Women, Resistance and Revolution (13 page)

This passage indicates the transformation Marxism made of
utopian socialist assumptions, while at the same time leaving unsolved many of the essential dilemmas of the earlier movement. There was no question of convincing oppressors as a group suddenly to become reasonable, or kind. Revolution was not a matter just of reason or human sympathy; it involved also the power to effect change. True, some radicals understood this before Marx. Much of the suspicion towards Owen from root and branch reformers was his early flirtation with the rich and powerful, ostensibly in the cause of the poor. But Marx’s ideas provided a clear theoretical and historical basis for this understanding. Thus Bebel argues that women must make their own struggle. However, the crucial difference which Marx made in his writing between previous exhortations to the workers to make revolution was to show how acting from their immediate situation the working class could not help but carry a potential alternative to capitalism at the very points at which they opposed the existing system. Bebel’s conception of women’s need to struggle is still a
moral
imperative. The imperative remains voluntary, an exertion of will. Here the break with utopianism is not made distinctly. There is no apparent way in which women could not help but act in some manner towards a socialist society. Like earlier revolutionary feminists Bebel could only appeal to women to see the light of reason. This is consistent with the more general theoretical and practical deadlock within German social democracy at this time and the lack of any strategy for the revolutionary seizure of power.

The immediate importance of his book was the application to the predicament of women of an historical approach combined with a very clear refusal to gloss over the awkward areas. He brought the argument right home into the socialist movement:

There are socialists who are not less opposed to the emancipation of women than the capitalist to socialism. Every socialist recognizes the dependence of the workman on the capitalist, and cannot understand that others and especially the capitalists themselves should fail to recognize it also; but the same socialist often does not recognize the dependence of women on men because the question touches his own dear self more or less nearly. The effort to defend real or imaginary interests, which of course are always indubitable, and unassailable, makes people so blind.
⁴

It was to Bebel’s credit that he could searchlight the murky areas
of his own movement. Blindspots were not peculiar to revolutionaries when he was writing; they had appeared long before, and are with us long afterwards. But it has usually taken a separate movement to force socialists to look at them long and clear, without flinching. There is nothing more incongruous than the innocent surprise of a Marxist when he finds his own theoretical conclusions confirmed within his own movement. Comradeship can become a kind of camouflage, obscuring rather than resolving the particular consciousness of sex, race and class. It can often mean that people just pretend to cast off the selves produced by the outside world. Bebel would not accept the disguise of comradeship. He believed that real contradictions within the movement had to be confronted openly.

He is much less aware of contradictory and opposing interests among women themselves. He neglects the problem of class conflict, which cuts right through any sense of women as a group. In the 1880s and 90s the class interests of upper- and middle-class feminists which emerged so clearly in the war were less evidently opposed to working-class women and to socialism. Bourgeois feminism could still appear as part of a vague human movement towards a better society. Its later manifestations evoked an understandable hostility among socialists, though in its crudest form this was to be expressed as a straightforward contempt for middle-class women, in which sex prejudice became confused with revolutionary zeal.

But Bebel can be much more open. There is real sympathy in his description of the way these women were ‘trained as dolls; fools of fashion’, and the insight with which he traced their frequent illnesses to the meaningless course of the lives they could lead. Internationally the prominence and activity of women from middle-class backgrounds is very marked in the socialist movement of this period. Undoubtedly the consideration of their particular experience of oppression was a product of their revolutionary activity and at the same time contributed to their participation in it.

The implications of his view that the women’s question was inseparable from the whole social question have still to be worked out:

The question as to what position in our social organization will enable woman to become a useful member of the community, will put her in possession of the same rights as its other members enjoy, and ensure the full development of her powers and faculties in every direction, coincides with the question as to the form and organization which the entire community must receive, if oppression, exploitation, want and misery in a hundred shapes are to be replaced by a free humanity.
⁵

The liberation of women thus demands its own specific forms of socialism, which come out of the experience of women in oppression. Subordination has a hundred shapes; it needs innumerable combined transformations. Socialism is not only the ending of class oppression or exploitation at the work place, but in every area of human experience. The regions of consciousness are not capable of tidy delineation, and the spheres of subordination interact.

Bebel follows Marx and Engels in his commitment to human development and his faith in human potential. Right at the end of his book sits a surprising passage. It has been dismissed as quite unconnected to his general argument for women’s emancipation, and impossibly utopian. He suddenly branches out into a discussion of the authoritarian education which serves to compartmentalize and limit human beings’ capacity to become conscious of the world around them. He sees this as part of the division of labour and sees socialism as involving the disappearance of both. ‘There will be no musicians, actors, artists and scholars by profession, but by spontaneous choice, by right of talent and genius.’
⁶

In fact this was quite closely connected to his conception of the break up in the distinction between men’s and women’s roles. He thought socialism would mean that the individual cellular existence of the household would be reduced. Human beings would lead an extremely sociable existence. There would be innumerable halls for eating, for games, reading rooms and libraries, concert halls, theatres, museums, playgrounds, green parks. Behind these proposals was a conviction common in the socialist movement that not only would the internal world of the family merge with the outside world of society, but that the division between work and play, play and education, education and work, work and love-making, love-making and work, would completely disappear. Of course the revolutionary re-creation of boundaries between public and private could not be solved by these passages in Bebel or in Marx’s and Engels’s approach to love. It had to be worked out in practice. The extent to which the personal life of human beings could or should be socialized was to cause much controversy in the Soviet Union after the revolution. It related to the
more general argument about what should be preserved from the pre-revolutionary culture, and what had to be created anew.

