Socialism: Positive and Negative

by Robert Rives La Monte

"What we may anticipate," says Engels, "about the adjustment of sexual relations after the impending downfall of capitalist production is mainly of a negative nature and mostly confined to elements that will disappear. But what will be added? That will be decided after a new generation has come to maturity: a race of men who never in their lives have had any occasion for buying with money or other economic means of power the surrender of a woman; a race of women who have never had any occasion for surrendering to any man for any other reason but love, or for refusing to surrender to their lover from fear of economic consequences. Once such people are in the world, they will not give a moment's thought to what we to-day believe should be their course. They will follow their own practice and fashion their own public opinion—only this and nothing more."[20]

Changed economic conditions are already reflected in the disintegration of the traditional bourgeois belief in the permanency of the existing forms of the family and the home. A portentous sign of the times for the conservatives is the appearance of Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons' book on "The Family," the most scholarly work on the subject by a bourgeois writer that has yet appeared. Like all bourgeois writers Mrs. Parsons has been very chary of using materials furnished by Socialist scholars. Very striking is the absence from her very extensive bibliographical notes of the names of Marx, Engels, Bebel and Ferri. But she was compelled to avail herself freely of the wealth of materials provided by the scholarly and industrious researches of Morgan, Kautsky, and Cunow.

In her now famous Fifteenth Lecture on "Ethical Considerations," she suggests various modes of ameliorating the condition of Woman, and improving conjugal and family relations; but she is again and again driven to admit that the economic independence of women is a condition precedent to her "reforms." Most of her suggestions are tinged with the utopian fancifulness characteristic of the bourgeois theorist. Two excerpts will illustrate these points sufficiently:

"Again reciprocity of conjugal rights and duties is desirable for parenthood. If marriage have a proprietary character, neither the owner nor the owned is entirely fit to develop free personalities in his or her children. Moreover the idea of marital ownership more or less involves that of parental ownership, and the latter, as we have seen, is incompatible with a high type of parenthood. The custom of proprietary marriage inevitably leads, for example, to restrictions upon female education. Now just in so far as a woman's education is limited is she handicapped as an educator of her children. It is unfortunate that in the emancipation of woman agitation of the past half-century the reformers failed to emphasize the social as adequately as the individualistic need of change. If women are to be fit wives and mothers they must have all, perhaps more, of the opportunities for personal development that men have. All the activities hitherto reserved to men must at least be open to them, and many of these activities, certain functions of citizenship[21] for example, must be expected of them. Moreover, whatever the lines may be along which the fitness of women to labor will be experimentally determined, the underlying position must be established that for the sake of individual and race character she is to be a producer as well as a consumer of social values.[22] As soon as this ethical necessity is generally recognized the conditions of modern industry will become much better adapted to the needs of women workers than they are now, the hygiene of workshop, factory, and office will improve, and child bearing and rearing will no longer seem incompatible with productive activity" (pages 345-347).

Here follows the paragraph upon which the Reverend Doctor Morgan Dix and other clerical defenders of the economic conditions that cause marital and non-marital prostitution pounced with such avidity:

"We have therefore, given late marriage and the passing of prostitution,[23] two alternatives, the requiring of absolute chastity of both sexes until marriage or the toleration of freedom of sexual intercourse on the part of the unmarried of both sexes before marriage, i. e., before the birth of offspring. In this event condemnation of sex license would have a different emphasis from that at present. Sexual intercourse would not be of itself disparaged or condemned, it would be disapproved of only if indulged in at the expense of health or of emotional or intellectual activities in oneself or in others. As a matter of fact, truly monogamous relations seem to be those most conducive to emotional or intellectual development and to health, so that, quite apart from the question of prostitution, promiscuity is not desirable or even tolerable. It would therefore, seem well from this point of view, to encourage early trial marriage,[24] the relation to be entered into with a view to permanency, but with the privilege of breaking it if proved unsuccessful and in the absence of offspring without suffering any great degree of public condemnation.

"The conditions to be considered in any attempt to answer the question that thus arises are exceedingly complex. Much depends upon the outcome of present experiments in economic independence for women, a matter which is in turn dependent upon the outcome of the general labor 'question.' Much depends upon revelations of physiological science. If the future brings about the full economic independence of women, if physiologists will undertake to guarantee society certain immunities from the sexual excess of the individual,[25] if, and these are the most important conditions of all, increases in biological, psychological and social knowledge make parenthood a more enlightened and purposive function than is even dreamed of at present and if pari passu with this increase of knowledge a higher standard of parental duty and a greater capacity for parental devotion develop, then the need of sexual restraint as we understand it may disappear and different relations between the sexes before marriage and to a certain extent within marriage may be expected."

The Socialist materialist leaves idle speculations of this nature to the bourgeois Utopians; he knows that a revolution in economic conditions must precede any material changes in sexual relations, and that when such changes take place they will take place in response to the stimuli of the transformed economic environment, and not in accordance with any preconceived notions of Mrs. Parsons or others.

Those, who are horrified at such proposed modifications of marriage as Mr. George Meredith's marriages for a fixed, limited period, and Mrs. Parsons' "trial marriages," will do well to ponder this posthumous aphorism of the clearsighted Norse genius, Ibsen, recently published in Berlin: