Reading notes & reflections and some questions — O. Bebel's 'Women and Socialism'

free discussion Reading notes
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Recently, I plan to study Bebel’s “Women and Socialism” again. In 2022, I was still very ignorant; when I first read this book, I just swallowed it whole. Now I realize I need to seriously study the theory of women’s liberation, so that I can establish a firm belief in women’s emancipation and pass the truth of Marxism to oppressed women and the broad masses of people. I still have many things I don’t understand, and I want to ask everyone.

The preface feels very well written. 【We live in an era of continuous social change, where mental unrest and doubt are increasing day by day, manifesting clearly among all classes in society, demanding thorough transformation. Everyone feels the ground beneath their feet shaking. Many issues have arisen, attracting increasing attention from a wide range of people, and whether these issues can be resolved is debated from various standpoints. Among the most important and increasingly prominent issues is the women’s question.】 Nowadays, both in China and around the world, the women’s question is very prominent. Since the restoration of capitalism in China, women have fallen back into the status of slaves; women face oppression from birth to death. In China, the women’s issue is also very prominent, which I believe is related to the sharp gender contradictions in China and the deep oppression of women by patriarchy. Globally, the women’s question is also very prominent, after all, it concerns half of the human population. But I wonder, why is the women’s issue more prominent in capitalist societies (compared to feudal and slave societies)? I always feel there must be an inevitability, a pattern, but I can’t quite articulate it.

The preface also explains the necessity of addressing the women’s question from two aspects. One is because it concerns the majority of society members, and 【on the other hand, the secular explanations of the development of women’s social status over thousands of years are far from the facts, so clarifying this issue is very necessary for understanding the present and the future. In fact, when observing this continuously progressing movement, biases often exist among different people, and even among women themselves, mostly due to ignorance and misunderstanding of women’s status. Many even claim that the women’s issue does not exist at all. That is, the position women have always taken and will take in the future is determined by their ‘natural duties,’ thus they are destined by fate to be virtuous wives and good mothers, confined to family life; outside their homes or in matters unrelated to their family duties, they are completely unaware.】

This mentions those who claim that the women’s issue does not exist; they believe women should naturally fulfill their roles as virtuous wives and good mothers, which is a reactionary faction on women’s issues mentioned later by Bebel. These people are extremely discriminatory and hostile towards women, believing that giving women, who are inherently lowly female slaves, a natural role as wives and mothers is enough, and they ignore the tragic realities women face. This results in millions of women being trapped in the so-called ‘natural duties’ assigned to them as housewives, breeders, and caregivers. They also ignore that millions of other women see marriage as a form of bondage and subjugation, living miserable lives filled with misfortune and lack, causing their ‘heavenly duties’ to lose their function broadly. However, these ‘sages’ are always indifferent to these facts. Similarly, millions of women work various jobs just to survive, often using unnatural methods, bearing burdens beyond their strength, and they are also indifferent to these realities. They dismiss these facts as they do the poverty of the working class, covering their ears and eyes, saying that since it has been like this ‘continuously,’ it will be so ‘forever,’ to comfort themselves and others.】 This reminds me of those online ‘Sun Ba’ men, who treat women as sex tools and reproductive machines.

To counter these male chauvinist fallacies, I believe one must expose the class interests behind the right-wing petty bourgeois and bourgeois male chauvinists’ claims that women are naturally destined to be sex tools and reproductive machines, and that the idea of being a virtuous wife and mother is a class interest. Such fabrications are meant to uphold capitalist patriarchy and male domination over women, ensuring every man has his own slave, thus maintaining the ‘long-term stability’ of capitalism. Bourgeois women are beneficiaries of the capitalist system; they are the ruling class of society. The so-called fallacies of sex tools, reproductive machines, and virtuous wives and mothers mainly target petty bourgeois and proletarian women, especially working women, adding another chain to their shackles, making them tolerate male oppression, and further tolerate capitalist exploitation and oppression. It also encourages oppressed men to think they still have women to play with, preventing them from resisting capitalism. If such reactionary male chauvinist ideas infiltrate the proletarian ranks, it will only cause division. Moreover, these fallacies are the most crude idealism, like religion. Religion is dogmatic, forcing people to believe in its teachings without any basis (such as the myth of God creating the world in six days), and men below claim that women being sex and reproductive tools is their ‘destiny’ and ‘natural arrangement.’ Furthermore, I feel that their focus on women’s reproductive and nurturing abilities is based on a certain logic—linking biological ‘functions’ (I don’t know how to express it) with social division of labor. But I currently don’t know exactly how to analyze this; I am still figuring it out.

