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Title: Socialism and Marriage
Author: Guy A. Aldred
Date: 1914
Language: en
Topics: marriage, socialism, love
Source: Original text from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=10817, 2021.

Guy A. Aldred

Socialism and Marriage

Foreword

This pamphlet was published at Shepherds Bush in 1914. It was revised

from The Religion and Economics of Sex Oppression, which was printed and

published by the Bakunin Press, at the Goswell Road address in 1907. The

purpose of the original pamphlet was described on the title page as

follows:—

“Being a consideration of the principles of Socialism and Freethought in

relation to Women, The Suffrage, Free Love, and Neo-Malthusian, together

with an examination of scriptural precepts and injunctions, the teaching

of the Christian Fathers, and of the Latter Day Saints upon the

questions of polygamy and the position of woman.”

The Foreword mentions how the pamphlet owed its inception to a lecture

delivered before the Southwark Socialist Club (S.D.F.) on January

7^(th), 1906, on “Socialism and Woman.” It concludes by dedicating “my

present effort to my comrade, Rose Witcop.” Subsequently, my

relationship with Rose Witcop became an interesting legal question and

gave rise to much newspaper comment. That relationship and the legal

question merit discussion in a separate work. The original preface can

be reproduced later.

The 1911 rewritten essay omitted the Mormon satire on Marriage Relations

and sermon on Jesus as a polygamist. This ought not to have been deleted

but should have been reviewed more thoroughly. A considerable section of

the 1907 pamphlet that was deleted from the 1911 revision ought to have

been removed to an appendix. In 1912 in the Herald of Revolt, and later,

in The Spur, the author discussed at greater length the various aspects

of the question of womari’s emancipation. It is my intention to bring

all these essays together in another pamphlet.

The full (1907) reference to the Church Fathers and their views on woman

has been restored in place of the more general summary published in the

revised pamphlet.

Glasgow, May 9, 1940.

G. A. A.

I.

The Bible is not a divinely inspired book. Its every line is not sacred.

Its very periods are not inspired. Its whole prospect is not awful.

Penetrate the gloom with which the Christian centuries have surrounded

the ancient “book above books,” and you will discover nothing more than

an old-time “book of books.” In this literary miscellany, it is

impossible to discover an even distribution of talent. The books are not

equally good. Every passage is not expressive of a common level of

ability on the part oi the authors. Many sentences challenge

publication. As many merit oblivion. Outlooks, it has in abundance from

that of Moses, gluttonous for power, to that of Isaiah, stern for the

righteousness of liberty. Minor priests rub shoulders with minor

prophets. Drama is found in job, cynical materialism in Ecclesiastes,

and the championship of secular authority only in Saul. Pentateuchal

polygamy is mingled with much divine imbecility. Sinai storms at sense.

But the captivity is followed by denunciations of useless ritual and

canting ceremony. The God with “back parts” gives place to the God of

spirit; the jealous to the zealous deity. His holiness hungers not for

sacrifice from the strong, but thirsts to sustain the weak. It abandons

dominion to cast out oppression. Works recording so radical a

transformation of the divine character or characters must boast a little

genius in places. Suspicion of such cannot be avoided entirely.

Of this natural magazine of literature, or collection of writings, no

mention will be made in this essay. We shall write only of a

supernatural “books of books.” This is a, circumspect “line in

literature” which time has rendered acceptable to the kirk elder and the

bethel deacon. Since it is treated to no variety of appreciation, it is

discovered to possess no divergency of style, nor lights or shades of

merit. It is the book. Not a fossil, but a whole geological stratum.

This is what the Hebrew literary museum has been hallowed into being by

the Church, which has disciplined the intellect of man to stagnation.

One day we shall understand the stratum so well that we shall discover

not merely fossils but living forms—the living forms of past struggles

for freedom. In the fetish, we shall glimpse the truth. At present, we

can see nothing beyond a rod of authority, which narrows our vision,

curbs our liberty, and commands our slavish devotion.

Mankind evolved and embraced this rod of authority in the ages when

darkness was its only light. Rod and victim experienced a common

degradation. Where all was divine equally, the vulgar was divine mostly.

The power of the rod consisted in its rudeness. The subjection of the

people lay in their lewdness. Wisdom was the flourish of accidence,

which ornamented the ecclesiastical crook. The Bible itself was its most

imbecile portions. Pearls were refuse because husks were gems. God’s

“blind mouths” secured social sanctuary, whilst power destroyed

perspective, and interest nursed misery.

We are devout neither about nor towards this Bible of despotism. We dare

not pretend a respect for the Bible of reality, for the Christian world

knows of no reality outside of the Bible of pretense. Its worthlessness

calls for exposure. We will discuss its relation towards w0man’s

freedom, because our social greatness, involving woman’s subjection, is

held to -be founded upon the said holy writ.

God’s word treats woman not to a lesson, but to a dirge. It ‘compliments

our mothers and sisters by insisting on their vicious curiosity and

ambition. Woman’s inherently corrupt nature is presumed to corrupt all

her male posterity. In the female line, there is so much spontaneous sin

that no room remains for any inherited taint. Fatherhood is virtue,

whilst motherhood is vice. It is unclean to suffer the pain of

“presenting” one’s masculine proprietor, called husband, with a child.

It is clean to have been the cause of the presentation. But it is doubly

unclean to bear a female instead of a male child. One wonders how the

father ‘escapes contamination in this event.

What the Jewish Code of Leviticus says in this connection, the Anglican

Service for the Churching of Woman retains. Female hysteria applauds the

lie.

God decreed that woman should be subject unto man. He destined her for

child-bearing at her husband’s will and domestic drudgery on his behalf.

Obedience must be paid to his every whim, care given to his comforts,

ministering to his passions, and submission to his castigation. The most

exemplary attention to the servitude of this underpaid housekeeping is

rewarded with pain and sorrow. From Eve to Dorcas, the records oi the

duet woman ‘characters in the Bible, preach the same dreary morality.

Even when exercising the virtue of most complete humility, woman remains

an abomination. Even when exhibiting no initiative, she exerts an evil

influence. Good dwelt in Nazareth, but it has never dwelt in woman.

Leah and Rachel were so much cattle given in wedlock to Jacob as a

reward for seven years’ service each. On the most flattering estimate

they were but good wages. Maybe their lord and master often viewed them

less charitably.

The Jewish Lord oi Hosts was a God of Rape. In Deuteronomy, he bade the

Hebrews force beautiful captives from among their fallen enemies--unto

whom they might have a desire—to be their wives. In judges, he has the

sons of Benjamin waylay the daughters of Shihol.

Man was the human being. Woman was the female. She completed that sex

nature, which was incidental to his physical “make-up. After

Constantine, the Church Fathers, who relished sacred writ, gravely

discovered that she had no soul, and noted, without alarm, that she died

like a dog.

To this day, a similar dictum prevails. Man is mankind and woman is the

sex. It is the function of man to dispose of her body, as his own

dependence on the laws of brute force, fraud, and purchase decide. She

has no right to object, no need to consent. Everything is done for her.

Man proposes, man disposes, and the ‘woman changes hands. What will be,

will be.

When a man dies, his “relict” is permitted to survive. She continues his

shadow until she completes another human being’s ;sex. Instead of a

relic, she is now an appendage.

In the Jewish ritual, she is permitted to discharge no functions

requiring individual initiative In the framing of the creed, canons, and

codes of Christendom her voice has never -been heard.

Jesus denied the God of Abraham and placed woman on terms of equality

with her accusers. The heresiarchs—Cerdon, Carpocrates, and Paul of

Samosata—applauded this view and repudiated Old Testament authority.

Visiting them with excommunication, “the Church accepted ‘Constantine

and Jehovah, and treated the world to those councils, doctrines, relics,

monastic institutions, and forgeries which have been the wonders of

sixteen centuries.

It invented the story of the resurrection. Thomas felt the wounds in

Christ’s side. Mary was not good enough to touch “the risen savior.”

Since he was man, an eternal soul, the testimony of Thomas counted.

Since she was woman, the sex instrument of man, the evidence of Mary was

of no moment. What she saw or heard could have no weight in the decision

of the Church.

Much is made of the alleged fact, that Christianity has “honored” woman.

Much, also, is said of the historical authenticity of the Christian

Scriptures. In support of which authenticity, defenders of the saintly

faith refer us to the Pagan Christian fathers.

Some of these fathers may be quoted in favor of Communism and they are

not always completely heterodox. Did the faithful folk, who cite these

worthies without question, believe in Jesus and understand the story of

his teaching and its historic perversion and negation, they would be

given less to this weakness. In the main, despite their varying degree

of heresy, these gentlemen were mostly ecclesiastical time-servers. Each

is the voice of the Church, not when he proclaims the truth of his

particular heresy, but only in his appalling declaration of allegiance

to superstition and oppression. The arrogance and ignorance has, oi

these Church Fathers, combined to become the gospel of Christendom. Some

of them may have urged Communism. All opposed the freedom of woman,

-denied her equity and justice in her relations with the male human.

St. Chrysostom describes woman as “a necessary evil, a natural

temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly

fascination, and a painted ill.” Obviously, cosmetics, lip-stick,

sun-tan, rouge, are as ancient as the ‘Church Fathers! The same saint.

asserted that “through woman the Devil has triumphed, through her

paradise has been lost; of all wild beasts, the most dangerous.” Equally

worthy of a Christian thinker, and similar in letter and in spirit to

this sweetly sympathetic dictum is that of Tertullian, who addressed

woman as “the Devil’s gateway,” and “unsealer of the forbidden tree,”

“the first deserter of the divine law,” “who destroyed so easily God’s

image, man.” Then there is the declaration of St. Gregory the Great, to

the effect that “woman has the poison of the asp, and the malice of a

dragon.” St. Jerome, who invented the doctrine of heavenly salvation and

substituted it for the doctrine of mental health, eulogized woman in his

quaint style as “the gate of the devil, the road of iniquity, the dart

of the scorpion.” This vies, in strength of declaration, with the word

picture created by the Christian genius of Clement of Alexandria. This

noble soul denounces affection for a woman as leading “to the fire that

will never cease in consequence of sin.’? Gregory Thaumaturgus placed it

on record, that, “verily, a person may find one man chaste among a

thousand, but a woman never.” St. Bernard apostrophized her as “the

organ of the Devil.” St. john Damascene contented himself with the

comparatively mild description: “the daughter of falsehood, a sentinel

of Hell, the enemy of Peace,” through whom “Adam lost his paradise.”

Similar testimony is borne ‘by St. Antony, Bonaventure and Cyprian, who

regarded woman, respectively, as “the fountain of sin, the arm of the

Devil, her voice the hissing of the serpent”; “the scorpion, ever ready

to sting, the lance of the demon”; and “the instrument which the devil

uses to gain possession of our souls.”

This is “the good news” that woman has welcomed down the Christian

centuries! For a thousand years, the insane and inane denunciation of

woman has been the teaching of Christendom. Even when it was no longer

as the gospel of Christian civilization, this teaching inspires secretly

the approach to woman as something uncanny if not positively socially

unclean in herself. The parade of gallantry ‘conceals the real attitude.

Whoever believes that the church fathers voice “the truth” of

‘Christianity must accept the degradation of woman as a divine decree.

Whoever regards the god oi Abraham as the heavenly pater of Jesus, must

look upon polygamy as compatible with God’s law. Holy writ boasts no

express discharge against it, and the holy spirit often commends it.

II.

The dutifully pious young lady of to-day does not believe in polygamy.

When she sells her chastity in the marriage market, she is guaranteed a

legal monopoly. That satisfies her conscience. She does not inquire

whether or not the man is offering her damaged goods. Indeed, she half

suspects that he has sown wild oats in the company of other women.

Henceforth, these are to have no claim on him. So her jealous sense of

honor is satisfied.

