Woman and Socialism

Contents

1. Introduction 15 min 8

   Bebel defines the woman question as one phase of the general social question. Conservatives confine women to a “natural profession” that millions cannot or do not want to follow; bourgeois reformers seek education, professions and the vote within the existing order. Women bear a double yoke, social dependence on men and economic dependence, and legal equality removes only the first. Bourgeois and proletarian women can cooperate on equal rights, but a full solution requires abolishing wage-slavery and private property, which only the Socialist Party proposes. Bebel takes personal responsibility for his picture of the future.

2. I The Position of Woman in Primeval Society 44 min 18

   Woman, Bebel argues, was the first human being brought into servitude, and since relations between the sexes have changed with methods of production, they will change again. Following Bachofen, Morgan, Engels and Cunow, he outlines Morgan's epochs of savagery, barbarism and civilization and the supposed sequence of family forms: promiscuity, the consanguine family, the Punaluan family and the pairing family, read from kinship terms. With descent traced through the mother, the gens became a communistic “matriarchate” in which women were honoured, sat in council and matched men in strength, as he illustrates from the Bible, Herodotus, Tacitus and travellers' reports.

3. II Conflict between Matriarchate and Patriarchate 1 h 7 min 33

   Division of labour put herds, tools and slaves in men's hands, and the wish to bequeath property to their own children overthrew mother right: the patriarchate meant private property and the enslavement of woman. Bebel traces the change through Hebrew law, Aeschylus's Eumenides and Athenian custom, where wives were secluded while courtesans and Solon's state brothels served men, and prostitution became the complement of monogamy. He finds survivals of the matriarchate in temple rites, Sparta and modern peoples. Private property brought classes, written law and the state, whose rise he follows into Rome, from Cato's complaints to Augustus's marriage laws and imperial debauchery.

4. III Christianity 16 min 8

   Christianity grew from the misery of Rome's subject masses and women embraced it eagerly, but it repaid them poorly. Drawing on the Old Testament, the Gospels, St Paul and the church fathers, Bebel argues that it inherited the Oriental contempt for woman as the impure seducer, preached asceticism and celibacy, and taught wives obedience. Improvements in women's position came from Western civilisation's struggles against the Christian view, not from the church, and the cult of the Virgin Mary simply replaced older goddesses.

5. IV Woman in the Mediaeval Age 35 min 16

   The Germanic peoples, admired by Tacitus, kept traces of mother right, but their gens gave way to the mark community and then to feudalism, under which lords controlled serfs' marriages and claimed the right of the first night. Guild restrictions in the towns, war and plague left many women unmarried; they wandered with armies, entered beguinages or worked in municipal brothels organised like guilds, while poor girls were punished harshly. Bebel denies that knightly love honoured women and closes by praising the frank sensuality of the Middle Ages against modern prudery.

6. V The Reformation 24 min 13

   Bebel presents Luther as the spokesman of a frank, natural sensuality. Luther denied that marriage was a sacrament, attacked clerical celibacy and approved the bigamy of Philip of Hesse. Bebel reads the Reformation as the rising bourgeoisie’s revolt against feudal constraint. Its results for women were mixed: marriage became possible for former monks and nuns, but brothels were closed and “fallen” women persecuted. The economic decline and the Thirty Years’ War followed, along with the expropriation of the peasants and the exclusion of women from the guilds. Marriage laws grew harsher out of fear of over-population.

7. VI The Eighteenth Century 19 min 6

   The eighteenth century opens with the mistresses and morganatic marriages of German princely courts, imitated by nobility and bourgeoisie. Absolutist states needed taxpayers and soldiers, so governments from Spain to Prussia rewarded marriage and immigration, while manufacture began drawing women into textile work. Around 1800 opinion turned, and many German states again restricted the marriages of the poor, raising illegitimacy. The French Revolution, steam power and the “revolution from above” of 1866 swept these barriers away and freed women from much household production. Fear of over-population returned with the growing population.

8. VII Woman as a Sex Being 18 min 10

   Opening Part II, Bebel argues that women in bourgeois society are oppressed both as workers and as a sex. He treats the sexual impulse as a natural need whose healthy satisfaction matters as much as food, citing Luther, Kant, Schopenhauer and physicians. Suicide statistics from across Europe show men killing themselves more often overall, but young women more often than young men, which Bebel links to seduction, illegitimate pregnancy and frustrated love. Quotations from Krafft-Ebing and Ploss on unmarried women lead to three questions: does society meet these needs, can it, and how could it?

9. VIII Modern Marriage 25 min 9

   Against the claim that socialists attack marriage, Bebel argues that bourgeois monogamy is a forced institution resting on property, often far from a union of love. Economic insecurity makes children a burden, and falling birthrates in France, Germany and across Europe show that births are governed by economic conditions. He rejects the exclusion of women from industry, citing workers’ congresses. He mocks Lorenz von Stein’s idyll of marriage and quotes Mill. The chapter ends with the “matrimonial market”: indebted nobles, procuresses, marriage brokers and newspaper advertisements selling marriage like a stock-exchange deal.

10. IX Disruption of the Family 33 min 16

    Church and state sanctify mercenary marriages but obstruct their dissolution. The German Civil Code of 1900 abolished divorce by mutual consent. Divorce statistics from France, the United States, Germany and elsewhere show divorces rising faster than population and wives as the majority of plaintiffs. Divorce is commonest in commerce and the professions and rarest in agriculture. Bebel then contrasts the idleness and intrigue of upper-class marriage with the proletarian household: both spouses at work, children neglected, overcrowded lodgings, and the wife’s double labour. He notes that infant mortality fell when the 1860s cotton famine and the 1909 Swedish strike kept mothers at home.

11. X Marriage as a Means of Support 47 min 22

    Marriage rates rise and fall with prices and the business cycle, which shows that economic, not moral, causes govern them. Fear of poverty drives contraception, abortion and infanticide. Bebel attacks the French ban on paternity suits and the German Civil Code’s harsher treatment of illegitimate children. He blames a false education, all sentiment and accomplishments, for women’s supposed inferiority, and explains “female traits” such as gossip, vanity and rivalry by dependence and competition for husbands. He ends with the ill health of women, their ignorance of sex and motherhood, venereal infection by husbands, and marriage reduced to a means of support.

12. XI The Chances of Matrimony 47 min 17

    Bebel criticises Schopenhauer and Lombroso’s biological view of women and explains vanity socially: whichever sex must woo adorns itself. Census figures show that more boys than girls are born, but emigration, accidents, shipwrecks and higher male mortality leave Europe with a surplus of women, especially of widows. Military rules, expected incomes and the costs of respectability keep many men unmarried, and the propertied marry latest. Genteel women working for pin money undercut female home-workers, while bourgeois women’s clubs avoid radical demands. Bebel concludes that bourgeois marriage is decaying with bourgeois society and that only a new social order can free women.

13. XII Prostitution a Necessary Social Institution of Bourgeois Society 1 h 21 min 63

    Bebel argues that prostitution is the necessary complement of bourgeois marriage, as much a social institution as the police or the church. He quotes doctors and police officials who defend state regulation and exposes its contradictions. German law punished procuring while the police tolerated brothels, and medical inspection of women alone failed to check venereal disease, as England’s Contagious Diseases Acts showed. He describes the international traffic in women and the poverty, domestic service and seduction that recruit prostitutes. He then turns to illegitimacy, infanticide, foundling hospitals and the spread of venereal disease, and asks whether women’s demand for economic independence can bring relief.

14. XIII Woman in Industry 49 min 34

    Bebel traces the rapid growth of women’s paid work in Germany, Britain, the United States and France from census figures. Employers prefer women because they are cheaper, more docile and less organized. Women’s employment therefore grows while wages fall, and men and women are set against each other. He examines married women in factories, the sweated home industries of Berlin, dangerous trades and infant mortality, and the protective laws of 1891 and 1908. He concludes that this development, for all its evils, is irreversible progress. The answer is protective legislation now and, in the end, socialization of the means of production, under which women will be men’s equals.

15. XIV The Struggle of Women for Education 1 h 34 min 42

    Bebel defends women’s entry into the learned professions. Housework is being industrialized and the family is losing its old functions, so the home can no longer be called woman’s natural sphere. He rebuts the argument from women’s smaller brains with the anthropometry of his day, and attributes differences in achievement to thousands of years of unequal education. Darwinism, rightly understood, supports socialism rather than the rule of the propertied. He then surveys women’s admission to universities and to medicine in the United States, Switzerland, Russia and Germany. He covers student and ministerial opposition, Prussia’s reforms of 1908, women factory inspectors and women inventors.

