Concerning Women by Suzanne La Follette - HTML preview

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For a most enlightening treatment of the genesis and nature of the State, I refer my readers to Franz Oppenheimer’s short treatise on the subject (“The State,” B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York). It is sufficient here to define it as an organization primarily designed to perpetuate the division of Society into an owning and exploiting class and a landless, exploited class. In its genesis it is an organization of a conquering group, by means of which that group maintains its economic exploitation of those subjugated. In its later stages, when the conquering class has become merely an owning class, the State is an organization controlled by this class through its control of wealth, for the purpose of protecting ownership against the propertyless classes and facilitating their exploitation by the owning class. The State is thus the natural enemy of all its citizens except those of the owning class.

[2] I shall take up this question later; but I might remark that this point is well illustrated by a suit recently brought in the State of New York. The former wife of a wealthy man, whom he had divorced twenty years before, brought action against him for separation and maintenance. When asked why she had waited twenty years before questioning the validity of the divorce and her husband’s subsequent remarriage, her lawyer stated that she had never been in need of money before, but that she had been swindled out of the money settled upon her by her husband at the time of the divorce. The italics are mine; and no comment, I think, is needed.

[3] Among the Chinese, for example, the woman never goes near the kitchen.

[4] According to news-reports on the day that this is written, Judge McIntyre of New York, sentencing a young woman in a criminal case, said: “When a woman is bad she is vicious and worse than a man, many, many times over.”

[5] It finds grotesque expression now and then. I remember seeing in a San Francisco newspaper a few years ago this headline: “Accused of having immoral relations with a woman other than his wife.”

[6] In the State of Maryland, if the wife be found to have been unchaste before marriage, the husband is entitled to a divorce; but premarital unchastity on the part of the husband gives the wife no corresponding ground.

[7] As the only woman member of an editorial staff during a period of four years, I had ample opportunity for experience of this attitude. It was openly expressed only twice, both times, oddly enough, by women; but so universal was the unconscious assumption of inferiority that I may say without great exaggeration that it was only among my colleagues that I did not meet with it.

[8] This was written, needless to say, before the casual taste of men set the fashion for women to be mincing and sickly.

[9] Elie Faure.

[10] Westermarck defines it as “a more or less durable connexion between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring.”

[11] E. C. Parsons: “The Family.”

[12] It is interesting in this connexion to note that in post-war England, where the thousands of unemployed workers constitute a heavy drain on the public purse and a baffling political problem, it has been made lawful to sell devices for birth-control. One now sees these devices conspicuously displayed in druggists’ windows.

[13] In Maryland fornication is not a crime, although it may entitle a husband to divorce if he did not know of it at the time of the marriage. Adultery is punishable by a fine of ten dollars.

[14] It is important to call attention to the loose use of the word “Society” in this quotation, as practically synonomous with the State. In their final definition, the two terms are antithetical. There is general agreement among scholars, according to Professor Beard, that in the genesis of the State, exploitation was primary, and organization for other purposes, e.g., what we know as “law and order,” was incidental and secondary. The term Society, then, really implies the disappearance of the State, and is commonly so used by scholars. Even now, too, tribes which have never formed a State and are without government of any kind, maintain society, i.e., a quite highly organized mode of communal life. Thomas Jefferson remarked this phenomenon among the American Indian hunting tribes, and so did the historian Parkman.

[15] This motive is especially powerful in the United States, because monopoly in this country even now permits people to do relatively well. Moreover, there is still a strong current of optimism attributable to the failure of Americans to see that the old days of almost unlimited opportunity ended with the closing of the frontier. If the American family finds itself in straitened circumstances, its members are likely to attribute the fact to “hard times,” and to expect an improvement before long, since the country has recovered from a panic about every twenty years for the past century. They do not understand that the measure of recovery they hope for is now impossible. How many Americans, I wonder, have stopped to ask themselves why this country has suffered from uninterrupted economic “depression,” with the exception of the war-period, ever since the panic of 1907? What they regard as depression is really the normal result of complete land-monopoly and high tariffs. Prices have continued to rise since the war; which is to say that real wages have fallen.

[16] According to Herriot, children form the wealth of savage tribes.

[17] The first passage I have quoted is from “Love and Marriage”; the other two I have taken from Miss Key’s “The Younger Generation,” simply because I found the ideas they contain somewhat more clearly and definitely expressed in that book than in the other.

[18] Franz Oppenheimer, Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Œkonomie. Berlin, 1912.

[19] For a striking and characteristic example of this ineptitude, I refer my readers to Dr. Havelock Ellis’s little book, “Eugenics Made Plain.”

[20] Code Napoléon: “La recherche de la paternité est interdite.” This provision was expunged in 1913. In Massachusetts, the father’s name may not be given in the record of birth except on the written request of both father and mother. No similar protection against publicity is provided for the mother.