Polygamy, though Biblically sanctioned, dishonors woman, by making her

the property of man. It lays it down that one man has the right to own a

number of women as his lawful wives, and have connection with others as

his unlawful passions dictate. Under polygamy, the aim of every woman is

to be a lawful wife if she would be counted “respectable.”

Monogamy, though legally established, dishonors woman, by making her the

property of man. It lays it down that one man has the right to own one

woman as his lawful wife, and have connection with others as his

unlawful passions dictate. Under monogamy, the aim of every woman is to

be a lawful wife if she would be counted “respectable.”

The position of the wife under both systems is the same. She purchases

her position by her chastity. The chastity of the man is another matter.

A wife cannot be divorced from her husband through his having committed

adultery alone. There must be, in addition, the proven charges of

cruelty and desertion. Should the wife commit adultery, the husband can

obtain a divorce, and monetary damages against the corespondent, as a

solatium for his injured feelings.

Woman is the property of man. In marriage, she has no name of her own,

no right of parentage. Any man who, being unmarried to a woman, attempts

to force caresses on her is penalized for assault. judge and jury have

decided, however, that a husband is entitled to a show of his wife’s

affections. He has purchased that right, and may abuse her body, in

consequence, for years.

Not a few atheists attack the Bible for its polygamous teachings, on the

ground that they degrade woman. They denounce Mormonism for putting the

teachings into practice, as a “horrible example” to other Christian

systems. Of course, they deny that marriage is a sacrament of the

church. Today, after years of struggle, the State has been compelled to

accept their view, that marriage is only a secular contract. What good

has this “reformed outlook” done woman? In what way has it affected the

hypocrisy of marriage?

Let no man, says the Church sacrament, put asunder those whom God hath

joined together. In other words, let the Godfearing lawyers do it, if

you are rich enough to pay them. Surely if God exists, it should be left

to him to join the chosen ones together. Only blasphemy can expect the

priest, who does not know God’s will, to do it. Only impiety can dread,

that, without an idle ceremony, God cannot join together those whom he

wishes to have united.

The secular contract is as binding as the Church sacrament. It is as

substantially dishonoring to woman. It is equally false. To. object to

mentioning God’s name in the ceremony, when you do not object to the

slavish covenant it involves, is cant of the worst possible description.

To demand secular instead of ecclesiastical marriage, when virtue

demands the abolition of all marriage, is humbug. Marriage gave a

Christian preacher the power to deprive Annie Besant of her children.

Had she been unmarried, she would have owned both herself and her

children. As it was she was his property, and her children belonged to

him. It was not ecclesiastical marriage that did this, as distinct from

secular marriage, but marriage-the legalized sex relationship. Yet Annie

Besant, in an eloquent pamphlet on “Marriage: As it Was, As it Is, and

As it Should Be,” published in 1882, pleaded for a written contract

between the parties to a marriage union.

Annie Besant urges marriage reform, and simple divorce on the grounds of

incompatibility. Simple divorce is merely a legalized form of pure and

simple mating in the terms of free love, for it is marriage and

separation at will. Only the mating and separating are registered. This

timid, incomplete, and hypocritical approach to the solution of the

problem is the last hopeless gesture of property society. The need for

divorce means that monogamy is no more satisfactory to mankind than

polygamy. Actually, different mating systems should exist side by side

in a sane and civilized society.

It is the woman’s place to take care of the children. She must bear

unwanted children, and care for them amid much misery. If she neglects

this duty, she is sent to prison, and her children to the workhouse. Her

husband can plead that he was not responsible for his wife’s neglect.

Woman suffers all the penalties of a parent. She enjoys none of the

rights.

Under a promise oi marriage, a young woman consents to cohabit with the

man to whom she has been engaged for a number of years. He fails to make

good, and the victim of his lust becomes a social outcast at a moment

when she needs most friendship. No one owns her or her offspring. Were

there no marriage laws, such callous outrage would be impossible.

Dissenting cant views her as an “unfortunate.” It is wrong. Moral

conventionalism follows suit. It is wrong. The secular marriage has no

meaning if it is not destined to serve the same end. It is as

hypocritical as the ecclesiastical sacrament.