16. XV The Legal Status of Women 1 h 21 min 34

    Bebel surveys women's legal and political position around 1909. Treating law as the expression of ruling interests, he compares the new German Civil Code, English coverture and its reform, the Napoleonic Code civil and the newer Swiss and Scandinavian codes, stressing unequal property, custody and divorce rules. He then traces the demand for political rights from the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft and the utopian socialists to the suffrage won in Wyoming, New Zealand, Australia and Finland, answers the usual objections, and concludes that women must ally with the proletarian movement.

17. XVI The Class-State and the Modern Proletariat 29 min 13

    Opening Part III, Bebel turns from women's status to the state and society as a whole. The modern state, he argues, is a class state that protects property, keeps the masses ignorant and taxes them through indirect duties. Arms races and national debts are ruining Europe, and a future European war of many millions would be uncontrollable: “the next war will be the last war.” Competition sets individual against individual and class against class; crime and vagrancy rise with economic distress, while wealth gathers in a few hands.

18. XVII The Process of Concentration in Capitalistic Industry 46 min 18

    Using the German occupational censuses of 1882, 1895 and 1907, Bebel argues that industry and commerce are displacing agriculture, small independent producers are disappearing, and large enterprises dominate mining, chemicals, machinery and textiles. Breweries, coal mines, blast furnaces, sugar refineries and shipping all show fewer, larger concerns. He quotes Karl Bücher's rebuttal of Yves Guyot on concentration, notes the rise of the United States, and uses income statistics for Saxony, Prussia, Austria, Britain and France to show wealth concentrating at the top.

19. XVIII Crisis and Competition 21 min 8

    Bebel explains crises as the result of unplanned production for an unknown market: firms expand together, overstock the market, cut wages and production, and drag other branches down. Unemployment counts from Berlin and England illustrate the 1907–08 slump. Trusts and stock companies cannot prevent crises, and the search for markets drives colonialism and naval rivalry. A swollen class of middlemen raises prices and encourages food adulteration; consumer co-operatives show that intermediate trade is superfluous.

20. XIX The Revolution in Agriculture 41 min 11

    Bebel examines agriculture under capitalism. Cheap overseas grain, military service and migration to the cities have unsettled the countryside, while estate owners combine farming with distilleries and sugar factories. Census tables show millions of tiny holdings; small peasants lack capital and machinery and fall into the hands of creditors, while great landowners, entailed estates and, in Austria, aristocratic hunting preserves engross the land. He discusses the conflict of town and country over food prices, deforestation, sugar bounties and stock-exchange speculation.

21. XX The Social Revolution 17 min 12

    Opening Part IV, Bebel argues that the ruling classes will yield nothing to reason, but that their power declines as the exploited come to understand their position. He declines to predict the exact measures of transition, but surmises that when the evils become unbearable a general expropriation of capitalist property will follow. Once the means of production are common, the state, the organ that protects private property, becomes unnecessary and dies out. Against the charge that this is robbery, he lists expropriations carried out “for the common welfare” in history, from enclosure to slave emancipation, and quotes Rodbertus on confiscating land.

22. XXI Fundamental Laws of Socialistic Society 1 h 23 min 45

    Bebel sets out the laws of socialist society: a duty to work for all able-bodied persons of both sexes, administration by elected and recallable boards instead of a government, and production planned by statistics rather than by trusts or markets. Citing Hertzka, he argues that rational large-scale production would cut the working day to a few hours. He surveys electricity, solar and water power, fast transport and synthetic chemistry, then argues for varied work combining mental and manual labour, the end of crises, trade and money, equal pay for unequal talents, and the claim that men are what society makes them.

23. XXII Socialism and Agriculture 57 min 28

    Land, Bebel argues, must again become common property, as it was in primeval society. Only society as a whole can undertake the canals, irrigation, drainage and reforestation that would end floods and multiply yields. He cites experiments showing the gains from large-scale farming, electric ploughs, seed selection, fertilizing and glass-house vine-culture, and argues that small peasants cannot use modern science. He discusses soil exhaustion, human manure and the new fixation of atmospheric nitrogen, and ends by predicting that the great cities will dissolve as population spreads across the country, ending the contrast between town and country.

