Concerning Women

by Suzanne La Follette

Nor does the opposition to the emancipation of women which still finds expression in this country and in Europe, prove anything more than that superstitious addiction to custom of which I have already spoken. Those anxious critics who protest that women have got more freedom than is good for Society make the mistake of supposing that Society can exist only if its organization remains unchanged. The same conservatism has opposed all the revolutionary adaptations which have fitted the social order to the breakdown of old forms and their replacement by new ones. Yet when the need for such adaptations ceases, the growth of the social organism ceases with it, and we have such a spectacle of arrested development as the civilization of India presents. Society, in so far as it has become organic, is governed by the same rules as any other organism: the condition of its health is growth, and growth is change.

Certainly the present tendency of woman to assume a position of equality with man involves, and will continue even more to involve, profound psychic and material readjustments. But to assume that such readjustments will injure or destroy Society is to adopt toward Society an attitude of philosophical realism, to attribute to it a personality, to suppose that it is equally capable of destruction with the individual, and that it may in some mystical way derive benefit from the sacrifice of the individual’s best interests. But what is Society save an aggregation of individuals, half male, half female? Where you have a handful of people forming a community, there you have Society; and if the individuals are enlightened and humane it may be called a civilized Society, if they are ignorant and brutal it will be uncivilized. To assume that its “interests” may be promoted by the enslavement of one-half its members, is unreasonable. One may be permitted the doubtful assumption that this enslavement promotes the welfare of the other half of Society, but it is obvious that it can not promote the welfare of the whole, unless we assume that slavery is beneficial to the slave (the classic assumption, indeed, where the slaves have been women). When we consider the political organization known as the State, we have a different matter. The State always represents the organized interest of a dominant class; therefore the subjection of other classes may be said to benefit the State, and their emancipation may be opposed as a danger to the State.

It is evident from the very nature of the State[1] that its interests are opposed to those of Society; and while the complete emancipation of women, as I shall show later, would undoubtedly imply the destruction of the State, since it must accrue from the emancipation of other subject classes, their emancipation, far from destroying Society, must be of inestimable benefit to it. Those critics, and there are many, who argue that women must submit to restrictions upon their freedom for the good of the State, as well as those advocates of woman’s rights who argue that women must be emancipated for the good of the State, simply fail to make this vital distinction between the State and Society; and their failure to do so is one of the potent reasons why the nonsense that has been written about women is limited only by the literature of the subject.

Feminist and anti-feminist arguments from this standpoint centre in the function of childbearing; therefore it should be noted that the emphasis which is placed on this function by the interest of the State is quite different from the emphasis that would be placed upon it by the interest of Society; for the interest of the State is numerical, while the interest of Society is qualitative. The State requires as many subjects as possible, both as labour-motors and as fighters. The interest of Society, on the other hand, is the interest of civilization: if a community is to be wholesome and intelligent, it is necessary not that the individuals who compose it shall be as numerous as possible, but that they shall be as wholesome and intelligent as possible. In general, the interest of the State is promoted by the number of its subjects; that of Society by the quality of its members.

The interest of the State in this respect has been most concisely expressed by Nietzsche. “Man,” said he, “shall be trained for war, and woman for the re-creation of the warrior: all else is folly”, and if one accept his premises he is exactly right. But there have been many writers on women who have not accepted his premises—not at least without qualification—and who have yet failed to observe the antithesis between the interest which the State has, and the interest which Society has, in the question of population. Hence, mingled with the voices of those critics who have demanded the subjection of woman for the sake of children, have been the voices of other critics demanding her emancipation for the sake of children: and both these schools of critics have overlooked her claim to freedom on her own behalf. It is for the sake of humanity, and not for the sake of children, that women ought to have equal status with men. That children will gain enormously by the change is true; but this is beside the issue, which is justice.

The argument that woman must be free for the sake of the race, is an argument of expediency; as nine-tenths of the arguments against her legal subjection have been, and indeed had to be. Unfortunately, humanity is likely to turn a deaf ear to the claims of justice, especially when they conflict with established abuses, unless these claims are backed by the claims of expediency plus a good measure of necessity. Adventitious circumstances have made the social recognition of woman’s claims a necessity, and their political recognition a matter of expediency. Otherwise she would have to wait much longer for the establishment of her rights as man’s equal than now appears likely. In the Western world her battle is very largely won; full equality, social, industrial and legal, seems to be only a matter of time and tactics. This she owes to the great political and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century.

The conscious movement towards freedom for women may be said to have originated in the great emancipatory movement which found expression in the American and French revolutions. The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured. But they did succeed in creating political forms which admitted, in theory at least, the principle of equality. Their chief contribution to progress was that they dramatically and powerfully impressed the idea of liberty upon the minds of men, and thus altered the whole course of human thought. Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” revolutionary though it seemed in its day, was a perfectly natural and logical application of this idea of liberty to the situation of her sex. This remarkable book may be said to have marked the beginning of the conscious movement towards the emancipation of women.

The unconscious movement was the outgrowth of the revolution in industry, brought about by the introduction of the machine. Women had always been industrial workers, but their work, after the break-up of the gilds, was for the most part carried on at home. When the factory supplanted the family as the producing unit in society, the environment of women was altered; and the change affected not only those women who followed industry to the factories, but also those who remained housewives, for where these had before been required to perform, or at least to superintend, a large amount of productive work, they now found their function, as the family became a consuming unit, reduced to the superintendence of expenditures and the operation of the household machinery—a labour which was increasingly lightened by the progress of invention. With domestic conditions so changed, what was more natural than that the daughters should go into the factory; or, if the family were well-to-do, into the schools, which were forced reluctantly to open their doors to women? And what was more natural than that women, as their minds were developed through education, should perceive the injustice and humiliation of their position, and organize to defend their right to recognition as human beings? “If we dared,” says Stendhal, “we would give girls the education of a slave.... Arm a man and then continue to oppress him, and you will see that he can be so perverse as to turn his arms against you as soon as he can.”

Women in the factories and shops; women in the schools—from this it was only a moment to their invasion of the professions, and not a very long time until they would be invading every field that had been held the special province of men. This is the great unconscious and unorganized woman’s movement which has aroused such fear and resentment among people who saw it without understanding it.

The organized movement may be regarded simply as an attempt to get this changing relation of women to their environment translated into the kind of law that the eighteenth century had taught the world to regard as just: law based on the theory of equal rights for all human beings. The opposition that the movement encountered offers ample testimony to the fact that “acceptance in principle” is more than a mere subterfuge of diplomats and politicians. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resolutely clung to the theory of equality, and as resolutely opposed its logical application. This is not surprising; most people, no doubt, when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations about the proper application of the word “human.” Women had hardly been regarded as human in mediaeval Europe; they were considered something a little more from the chivalrous point of view, and something a little less from the more common, workaday standpoint. The shadow of this old superstition still clouded the minds of men: therefore it is hardly surprising that the egalitarians of the French Revolution excluded women from equal political and legal rights with men; and that the young American republic which had adopted the Declaration of Independence, continued to sanction the slavery of negroes and the subjection of women. How firmly rooted this superstition was, may be seen in the following irresistibly funny excerpt from the writings of that great American advocate of freedom, the author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson.