that as free human personalities they perform the most important work of society: the bearing and rearing of children.
Fathers with time and leisure to share with the mothers the task of education and to share with them and the children the joys of the home life, as well as of the remainder of existence.
This ideal of the future state takes in my imagination the form of a varied Italian garden with a wide outlook upon the great sea. The other ideal of the future, on the contrary, is to me like a coal mine wherein all spiritual and social vegetation is petrified so that it now serves only as motive-power for machines.
Nothing more effectively proves how rife with reactions—and for that reason how hidden—is the power of development, than to realise that the unorganized, inorganic socialistic ideal of the future, just mentioned, is the logical sequence of the woman movement if one draws the extreme conclusion from its fundamental idea—the right of woman to individual, free development of her powers. It is consistent historically that in America, where the movement for the right and freedom of woman has been most widely successful, many middle-class women have resolutely drawn these extreme conclusions of emancipation. Quite as psychologically logical is it, that at a time when the uncomplicated soul life and life demands of the masses still form the most important factors in the shaping of the ideal of the future, the socialistic women, from their different point of view, have arrived at like ideals. But fortunately there are in women, as in the masses, still great tracts of “new ground” where new soul conditions will germinate, and in due time, new ideals will flower. Groups of men can at times forget mankind in dwelling upon themselves. But mankind in its entirety has never yet lost the instinct for the conditions of self-preservation and the higher development of the race. I will come back later to the psychological phase of the question. I touch upon it here only as the social program of the future.