If woman did not lose her identity when she married, no one» could

object to her bearing children in her own right. If she owned her body

in marriage, there would be no shame attached to owning it out of

marriage.

But if woman owned her body, the marriage profession would be gone.

There would be no harlots to sell their bodies for a night. There would

be no respectable women to sell their bodies for life. Children could

not be la-belled bastards for a fictitious offense, and women would be

betrayed no more. Rape would disappear, -both by contract, and without

it.

Men and women would not commit adultery and practice desertion to escape

a wedded prostitution that did not exist. Irrational promises would not

-be terminated by unnecessary divorces. Papers would not carry notices

of men and women’s intentions to sleep together. They would not announce

the abandonment of the practice, or record reasons for changing

partners.

Women’s boast of marriage respectability is man’s exhibition of his

dishonor. It the father, son, husband, and sweetheart, did not outrage

some women, other women would not be able to avow their honorable

unions. Marriage bribes some women and degrades others, that man may

parade his sex infamy.

Human nature is shamed and dishonored not by this or that ceremony of

marriage. It is outraged by the institution itself. The moral of

well-being of mankind demands the abolition of marriage. Woman must own

her own body. She must choose the father or fathers of her children. If

name they must have, that name should be hers. Only this means not

reform but revolution.

III.

“Marriage,” wrote the late Dr. E. P. McLoghlin, “is not an empty form;

it is an indissoluble, untruthful, and unfounded contract, terminable

only by death or dishonor. Untruthful and unfounded because the

contractor saith, ‘I will love.’ He cannot do this; to love is beyond

the power or domain of will. He may say, ‘I do love.’ But ‘I will love,’

he cannot and ought not to say. ‘The law which would make her his.’ I

neither acknowledge the righteousness, nor even the possibility of any

law save that of mutual consent—that is, affection. I do not desire to

make any woman mine; it must be her love for me, and my love for her,

which alone can dictate an inviolable relationship between us. In the

presence of that love, either soluble or indissoluble bond, other than

the influence of that love, is as insulting as it is necessary; in the

absence of that love, any bond is as untruthful and useless as it is

immoral.”

The foregoing argument is unanswerable. Whenever it or any similar line

oi reasoning is advanced, no one attempts to reply to it. Every defender

of the legal institution will admit its validity, and then proceed to

question its morality.

First, do we believe that one man should possess a woman or that she

should be common property? This is supposed to bring the blush of shame

to the cheek, and expression of horror to the eyes. A little calm

reflection will dispose of it.

We have not proposed that woman should be common property. That is

polyandry. Under polyandry, a woman no more owns her body than under

polygamy or monogamy. All three systems decline to entertain the notion

that woman should dispose of her own body as she thinks fit. In every

case, it is the man’s not the woman’s desire, which counts. The woman

may desire to have connection with only one man, with no man at all, or

with several men at different times. That is her own affair. We propose

that she should dispose of her body accordingly. To no man would belong

the privilege of invading this right. How then can one talk of no

ownership but self-ownership being collective ownership?

Next it will be urged that this involves promiscuity. But does not the.

division of woman into two camps—“respectable” and otherwise—argue the.

existence of promiscuity? It promiscuity does not degrade man to-day,

why should it degrade woman tomorrow? At least, it would be an honest

promiscuity, and woman could select a healthy parent for her child.

Since the free woman could never be run to the marriage cover, her body

could never be outraged or her person degraded.

Having urged that freedom involves promiscuity, the defender of legal

marriage takes a lofty attitude. Promiscuity would degrade human‘

nature. Maybe; but if human nature is above promiscuity, how could

freedom reduce it to this condition? If monogamy is the result of

personal dignity, and cultured feeling, freedom can give only full and

free expression to that dignity and feeling. Then only those alliances

not based on either dignity or culture will disappear in a state of

freedom. If the woman lives with a man because she loves him, not

because she is tied to him, given freedom to decide, her choice will be

unaffected. Wherein, then, is it wrong for a woman to own her body not

up to the time she sleeps with a certain sex-mate, but for all time?

Let us canvass, fully, the significance of this word, “promiscuity.”

