Lida Parce on the difference between her idea of women under Socialism and those of her male comrades.

‘Doing Things With Women Under Socialism’ by Lida Parce from The Socialist Woman. Vol. 1 No. 12. May, 1908.

Formerly, when men talked with a certain sly knowingness about their inability to understand women, I thought they did it because they believed it would in some way endear them to “the sex.” It was considered rather cute, and in any case It enhanced that mystery and romance which is cultivated as a stimulus to the sex attraction. But since reading the expression of some Socialist writers on the subject of woman I have come to see that it is the solemn truth men have been telling with so many knowing glances and sly winks. I find their “thought” about woman is not thought at all; but the same old mixture of sentimentality and superstition on which the vanity of both man and woman have been fed from the days of chivalry.

One man writer commiserates us on the ruination of our beauty under capitalism, because, forsooth, “our face is our fortune.” And he comforts us with the starry hope that under Socialism we will no longer suffer this fundamental and fatal affliction. Does he take the universal woman for a silly milkmaid in a nonsense verse? Another declares that Socialism will “take woman out of the factory and the factory out of the home.” What, then, is woman going to do; live by her sex?

Still a third writer, who quite speaks with authority, throws a good old orthodox fit about “keeping” woman and “the right to work for, fight for and die for” woman, which proud man will reclaim under Socialism. And now comes one and avers that under Socialism each woman “will be made to reign” in a pleasant home. Excuse us! We have about served our term at being “made” to do things. And the reigning business in particular has suffered a sharp decline in popularity among those women who are in a position to choose whether they will “reign” or not. What women want, and will have, is free scope for the exercise of their faculties. They will have homes all right; but those homes will be organized for the comfort of themselves, not as places where they exist mainly as convenient economies for others. And they will not work overtime reigning in them.

This mass of hopeless vagaries that is uttered on the subject of woman’s position in society is well calculated to sicken the soul of a thoughtful and honest woman. One thing may be taken for truth. When women have free access to the instruments of production, without the intermediation of sex relationships, they will not live by their sex on any kind of terms. Woman’s face will no longer be her fortune. She will not be taken out of any place, nor put into any place; nor will she be made to do anything.

It is time for Socialists to leave off tilting at clotheslines on this woman question.

Progressive Woman replaced The Socialist Woman. 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/080500-socialistwoman-v1w12.pdf