Mother Earth Magazine |
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emphasize the fact that the true enemies of woman are not men individually, but the corrupt and enslaving forces of the State -- representing the industrial masters, the Church, Morality, Custom.
But note the evasion of this problem of the freedom of the body in the works of our leading American feminists -- in the pages of Mrs. Gilman's "Forerunner" or in the glib and diffuse ramblings of one Beatrice Hale's "What Women Want" -- an interpretation of feminism recently published. These ladies -- and if they are not representative, they should be immediately corrected -- align themselves squarely with the good old forces of Respectability. They grow eloquent over "work" and "economic independence" -- revealing a pathetic detachment from the woman who does work, who might tell them something of the "glory of Labor." They would open all careers to women; but it is painfully evident that they desire only well-paid servile posts of the middle class, that they wish to become only the clean-handed slaves of the State, the Charities, the Churches, and the "captains" of industry. But these champions of chastity and feminism might profitably ask the victims of organized morality whether the cruelty they may have suffered from men has ever equaled that of these of these female charity and corrections experts, these eminent feminists who conduct reformatories and supervise jails and prisons. In a word, whatever so-called feministic progress has already been made has only strengthened and broadened the systematic interference of the Government and the Church with the lives of their victims. This is strikingly the case in the "political freedom" in those States where women have been given the ballot -- a "freedom" that has in not a few cases concentrated its activity into the hounding and persecution of other women -- prostitutes -- note the Redlight Abatement Act in California.
This alliance of the feminists with all the forces that have been the most determined enemies of the working people, of the poor and disinherited, in unconsciously but clearly brought out in Mrs. Hale's book. This book makes it strikingly and curiously evident that American feminism is a by-product of the middle-class habit of thought, instead of being, as it claims a vital and cre-
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