[21] Lecky, “History of European Morals.” Chapter V.

[22] A recent decision in the State of New York declared that a husband is not required to fulfil his promise to return money loaned him by his wife, when she has accumulated it through economy in her housekeeping; because every saving of the kind is the property of the husband, as are the services of the wife. The wife has no money of her own.

[23] The State of Wisconsin has made men and women equal before the law.

[24] In countries where the custom of dowry persists the parents are obviously in a position to exact a great degree of regard for their wishes, more particularly where economic opportunity is no longer plentiful. In this country, where abundance of free land made the support of a family comparatively easy and secure, marriage early became a matter to be arranged by the contracting parties. In modern France, on the other hand, it is still largely a matter to be arranged between families.

[25] Several feminists have already, indeed, urged public sanction of extra-legal sexual relations, and C. Gasquoine Hartley, with a genuinely Teutonic passion for order, has even advocated their regulation by the State. This is probably impossible, for people who choose such relationships usually do so to escape regulation.

[26] Ellis: Man and Woman. 5th ed. p. 14.

[27] Katharine Anthony found the workmen of Germany frankly in favour of any “protective” legislation that would hamper German working women (“Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia”); and the Woman’s Party has met with the same attitude among unions in this country. Among the resolutions passed at the twenty-fifth convention of the International Moulders’ Union of North America was the following: “Resolved, that the decision of this convention be the restriction of the further employment of child and woman labour in union core rooms and foundries, and eventually the elimination of such labour in all foundries by the example set by union foundries in the uplifting of humanity.... Resolved, that the incoming officers be directed to, either by themselves or in co-operation with others in the labour movement, give their best thought and effort in opposing the employment of female and child labour in jobs recognized as men’s employment.”

[28] There are, of course, exceptions to this rule; as when a woman has, before her marriage, already made a great reputation. In such a case the husband would be thought selfish who demanded the sacrifice of her career. But the husband who demands the sacrifice of a potential career is generally thought to be well within his rights.

[29] From the Laws and Decrees of the Soviet Government on medical questions, sanitation, etc., published in Moscow, 1922.

[30] Still, putting the shoe on the other foot, there is no denying that discriminative legislation based on the Larger Good might as well serve to secure to women privileges which would lead toward female domination, as to create disabilities which would keep them at a disadvantage compared with men. Even the United States Supreme Court has been known to reverse itself.

[31] Land, that is, in the technical economic sense. It does not mean the solid part of the earth’s surface—earth as distinguished from water. It means the sum-total of natural resources.

[32] It is hardly necessary to go into the methods by which this control is exercised. In a country where government is elected, as in this, privilege controls through its contribution to party-funds, through bribery, through economic pressure, and all the other means which its control of economic opportunity puts at its disposal.

[33] Women and slaves were discriminated against in this country; and in the State of California today, no person incapable of citizenship may hold land—a provision which excludes Japanese and Chinese.

[34] A great deal is said about credit-monopoly, as if it were something requiring a new and special kind of instrument to break up. But what is credit? Merely a device for facilitating the exchange of wealth, and all wealth is produced from land. The break-up of land-monopoly would therefore at once break up credit-monopoly. Or, putting it in another way, the one and only imperishable security is land—all other forms of security finally run back to it. The break-up of land-monopoly would therefore break up the monopoly of all the secondary and derived forms of security upon which credit could be based.

[35] There is recent precedent for this in American law. Under the XVIII Amendment and the Volstead Act, the Federal Government confiscated ex post facto without a penny of compensation hundreds of millions invested in the liquor business. All this, too, was in labour-made property, not in law-made property, which greatly strengthens the precedent.

[36] The Constitution of one of the Soviet Republics—I think it is Georgia—begins something after this fashion: “It is the purpose of this Government to abolish government.”

[37] The political placeholder must not be confused with those workers in business, industry, or the arts who are not manual labourers, but perform valid services which are exchangeable for wealth and justify their being accounted productive workers.

[38] This is not to be taken as a contradiction of what I have said in Chapter I concerning the argument that women wanted to be subjected. No class ever voluntarily accepts subjection; but when it has been subjected by one means or another, the ignorance that its subjection breeds may cause it to become passively acquiescent in the injustice of its position. It is worth noting that so long as the idea of slavery is tolerated, slaves may accept their position with a certain fatalism, much as the vanquished force in war accepts its defeat.

[39] It is not to be understood that all male workers, individually or in union, take this attitude; but that it does exist among them I have already shown.

[40] This is not to be taken as contradicting the earlier statement that women would not renounce without a struggle the rights they have gained. The world can not move toward freedom without carrying women along; they would not tolerate a dual movement, towards freedom for men and slavery for themselves. But when the general movement is away from freedom, as the movement of political government is at present, the rights of women are endangered along with those of men.