The socialist movement which developed in England from the 1880s onwards was one in which women’s emancipation was extremely important. The reasons for this are various. The agitation of middle-class women for higher education, legal changes, the participation of radicals in the movement against the Contagious Diseases Act, and for birth control, inevitably raised women’s right as a living issue which socialists could not ignore. Though the liberal feminist movement for equal rights culminating in the struggle for the vote has often been chronicled, it has suffered from adulation or outrage. The feminists appear either as great and noble heroines, or frustrated and ridiculous battle-axes. Many of the crucial questions about liberal feminism as a political and social movement are only just being asked. One of these must undoubtedly be the nature and extent of the interaction between liberal feminism and the various socialist groupings, both in terms of individuals and in terms of the influence of ideas. One obvious change was the emergence of the Pankhursts, minus Sylvia, as quite explicitly on the side of the ruling class, conservatism and the Empire in the period just before the war. The split was apparent when Sylvia’s attempt to link the women’s cause to that of the working class met with her mother’s and her sister’s determined opposition.

In the eighties and nineties the situation was much more fluid. Division was less clear and the points of agreement blurred. There were also aspects of the English radical and socialist traditions which aided an understanding of the women’s struggle, and immediate factors in the history of the reawakened interest in socialism which account for the prominence of the ‘woman question’. It was not so much the economic arguments of
Capital
(which were little known until the early 1900s), but the moral condemnation of the alienation of human relations in capitalist society (which came from the poets, from the romantic movement, from millenarian religion, from the writings of Carlyle and Ruskin) which provided texts for socialists. While Marx expressed the same horror of the inhuman effect of capitalism on human beings, in his later writing he quite explicitly subordinated moral concern to the attempt to work out a means of changing society by understanding its actual historical and economic basis. But within the socialism of the 1880s it was the immorality,
the ugliness, the narrowness, the absurdity of capitalism which preoccupies socialist discussion. There was also less interest in theories of organization and little grasp of strategy, which was to emerge after Lenin’s influence had been felt. As women’s emancipation was still a moral issue, and one which related to ideas about consciousness and cultural change, this emphasis meant it was considered a great deal in the wide range of subjects which were felt to be important. More immediately, the fact that secularism was closely linked to the growth of socialism, and that religious doubt led many middle-class intellectuals towards socialist ideas, questions about spiritual or material changes, figured prominently.

For example, the grouping which included many of the original members of the Fabians, the Fellowship of the New Life, split on this issue. The controversy about internal spiritual change and external political transformation was often fought out in terms of ‘either- or’ just as it is today. But there was quite a strong tendency among the early socialists to attempt to argue for both. To some extent this involved an immediate reaction against the emphases of Marx’s and Engels’s later life and produced a strong current of romantic socialism. Again this helped the question of women’s oppression to emerge clearly, because of all subordination this was precisely one in which the personal merged with the political. Though a cheap translation of
The Origin of the Family
was not available until the young rebels against Hyndman in the Social Democratic Federation started to import it from America in the 1900s, Bebel’s book was quite widely read in socialist circles, and had considerable effect.

In 1885, when it was published in England, Marx’s daughter Eleanor reviewed it with Aveling, the man she lived with, under the title ‘The Woman Question, A Socialist Point of View’ in the
Westminster Review.
They criticized the various feminist campaigns because they did not touch the economic basis of women’s oppression or have any real idea of a fundamental change in sex relations and in society as a whole. They followed Engels and Bebel in making a parallel between the worker and woman:

The truth, not fully recognized even by those anxious to do good to woman, is that she, like the labour classes, is in an oppressed condition, that her position like theirs is one of unjust and merciless degradation. Women are the creatures of an organized tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organized tyranny of idlers.
⁷

They acknowledged that women experienced a specific oppression from men. They argue again like Bebel that women must organize themselves:

Both the oppressed classes, women and the immediate producers, must understand that their emancipation will come from themselves. Women will find allies in the better sort of men, as the labourers are finding allies among the philosophers, artists, poets. But the one has nothing to hope from man as a whole, and the other has nothing to hope from the middle class as a whole.

They use ‘class’ in connection with women in the same rather ambiguous sense as Engels and Bebel. Their debt is apparent. The most interesting aspect of their article is as a response within the English socialist movement. The other sources they draw upon to support their case – Shakespeare, the
Vindication
, Shelley’s ‘Notes on
Queen Mab
’, Mill, Olive Schreiner’s novel
Story of an African Farm
, and Ibsen’s
The Doll’s House
– were characteristic texts for socialists who argued for the emancipation of women. They emphasize very much the connection between socialism and the creation of a new morality and new ways of living together. In the 1880s commitment to sexual frankness and opposition to the secrecy, silence and hypocrisy of bourgeois personal relationships still required a great deal of courage. They believed that under socialism marriage would be a purely personal affair; there would be no need for divorce. They thought like Engels that monogamy would be the form of relationship in the future, but a monogamy based on free choice. Women would be independent in every sphere, prostitution would no longer exist in any form. ‘There will no longer be one law for the woman and one for the man.’
⁸
Whatever sexual standards apply for him will apply for her. ‘Nor will there be the hideous disguise, the constant lying that makes the domestic life of almost all our English homes an organized hypocrisy.’