24. XXIII Abolition of the State 8 min 5

    Socialism abolishes private property, and with it class rule, speculation and the anxieties of the rich. Quoting Engels’s Anti-Dühring, Bebel argues that the state, the instrument of the ruling class, becomes superfluous and “dies out” once society takes over the means of production. Ministers, armies, police, courts and parliaments give way to administrative bodies that manage production and distribution. Crime disappears with property, and the persecutors of socialism will be remembered only by historians.

25. XXIV The Future of Religion 5 min 8

    Religion, like the state, will not be abolished but will fade away. Bebel treats it as a reflection of social conditions, evolving from fetishism to monotheism and pantheism, and kept alive by ruling classes who no longer believe in it themselves. In the new society religion becomes a private matter. Morality, too, varies with social conditions from cannibalism to wage-slavery; its highest form, the freedom and equality of all, will be realised under socialism.

26. XXV The Socialist System of Education 25 min 13

    Equal education is impossible while education depends on money. Socialism will provide equal conditions, not uniformity. Society will care for mothers, then educate children together in play, gymnastics, science and practical work, under boards of parents and teachers. Bebel cites Paris school meals, American coeducation and the army’s officer ratio, and attacks the class character of German schooling: wealthy idlers, reserve-officer arrogance, deliberately ignorant workers and brutal religious reformatories.

27. XXVI Literature and Art in Socialistic Society 10 min 3

    Once grown, people will educate themselves according to their talents; science and art will flourish without professional castes, as Wagner foresaw in 1849. Social life will become public, with halls, libraries, theatres and baths. Theological and legal literature will vanish, and the trash of commercial journalism and fiction with it. Writers will be judged by elected experts, not publishers’ profit, and perfect freedom of thought, which bourgeois society only pretends to grant, will prevail.

28. XXVII Free Development of Individuality 23 min 12

    Socialist society will enable travel, adjust working hours to need and support the old and sick as a duty, not charity. Bebel discusses diet, rejecting dogmatic vegetarianism with Pavlov’s physiology, and calls for scientific food preparation in central electric kitchens. These, with central heating, laundries and cleaning, will free women from household drudgery and make domestic servants obsolete. Against Treitschke and Richter, he cites inventions bourgeois society has already produced.

29. XXVIII Woman in the Future 19 min 12

    In the new society woman will be economically and socially independent, educated like man and free to combine occupations. Marriage becomes a private agreement, dissoluble when love ends; sexual life is a private matter. Bebel cites George Sand and Goethe to expose bourgeois hypocrisy and ties compulsory marriage to inheritance, which disappears with private property. Humanity returns, on a higher level, to primitive communism, as Bachofen and Morgan foresaw, ending class rule and man’s rule over woman.

30. XXIX Internationality 12 min 6

    Socialism must be international, because capitalism has already bound nations together through trade, communication and labour congresses, making their social conditions alike and their class struggles identical. Bebel predicts a final, worldwide social struggle, a peaceful socialist “civilizing” mission and a federation of nations ending war, which he blames on rulers’ manipulation of national hatred. He mocks Grant’s and Robespierre’s appeals to God as bourgeois uses of religion.

31. XXX The Question of Population and Socialism 53 min 18

    Bebel attacks Malthus as an apologist for the ruling class: fears of overpopulation arise when land is monopolised, as in Rome, Ireland and Italy. Poverty, not plenty, produces large families. The “law of diminishing returns” is refuted by agricultural chemistry, and vast lands await cultivation, so humanity needs more people, not fewer. Women’s freedom will slow population growth naturally, and under socialism man will consciously guide his own development.

32. Conclusion 20 min 5

    Socialism comes through historical evolution, not arbitrary will. Bebel explains Germany’s overproduction of educated people by its many small states and late, rapid capitalist growth, which ruined artisans and drove their children into crowded professions. This discontented intelligentsia joins the workers. The Anti-Socialist Law failed, the movement grows internationally, and women, especially proletarian women, must join the struggle, for “the future belongs to Socialism, that is, primarily, to the worker and to woman.”