The Woman Socialist/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY
“Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” was the brave and splendid legend inscribed on the blood–red banners of the French Revolutionists. And in strange ways the oppressed and hunger–maddened people sought to realise their ideal. It is still the battle–cry of the English Socialists, indeed, of the world–wide Socialist movement. Liberty of thought, speech, and of action, within the safety and happiness of the State; equality of opportunity for the development of each individual along his own lines, for the glory of the State; and universal brotherhood for the good of humanity are the ideals of the Socialists of this and other countries.
Under this present competitive system the great masses of the people are not free, but live in a condition which is the exact opposite of free. They are not free, because they are not all in the possession of the means to live; and where a small number of individuals in a community enjoy powers and privileges which are denied to the rest, there must be inequality and there cannot possibly be fraternity.
Much as the "free-born Briton" may dislike to hear the painful truth recited, it is a fact not to be controverted that four-fifths of our total population are bound as completely and as miserably as ever was a black African slave to a Western planter. There is no real freedom which is not economic freedom. He is a slave who depends for his bread upon the will or the whim of a man like himself, or of a number of such masters, who can and will and, owing to the trials and exigencies of modern commercial life, must cease to employ him as soon as it is no longer profitable to find him work.
It is reasonable to suppose, and necessary for a belief in the power for human happiness of the establishment of Socialism to understand, that the liberty, equality, and fraternity which are the Socialist’s hope, will be the portion of women as well as men when the good time comes.
Women are economically bound as well as men, the victims of Capitalism as well as men, and are seeking and needing the same freedom as men.
But there is an important difference between the present position of men and of women. The political power which is the key to their common economic prison is already in the hands of one sex, but is still denied to the other. That the prison door has not yet been opened is not the fault of the voteless women; but the responsibility of keeping fast within a helpless sex is with those who have the power and will not use it. Men might have voted themselves and their sisters into freedom half a century ago had they had the wisdom. Now women are clamouring for the right to do for themselves what men have so long neglected to do for them.
Nor is the tale of present inequality fully told when it is shown that women have no voice in making the laws which govern themselves and their children.
In the industrial world, women are generally paid much less for work similar in kind, quality, and amount to that done by men, and sometimes more in amount than that done by men in the corresponding positions in their departments. The average wage of the man-worker is about twenty-four shillings per week; that of the woman-worker, seven shillings per week.
The reasons for this offered by the average orthodox political economist will receive attention later. But no Socialist State worthy of the name could justify a relaxation of its principle of equality on account of sex.
The inadequacy of a woman’s earnings is frequently the cause of two other unfortunate conditions of her life. The struggle for existence is sometimes so hard, so lonely, so bitter, that she is constrained to sell herself into a still more terrible bondage. For the sake of bread and shelter she marries, and becomes the unpaid cook and housekeeper of a husband and the mother of his children. Or, hopeless of attracting to herself a man who is willing to keep her honourably in the married state, she sells herself without the consent and blessing of society, choosing a life of luxurious or comfortable vice before the soul-starving, heart-breaking drudgery of a work-girl’s life.
But even worse in some ways than the whole condition of woman’s bondage, political, economic, and sexual (the last two being the offspring of the first), are the chains of a decrepit and soul-destroying orthodoxy and conventionality with which time and centuries of training have tamed her spirit, dulled her intellect, and crippled her body. It is this which has made so disastrously against her in every effort which has been made for her enfranchisement. It is this which seems to offer a justification for the taunt of her mental inferiority; to people, at least, who are not able to see in this condition an effect as well as a cause of her slavery. She has allowed herself to be cramped and baffled and hindered by rules imposed upon her by a man-governed society. She cannot escape from the dominion of the proprieties. "How do I look? What shall I wear? What ought I to do? What will people say?" And the men who have made this slavish code of morals and manners for women, and who insist on their observance, despise the women who obey them, and show their contempt for their own regulations by consistently and absolutely refusing to be governed by these themselves.
From the foregoing, then, it will be seen that conditions of life are much worse for women than for men; that women have far to travel before they arrive at a condition of equality with men; that women are trebly bound—economically, to the capitalist, sexually, to the man, and spiritually, to wrong ideas of life; ideas which are a degradation to themselves and a disaster to their children.
Far below the lowest working-man is the woman. But Socialism will bring liberty to both, a double portion of liberty to her; and the two, set free, shall show to the world what it has never yet dreamt of, of what human nature is capable when it dwells in the warmth and sunlight of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.