TBC to be continued…
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I’ll stop here for now. The picture is related to female militia during the Cultural Revolution that I found, and I think it fits well.

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Could it be because, in capitalist society, women, due to socialized large-scale production, objectively participate in social labor more broadly than in the past, making the contradictions between the exploiting class’s restrictions on women and women’s participation in social activities more obvious, open, and intense? Additionally, capitalism has eliminated the complex layers of class found in past slave and feudal societies, so class contradictions and gender contradictions are also more apparent and straightforward. But this is just my guess; I hadn’t thought about this issue before. It was only today, after seeing the original poster mention it, that I realized this.

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After entering a capitalist society, women were regarded not only as private property but also as commodities. Whether in the old family or in society, there was a promotion of the idea that “women should sell themselves for a good price,” and many petty bourgeois women were deeply affected by this. This is similar to petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie that desperately compete and speculate to increase their own value, or use various means to speculate and profiteer, all becoming morally corrupt and extremely individualistic. The women’s issue in capitalist society is more prominent than ever, largely because the development of class struggle to this stage always demands equal rights for women from the revolutionary classes. Therefore, the bourgeoisie has to legally and explicitly recognize “First, if a marriage is valid, it must be a voluntary contract between both parties; second, during marriage and cohabitation, both parties must have equal rights and obligations”, which to some extent frees women from feudal coercion.
On the other hand, the next social form of capitalist society can only be achieved through proletarian revolution, reaching a communist society. The proletariat, in order to liberate themselves, must also liberate all oppressed people in society, women included. Therefore, women’s liberation is not only a gender issue but also a key issue in class struggle, which becomes even more prominent during the period of proletarian revolution.

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    Because capitalist society is the last form of private ownership, so any struggle against capitalism is also a direct struggle against all private ownership. The same applies to women’s liberation. All past struggles for women’s rights ultimately replaced one form of patriarchy under a certain social system with another form of patriarchy under a different social system. For example, in slave societies, patriarchy involved directly selling women as slaves, treating women as openly priced commodities, and the struggles of female slaves ultimately only changed them from being powerless female slaves to being “concubines” or “mistresses” whom men no longer directly regarded as tools, but this was essentially just replacing one chain with another. In bourgeois revolutions, the most thorough struggle for women’s rights ultimately only resulted in women reclaiming the right to sell themselves from their guardians, shifting from forced public or clandestine prostitution to engaging in the same activities “voluntarily” due to social economic coercion. Just like in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s desperate act of risking death was merely to turn being forced into selling herself to someone she did not want to marry into selling herself to Romeo whom she wished to marry. These movements for women’s rights, although they may have played some progressive role at certain historical periods, fundamentally did not treat women as equals. Women’s status remains fundamentally no different from that of slaves, merely regarded by men as tools detached from social production, especially as sexual tools and household slaves to be possessed and enslaved.

    In capitalist society, the goal of fighting for women’s liberation differs most from all previous women’s movements in that it no longer aims to improve women’s status within the family or their condition as slaves, but to fundamentally end the situation where women are slaves, excluded from social production, and regarded by men as beings without dignity or personality—meaning to completely destroy patriarchy rather than attempt to reform it. Since patriarchy involves the inheritance of private property, and is thus a crucial pillar of private ownership, this struggle against patriarchy is also a struggle against all private ownership. As a result, there is no longer any room for reconciliation between the exploiting class and the exploited class. In the past, the exploiting class might have accepted replacing old patriarchy with new patriarchy, such as feudal lords accepting their daughters marrying capitalists instead of marrying into noble families, or allowing their sons to marry daughters of wealthy merchants instead of counts, even permitting children to “freely” choose their marriage partners within certain limits. But what they could not accept was their children completely breaking free from their control, refusing to sacrifice their personal feelings for the benefit of the family in love and marriage, and loving others out of noble personal feelings. This way, sons would no longer be tools for inheriting property, and daughters would no longer be commodities to be sold; private ownership would collapse. Ultimately, when the family of the private owner rises in opposition to him, opposing private ownership, and when the private owner’s family is set ablaze everywhere, how can private ownership possibly be maintained? Because the interests are so significant, there is no room for reconciliation. The bourgeoisie will fiercely oppose women’s liberation on behalf of all existing exploitative classes in history, defending private ownership with stubborn resistance to defending patriarchy.

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Luanma, I just bumped this post and realized the original poster hasn’t updated it.

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Can urge for update