Annie Besant, pleading for monogamy, has pointed out, how, in the lower

ranges of animal life, difference of sex is enough to excite passion.

Here there is no individuality of choice. Among savages, this is

negated. It is still the female that is loved, but individual beauty

decides the connection. We rise to the civilized man; and find that he

needs, in addition to sex difference, and beauty of form, completion of

his higher nature. He needs satisfaction for heart, mind, and tastes.

From this it is argued that, the more civilized the nature, the more

durable does the marriage relationship become. It may easily prove

otherwise. The exclusive marriage union is a standard set up by the

prudery which objects to mixed ‘bathing and a pre-nuptial knowledge of

sex physiology. It implies that the joy of sex can never be known

unless, in every instance, it results in a certain act. Behind this

view, is the idea of the hunter, of courtship, of the slavery of woman.

As men and women mix more freely, as the charm of health and the lights

and shades of character express

themselves more variously, in wider and wider circles of social

intercourse, it does not follow that monogamy will disappear entirely.

But it does follow that the prime consideration will he healthy minds

and healthy bodies, joy, laughter, romping children, and social service.

That a man has been father of one woman’s child, is no reason why, if

his character completes that of another woman, he should not ‘be father

of her child. It will not affect the pain of bearing the child, or the

pleasure of caring for him.

“What about the children?” asks the moralist of to-day. Well, what about

them? Is the child’s right to live to turn upon the fact that he needs

food, clothing, shelter, and attention? Or, is it to be decided by the

fact that his father had had sex connection with but one woman? Where

consideration of the children is supreme, the moral code of the parents

does not matter. But if the question is the legality of some birth over

others, it is sheer cant to talk about the children. Nature never

created bastards. It was social respectability and prurient prudery.

That the matter has an economic aspect we are aware. Its discussion will

destroy the moral pretensions of the upholders of marriage, and bring us

clown to the materialistic factor. We shall discover then that

injustices attributed to free love, are common to class society.

Marriage will be revealed as a vice, reflecting vicious economic

circumstances.

IV.

“That a man and woman should occupy the same house, and daily enjoy each

other’s company—so long as such an association gives birth to virtuous

feelings, to kindness, to mutual forbearance, to courtesy, to

disinterested affection—I consider right and proper,” wrote Robert Dale

Owen in the Barton Trumpet, in May, 1831. “That they should continue to

inhabit the same house and to meet. daily, in case such intercourse

should give birth to vicious feelings, to dislike, to ill-temper, to

scolding, to carelessness of each other’s comfort, and a want of respect

for each other’s feelings—this, I consider, when the two individuals

alone are concerned, neither right nor proper; neither conducive to good

order nor virtue. I do not think it well, therefore, to promise, at all

hazards to live together for life.”

Most persons will agree with the above plea for divorce. It asserts the

immorality of the marriage tie. It puts all contracts out of the

question. Once the right to disregard laws in the part is admitted, the

duty of ignoring them in their entirety is implied. And every fresh

concession made in the direction of rendering divorce easier—for the

wealthy, and not for the poor, however—is a confession of the failure

morally of the laws to secure that harmony of being they are presumed to

effect. For laws are but the perpetuation of past errors. To realize

this tact is to believe in divorce. To subscribe to divorce is to accept

free love. If tree love involves promiscuity, divorce involves it. The

issue is between anarchy in love and compulsory loveless connection.

“When the two individuals alone are concerned,” qualifies R. D. Owen.

Can any sane person believe that it is either right or proper, either

conducive to good order or virtue on the part of the children to be

brought up in a loveless home? Do not the children learn to hate their

parents, and leave home at the earliest possible date in consequence?

Family life is the great lie of civilization. Parents sacrifice their

honor for their children, and children destroy their genius for their

parents.

What of the children? Are there no foundling hospitals? Are there no

mothers denied the right to bring their children up tenderly, because

they, the mothers, were not wedded to the fathers? What of these

children? Since when has God told man it was justice to oppress the

weak? If the foundling home is good enough for some children, it is good

enough for all.

