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Title: Woman must work Author: Madeleine Pelletier Date: 1921 Language: en Topics: class struggle, feminism Source: Retrieved on 10th September 2021 from https://forgottenanarchism.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/woman-must-work-by-madeleine-pelletier/ Notes: Published in Le Libertaire.
The Woman’s Voice published the summary of an article from the Rote
Fahne (The Red Flag) from Vienna on women’s labour.
It offers the old Socialist idea of the situation of women; an idea
which is primarily antifeminist since, by advocating to keep women at
home, it perpetuates their slavery. However, we can see some progress.
The Austrian Socialist understands that by closing the factory gates to
women, he turns her into an enemy of socialism, and he concludes in
favour of women’s labour.
It is annoying to see that, in matters of women’s rights, it is the
working class who proves most reactionary. Workers might want to free
themselves from the bourgeoisie, but they intend to remain masters of
their wives, maintain her in her economic dependency, in such a way that
she is forced to submit to sexual slavery in order not to starve. It is
in progressive groups that we can most often hear the old clichés on
women’s intellectual inferiority, her “special nature” which would ban
her from work, etc.
Women are weaker than men but this is of no concern for society. Far
from protecting women’s weakness, as it hypocritically pretends, society
only increases this hypocrisy, by taking away from the female sex the
means to live.
Weak or strong, women are individuals who have the right to live as they
wish.
During the massacre which just ended, we saw that only age-old prejudice
banned women from some professions. By opening these jobs to them, we
saw that they are able to do them. Their average ability did not equal
those of men, but it does not matter. It was still far from null, since
capitalists kept working women and even paid them wages as they had
never had before.
We always remain focused on the issue of equality or inequality which,
actually, does not have to be raised. Equality does not exist among men
in intelligence or strength; there are strong people, weak people and
average people in either domain.
Women will do what they can, and as long as the current society exists,
working women must fight to make bosses pay her labour as dearly as
possible.
Financial emancipation of women is not only justice, it is the real
interest of men. If most men do not think so, it is because they are
traditionalists. They want to live like their fathers and grandfathers.
Revolutionary as far as society is concerned, they do not want
revolution to enter their homes, but it must.
Housewives are the worst enemies of the revolution. Limited to their
kitchens, they do not know anything about the outside world, and she has
an instinctive fear of everything which threatens its peace and quiet.
To have a man who brings back good weekly and monthly pays, but who
doesn’t drink too much, who doesn’t hit her when the soup is not good,
that is her ideal.
In politics, she is reactionary because she is attached to her “home”,
just like the bourgeoisie is attached to their capitals. She hates
strikes and hates the unions who prepare them; she hates the groups
which incite her husband to forge what she considers wild dreams. To
her, an “honest man” is a quiet man, who doesn’t go out, who likes to
stay at home.
Superficial minds concluded from this very real psychology of the
housewife that women are incorrigible reactionaries. Housewives only
have the mentality of their state. She is like the artisan of the old
days who, confined at home where they worked on their own, had no idea
about social change.
It is the factory which made Socialists and Anarchists. Factories and
workshops will do to women what they did to men. And we will then see
that women don’t lag behind. The evolution which we indicate has already
started actually. The industrialisation of women will bring about the
revolution.