Any woman determined to win for her sex a complete emancipation will not know how to remain indifferent before a future hastened or retarded with a social fact as important as communism.

The feudal regime based on the doctrine of force, established on aristocracy of birth, the bourgeois regime founded on the profit system and putting its emphasis on material wealth have both kept women in subjection and exploited them. Will socialism, when realized, perpetuate this subjection and exploitation?

With only a superficial examination, one might believe this. Many of the militant syndicalists hold exactly the same opinion about women as those ancient Romans, autocratic and egoistic, who could think of no words of greater praise to put on the tomb of a Roman matron than, “She remained at home and spun wool.”

They do not understand the life of woman, bound, as it is, by all the enslaving duties of the home. They do not think of any activity of woman except in the shadow of a man. I have now in my hands a letter which a good militant sent me a short time ago about the work of woman. ‘‘Many of the comrades,” he said to me, “have decided, as I have, to have their wives withdrawn from industry.”

He did not even realize the tone of ownership which he had used. One could easily see in his thought and in that of his comrades that, the husbands once having made the decision, women had only to submit themselves, no matter what they were doing, to their husbands’ wishes.

Even in socialist circles, sympathetic to the emancipation of woman, it never enters the minds of our comrades that this emancipation can be accomplished by making an appeal to women themselves. Even when one appeals to the beginner, when one encourages him, when one urges him to action, he will find the beginner in his quiet place.

So that if it were necessary for us to depend for our progress on the masculine ideals which dominate society, we would not see woman’s emancipation but in the hazy distance of the future.

But there are things stronger than the sentiments and ideals of individuals. All yield, whether they wish to or not, to the law of the milieu in which they live. Communism, which tomorrow will modify the very foundations of society, will replace the rule of gold with that of service and will create, of itself, a favorable environment where the freedom of this slave of the centuries can be accomplished.

On the regime of the right of the strong, woman can do nothing. To power of money has given to the man who brings his wages to his home an advantage over her whose drudgery is not paid for. Today, in basing all rights on that work, the masters of the new city are “the citizens who earn their living in performing a work productive or useful to the community, as well as those who are engaged in household work for the former in order to permit them to work.” (Constitution of the Soviets, Art. 64.)

By its principles, by the remaking of the very structure of society, a communist society cannot fail to help in the emancipation of women, and I add that if it does not bring to an end the economic inferiority in which women are today, it will maintain within itself an unhealthy ferment which sooner or later will ruin it.

To bring about the society of tomorrow, which should break all chains, socialists are charged with the duty of seeking out the cause of this economic inferiority of women and of recognizing that there is one of the most serious problems which will present itself for solution to the minds of the grave-diggers of the old order.

In our age of the machine, where physical force is no longer the only requirement for work, where nervous force is an important factor in the doing a task well, generally speaking, woman does not find any avenue of work absolutely closed to her. She can assure for herself an independent livelihood. The thousand experiences of the war have proved that she is equal to all tasks. She can be sure of her livelihood if she can always work.

The child comes to prevent it. The child is then the cause of the enslavement of women. As a mother, the worker can no longer work. A baby demands constant care; during the first two years of its life, it monopolizes completely the activities of its mother. Circumstances have thus placed the mother and her child up to the present time in a position of dependence on the father; and the father, through the instrumentality of the child, has made the woman yield to his authority. Society has not only tolerated this state of things, but has embodied it into its laws and sanctified it.

It is thus that our laws on marriage and on the family constitute a veritable monument of iniquity. They have placed woman in a state of complete slavery to the man and have made of her a creature to be exploited.

I say ‘‘exploited,” and the word is not too strong. Hours of work not fixed, sometimes sixteen or seventeen hours, the impossibility of leisure, permitting her no personal culture, working conditions which no one attempts to better (see whether or not our city officials, members of the departments in charge of the houses of the poorer classes, have ever thought of a central kitchen for workers’ houses or for a sensible arrangement of the interiors of their homes); horrible sanitation—the man cares little, for it is not he who spends hours taking care of these hovels without light or air which are the kitchens of the workers’ houses—-such is the life that awaits the woman worker in her home. Enslaved by endless drudgery which constitutes what literary sentimentalists call the “life of the family,” the “queen” of the home has never been able to find time to work out a way to make her lot an easier one.

The Communists of Russia have realized that socialist society must set itself to the freeing of woman; not only in appearance, by the passing of laws which do not take count of the economic inferiority inherent in the life of woman today; but by providing means which will free her in part from the hold of the child, and which will try, by industrializing certain domestic duties, to render less crushing her endless round of household tasks.

And this is not all. For as the years pass, the desire for the independence of women will be more clearly formulated; and they will realize to what a state of inferiority in the present state of society they have been brought by their maternal function.

And there will be presented directly to communist society, as it has been already presented to bourgeois society, the problem of guaranteeing the complete economic independence of the mother. It is for us then to commence to work out the solution.

The reader is doubtless astonished that I pass over in silence what action our earnest comrades among the women can do to bring about communism.

In my opinion, it is not necessary for the time being to think about this action. Woman is, in France, too crushed by drudgery and by laws to have had any leisure to study political and economic questions. She submits to the present state because the duties which crush her do not permit her to revolt against it.

It is only when the revolution will have achieved the essential conditions of economic and political freedom for woman: that she can make the step forward towards her place in the world.

The more enlightened among the women workers are in sympathy with communism. On them, one can count. The new society will give the workers their due. All, in the development of their abilities, will pay back a hundred-fold to the society which has freed them the equivalent of the services which they have received.

(Translated from La Revue Communiste”’ by Frances B.)