Under free love, all men would desert their children. Of course the

argument is nonsense. Nothing of the kind would take place. All men are

not scoundrels. Admitting that the present financial system continued,

and that all fathers deserted the children, woman would cease to be the

household drudge, man would become his own domestic serf, and the

children, at the worst, would become all foundlings. They would -be

clothed and fed, as to-day they are educated, by the state or else the

community. If they are not pauperized by receiving common free

education, they will not he pauperized by receiving common free clothing

and food. If they are, then illegitimates should not be pauperized in

this way. ‘The marriage laws should go, in the interest of the

illegitimate.

This would have an economic effect. The workers’ wages are governed -by

his cost of production. When the luxury of family life ceased to enter

into that cost, his wages would decline. The children, heirs of the

commonwealth, would be kept still out of the workers’ labor power.

We have said the question is an economic one. It is. No man has the

right to help a woman because she needs help. If she has children by

another man, however great her suffering, his chivalry must not lend a

helping hand. Only where he has assaulted the woman’s chastity is he

permitted to assist her. It is not justice, not the sufferings of the

woman, not the tears of the children. It is the owning of the w0man’s

person that counts. Men who believe in marriage laws laugh at the idea

of “keeping” another man’s children. Why? Does the worker not keep the

children of the rich—and the parents into the bargain?

Analyze it, and this family life plea becomes individualism run mad.

Driven by the wants of his family, the dock-worker fights for his job.

Does he care about the family life of the weaker man he has ousted?

Hunger and misery evolve a thief. The need to live manufactures the

detective. Both have families. Both fight for them. The limb of the law

wins—and his family is happy. The thief loses—-and a family tragedy is

enacted. What of the children? Does the wedding-ring give them food?

“When the Scottish miners came out on strike in 1894,” wrote Mr.

Chisholm Robertson recently in the Glasgow Evening Times, “and

throughout the strike the miners of England and Wales continued at work,

filled the markets depleted by the abstention from work of the Scottish

miners. This was a veritable harvest to the miners over the border. It

prolonged, however, the fight, finally defeating it, with much suffering

to the families of the men on strike, great hardship to the workers of

kindred trades, and entailed years of hurt to the Scottish coal trade.”

The English miners were thinking of their wives and children. Their

family considerations prevented them being just to all women and

children of their class in whom they had no property. Good husbands can

make poor citizens. Good fathers make poor fighters against class

injustice. Surely the marriage which reduces a man to a scab should go.

Surely we are less than brutes if we cannot realize that our lives are

mean and narrow if we do not secure happiness and joy to others. When we

realize that, the class-struggle is substituted for the family struggle.

We are no longer husbands, wives, and children—but comrades and chums,

freely associating as the propaganda and our interest in it demands.

V.

Mother Grundy believes that the two sexes cannot smile, without

contemplating the sex-act. That a pleasant day cannot be spent without a

similar consequence. That mixed bathing leads to suggestion. That a

handclasp is fatal, and, even in moments either of extreme sorrow or

extreme joy, the most humble kiss of sympathy is dangerous. At one time,

no man was allowed to speak to a woman unless he had “honorable

intentions.” Properly translated, this meant dishonorable ones.

This is changed now, and Mother Grundy is wrong. The function of woman

is not to share barracks with man, and bear him children. She is

entitled to get all the health out of life possible. Free association

gives that health; and as we mix no longer in the presence of a sex

mystery, but understanding each other’s physiology, sex may give charm

to our friendship. It does not rush us into sex-connection. Knowing our

freedom, we are lured on by no forbidden fruit, and only at supreme

moments of passion will intercourse result.

We are speaking of Socialism, not of Capitalism, where intercourse is a

daily habit. Whilst full freedom belongs to Socialism, it would be wrong

not to embrace its teachings and endeavor to live up to some of them

to-day. To do so, is to break fundamentally with class-society; and even

though we enter upon free marriage rather than into free-love

relationships, it is but a step to the other, and prepares the

philistine imagination for the dawn of matriarchal society.

