‘Enfranchisement of Womanhood’ by Eugene V. Debs from The Progressive Woman. Vol. 2 No. 22. March, 1909.

Karl Marx declared that the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. The same is true of the enfranchisement of womanhood. The disabilities imposed upon and accepted by woman in the past on account of her sex can be removed only by herself.

The Socialist movement is the first to recognize and proclaim the injustice of sex distinction in reference to the rights, privileges and opportunities of civic and social life, and the Socialist party is the first to pledge itself unqualifiedly to abrogate that relic of barbarism and place woman where she ought to be–on an equal plane with man.

There is no need to argue here the question of “woman’s sphere” in bourgeois society, it being well understood to be limited by woman’s meek submission to the will of her lord and master and by the conventional rules and regulations imposed upon her with or without her consent.

If she be rich she is ordained to be a doll, a plaything, a coquette, spending her time in vain and frivolous, if not harmful and immoral indulgences, wasting her life, dissipating her energies and ending her useless existence in mental childhood, leaving no trace of service to society, and no memory of duties nobly fulfilled to preserve her name.

If she be poor she is doomed to drudgery and is all but a social outcast.

But rich or poor, woman has been and is still treated as the inferior of man in all that is essential to her mental and moral development. She is denied the freedom and opportunity without which she can no more develop the latent qualities of her nature than a flower can bloom without the vitalizing influence of the atmosphere and sunlight.

This is particularly true of the working class woman, who even in her bondage is made to feel the added weight of her sex inferiority and to bear all the odium of being an economic menial, a political nonentity and a social exile.

But happily the days of woman’s sex servitude are almost ended. No longer does she tamely acquiesce in her inferiority and degradation. At last she realizes that she has been victimized, that she has been shut out of life’s golden opportunities under the hypocritical pretense that she is the “weaker vessel;” and with the growing consciousness of her rightful place in the family, in the state and in society, she is making her influence felt, and in a corresponding degree the horizon of her sphere is expanding.

But even among Socialists there are traces–sadly out of place of the miserable middle-age superstition that woman is but the shadow of man, that she should maintain the deferential attitude of being the beneficiary of a privilege granted, instead of a right conceded, and that her voice should be seldom heard in the party councils, or not at all.

It is true that this sentiment prevails to no great extent in the Socialist party and yet such is the perversity of ancient prejudice that while equality in the abstract is recognized, the true spirit of it is denied in unconscious discrimination.

Here, as elsewhere, the remedy lies with woman herself. She may not in justice to herself or the party acquiesce in any restriction whatsoever, least of all when dictated by a custom born of ignorance and hoary with age. She must insist upon the recognition due her as a human being in the Socialist movement, not merely in the perfunctory sense declared in the law, but in the spirit and essence of its emancipating philosophy.

There are too few women in the Socialist party organization, in proportion to its male members, and far too few who are active in the management and direction of its affairs.

There is no reason why there should not be as many women as men in our locals and in our municipal, state and national conventions.

Nor is there any valid reason why they should not be equally represented in the field as lecturers and organizers, and on our tickets as candidates.

All that stands in the way is custom, the ignorance implied in the child-like observance of conventional “properties,” and this should be battered down with the ruthless iconoclasm the revolutionary spirit has for hoary shams.

Woman loses not one whit of her innate modesty in braving the frowns of fossils, whatever their standing or sex.

In proportion to her numbers woman has a remarkable work to her credit in the Socialist movement. Without her influence and activity the Socialist party would scarcely have an existence. All her zeal and enthusiasm are brought into play, all her patience, persistence and unconquerable fortitude are developed in the struggle for freedom, and she has already proved herself to be a powerful propagandist in the revolutionary movement.

If the Socialist women would realize their ambition to be free and fulfill their manifest destiny they must take their proper places in the movement and demand in all things the consideration due them as equal factors with men in the struggle for emancipation.

The Socialist Woman was a monthly magazine edited by Josephine Conger-Kaneko from 1907 with this aim: “The Socialist Woman exists for the sole purpose of bringing women into touch with the Socialist idea. We intend to make this paper a forum for the discussion of problems that lie closest to women’s lives, from the Socialist standpoint”. In 1908, Conger-Kaneko and her husband Japanese socialist Kiichi Kaneko moved to Girard, Kansas home of Appeal to Reason, which would print Socialist Woman. In 1909 it was renamed The Progressive Woman, and The Coming Nation in 1913. Its contributors included Socialist Party activist Kate Richards O’Hare, Alice Stone Blackwell, Eugene V. Debs, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and others. A treat of the journal was the For Kiddies in Socialist Homes column by Elizabeth Vincent.The Progressive Woman lasted until 1916.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-woman/090300-progressivewoman-v2w22.pdf