Part 1 (1/2)
Women As s.e.x Vendors.
by R. B. Tobias and Mary E. Marcy.
WHY WOMEN ARE CONSERVATIVE
We have often heard discussions of the reason we do not find women, as a s.e.x, in the vanguard of world affairs; why the great educators, strong figures in progressive or revolutionary movements, are men rather than women; why these movements, themselves, are made up almost entirely of men rather than women. People have asked over and over again why, in the fields of the arts, the sciences, in the world of ”practical affairs,”
men, rather than women, generally excel.
We believe the answer lies in the fact that women, as a s.e.x, are the owners of a commodity vitally necessary to the health and well-being of man. Women occupy a more fortunate biologic, and in many countries, a more fortunate economic position, in the increasingly intensified struggle for existence. And the preferred cla.s.s, the biologically and economically favored cla.s.s, or s.e.x, has rarely been efficient-to-do, has never been revolutionary to attack a social system that accords advantage to it.
As a s.e.x, women have rarely been rebels or revolutionists. We do not see how they can ever be as long as there exists any system of exploitation to revolt against. Revolt comes from the submerged, never from the group occupying a favored place. Today the revolutionist is he who has nothing to sell but his labor power.
The skilled trade union group is least revolutionary among the workers.
The best paid unions are not the most militant in acts calculated to improve the conditions of even their own group, and are least aggressive in conduct for improving the conditions of the whole working cla.s.s. So long as they occupy a more favorable position in the industrial world, the trade unions will have something to conserve. They become conservative.
We see the small, struggling farmers, who have probably very little to lose in this world save their debts and their mortgages, counting themselves in a cla.s.s of possible property owners and small exploiters, and generally throwing their support into movements promising petty reforms, when nothing but the abolition, or downfall of the system of private owners.h.i.+p in the means of production and distribution, can possibly help them.
The petty shop-keepers rail more against the ”outrageously” high wages and the short hours of the skilled workers than against the large business organizations, like the packing interests, or the great monopolies, that hold them constantly on the edge of failure.
Desperately and consistently, as they behold their compet.i.tors forced out in the irresistible march of centralization, they cling to their sinking s.h.i.+ps, their small deceits and petty ideology in the hope of one day winning out against the terrific odds opposed to them, and landing high and dry in the capitalist cla.s.s.
No shoe dealer in the darkest side street of the smallest village but hopes some day to leave his dingy shop behind and to climb into the cla.s.s economically above him. He counts himself a man of business, and thinks and acts and goes down to failure, individualistically. He hates and fears his compet.i.tors, ascribes most of his wrongs to them or to the highly paid skilled workers, and apes and envies the men whom he sees rising to wealth in the economic conflict.
As a s.e.x, women occupy a position similar to the petty shop-keeper, because they possess a commodity to sell or to barter. Men, as a s.e.x, are buyers of, or barterers for, this commodity. The general att.i.tude on this question of s.e.x may be, and in fact usually is, wholly unconscious; but the fact remains that men and women meet each other, in the capitalist system, as buyers and sellers of, or barterers for, a commodity.
Scarcely anybody recognizes this fact, and those who sense it fail to understand the inevitable result upon society and upon women themselves.
There is no office or saloon scrub-woman so displeasing and decrepit, no stenographer so old and so unattractive, no dish-washer so sodden, that she does not know, tucked far away in her inner consciousness, perhaps, that, if the very worst comes and she loses her job, there is the truck driver or the office clerk, the shaky-legged bar patron on the road to early locomotor ataxia, or the squint-eyed out-of-town salesman, who can be counted on to tide her over an emergency--usually for goods delivered.
When a man is out of a job and broke, he is flat on his back. His appet.i.tes, his desires cry out for satisfaction exactly as they did when he had money in his pockets to pay for the satisfaction of these appet.i.tes and these desires.
When a woman loses a job, she has always the sale of her s.e.x to fall back upon as a last resort.
Please understand that this is in no way a criticism of the conduct of women. We desire to lay no stigma upon them. We lay no stigma upon any cla.s.s or s.e.x or group, for down at bottom, men and women do what they do because they have to do it. The more we understand the economic and biological status of any group, the more we see they are compelled to act, under the circ.u.mstances, and in the environment they occupy, precisely as they do act. In the struggle for existence today the laurels are only to those who use any and all methods to save themselves.
We only want to point out that women =are able= to save themselves because of their ”favored” position in the biological world. Since economic interest and economic control are at the basis of all social inst.i.tutions, we want to show some of the results of this s.e.x monopoly possessed by women, and required by men.
Every group which possesses anything which is necessary to the health and well-being of any other group, is bound to be pursued, wooed, bribed, paid. The monopolistic cla.s.s, or s.e.x, in turn, learns to withhold, to barter, to become ”uncertain, coy and hard to please,” to enhance and raise the price of her commodity, even though the economic basis of the transaction be utterly concealed or disguised. All this is exactly as natural and inevitable as a group of wage workers demanding all they can get in payment for their labor power, or the land-owner holding up the farm renters for all the tenants will bear, or the broker selling to the highest bidder. No one is to be blamed.
The private possession of a commodity necessary to man, the lower cost of living for women, are the natural causes of lower wages for women than for men, and explains why women are actually able to live on lower wages, as a s.e.x, than men.
Few people speak frankly about s.e.x matters today. And still fewer understand them and their economic basis. The subject of s.e.x is clothed in pretense. We discuss women philosophically, idealistically, sometimes from the viewpoint of biology, but never from an economic =and= a biological standpoint, which is the only scientific basis from which to regard them.
Everywhere in the animal world except among humankind, the male possesses the gay and attractive plumage, the color and form to please the eye. Naturally he should possess them. But this is not so in the world of man. Here we find the woman decorating herself in the colorful garb. Woman has ceased to ask, ”Is he beautiful?” She asks ”What does he =own=?” or, ”How much can he =pay=?”
Men love to dress their women in expensive clothes, to provide them with luxurious surroundings, because this advertises to the world the fact that they are able to purchase a superior, i. e., a higher priced commodity. Women give much time and spend money extravagantly in articles of conspicuous waste for the simple reason that by so doing they announce the fact that =they= are finer than other women, higher priced, of a fancier brand, possessed of better wares.
Everybody knows that the office clerk who aspires to the affections of an artistically gowned, jewel decked young woman, often spends most of his wages upon her in the hope of winning her attention. His office a.s.sociates may describe her as ”fancy,” or speak of her as ”an expensive package.” And so the twenty dollar-a-week clerk magnifies his ”income”
in order to bribe the young lady into ”giving herself” to him in exchange for his name and some sort of life-long support, provided he can produce it.