In free marriage, both parties retain their identities. But the man,

feeling bound by honor and duty, should his love cool, hesitates to avow

the fact. Woman, owing to her inherited position in slave society, when

emancipated even, too often experiences a jealousy which the free man

does not experience. But his regard for his friend, and the children, if

any, fetters his expression of his feelings. This is wrong—and must go.

T-he ecclesiastical marriage, the secular marriage, and the

VI.

Free love is impossible under capitalism. Yes: so is honor or truth of

any description. Is that any reason why we should ask the priest to

bless our sex-relationship, or the law to license our associations?

Woman is now a wage-earner. She suffers all the misery of free labor.

She -bears all the chains of the past. Reduces her male colleague’s

wages by competition, and then maintains his existence on the lesser

income. Legally, she remains his inferior.

In order to remove these anomalies, some middle—class women have been

urging on the State their right to vote, and thus assist in the making

of the laws that govern them. Superficially, the claim is

incontrovertible. There is no reason why woman should not enjoy the same

social rights as man. If men boast a property franchise, so should

women. If a small set of male parasites vote, not according to their

intelligence, but in ratio to the houses they own, logically a select

clique of female parasites should be entitled to the same privileges. If

a man can sit in the House of Pretense, woman can also. The sexes are

equal in honor and dishonor. The property male vote is not the

enfranchisement of men.

The limited equal enfranchisement of women is not suffrage for women. To

pretend so, is ridiculous. Short of out and out adult suffrage, women

suffrage is impossible.

Whilst one is securing the part, one can be realizing the whole. It is

as easy to win “adult suffrage” as its palliative, “woman suffrage.” The

more loudly you demand the former, the more likely you are to secure the

latter.

Adult suffrage, in its turn, is only a palliation—the shadow of

political power which will be granted, one day, to prevent the surrender

of the substance of economic power. There is a futility in striving for

anything short of Socialism; and the suffrage struggle embodies that

futility.

So long as the workers are dominated by the capitalist class, so long as

they remain the economic slaves of society, so long will they lack that

industrial liberty, without which all suffrage is a.. farce. Economic

determinism, the slow but sure awakening of the masses to their real

position, are the factors governing the nature of capitalistic

concession; so that the nearer the people come to the realization of

their condition, the more advanced will be the nature of the palliatives

we shall secure, Hence there is no necessity to concentrate our energies

upon the securing of palliatives. Let us come out for Socialism, and as

the Bible has it, “these other things shall he added unto us.” As with

the limited franchise, so with adult franchise, both are equally absurd

without economic conditions prevail that guarantee freedom from want,

and are equally fraudulent, therefore, as battle-cries.

Free-love propaganda, if not discussed in the terms of its economic

basis, may become an Utopian cause. Anti-State activity may prove the

same. So may Atheist agitation. But free love is not a palliative. It is

an expression of our Socialism, an avowal of our revolt. Anarchism is

not a palliative. It either compromises to “direct action” and reforms

itself into an abstraction, or remains revolutionary—a statement of what

Socialism politically and socially involves. Atheism is not a palliative

Either it degenerates into a lifeless superstition of unreasoning

reason, or just summarizes. the materialism of Socialism.

Socialism, then does not believe in votes under capitalism, petitioning

to administer the capitalist system, either for men or women. It urges

social freedom for both instead—a new economic order of living, social

and industrial democracy.

These facts are commended to the attention of those who desire to hasten

the dawn of the day when woman shall stand forth freed from the fetters

of theological superstition and economic bondage. Let them but—

Author’s Note

In the 1907 pamphlet, the piety theme is developed in detail. The women

characters of the Bible are listed by name and comment made, that their

several stories “are included in the hope of inculcating in the woman’s

mind the propriety of her ‘modest’ (!) retirement to the privacy of

domestic life, performing, in an exemplary manner, the duties of a

domestic serf, studying his desires like a subject, whilst extolling him

for his strength of mind, and power of acquiring knowledge and enforcing

his will. To these disgusting precepts, We find even the boasted savior

of Christendom made, by priestly tradition, to lend his aid.”

This passage stands: but it would interfere with the re-written text of

the 1914 edition to restore it to its place in the main essay.