Though not attributed, this article was likely written by Victoria Woodhull.
In this age of progress, wherein rapid strides are being made in all branches of civilization, woman seems to be about the only constituent feature devoid of the general spirit that controls. All the elements of society are becoming more distinctly individualized with increasing heterogeneity. Its lines of demarcation, while increasing numerically, become more distinct. The whole tendency is to individual independence and mutual dependence. It is most true that in the aid progress receives from peoples, the female element is but poorly represented, but its effects are sufficiently obvious and diffusive to demonstrate, even to her, that there must be a forward movement made by the sex, else it will be left entirely too far in the rear to perform even an unimportant part in the great wants that the immediate future will develop.
The wife was formerly the housekeeper; she is becoming less and less so every day. Many of the duties that once devolved upon her are now performed by special trades. Each branch of housewifery is coming to be the basis of a separate branch of business. Schools perform all the duties of education that once devolved upon the mother, and tailors and dressmakers absorb the labor of the wardrobe. The grocer and the baker pretty nearly supply the table, while the idea of furnishing meals complete is rapidly gaining acceptance. Thus, one by one, the duties of the housewife are being taken from her by the better understanding and adaptation of principles of general economy.
Victoria Woodhull,1872
While this revolution is in progress, the preparatory steps to cooperative housekeeping are being taken. Thousands live at one place and eat at another, when once such practice was unknown. Dining saloons are increasing more rapidly than any other branch of business, and more transient meals are eaten every day. The result of this will be a division of living under the two systems represented by the two classes of hotels—the table d’hôte and the à la carte. The residence portions of our cities will be converted into vast hotels, which will be arranged and divided for the accommodation of families of all sizes. A thousand people can live in one hotel, under one general system of superintendence, at much less expense than two hundred and fifty families of four members each can in as many houses and under as many systems. As a system of economy this practice is sure to prevail, for progress in this respect is as equally marked as in attainment, and, if we mistake not, is of a higher order. To obtain more effect from a given amount of power is a higher branch of science than to obtain the same by increasing the power. To lessen resistance is better than to increase power, and on this principle progress in the principles of living is being made toward cooperation. Allowing that the practice will become general, what will become of the “special sphere” of woman that is painted in such vivid colors by the opponents of the extension of female privileges? Are the powers of woman to be wasted upon vain frivolities so widely practiced now, when this principle is already operating, or are they to be cast in some useful channel—some honorable calling? Is fashion to consume the entire time of women of the immediate future, or shall they become active members of the social body, not only forming a portion of its numbers but contributing their share to the amount of results to be gained? True, the beginning of this practice is forcing woman into wider fields of usefulness; forcing them without preparation into competition with man, who has been trained to industry from youth—a vast disparity over which the complaint of unequal pay is sometimes raised without real cause.
Does woman foresee what these things are to lead to, or does she prefer to remain blind to the tendencies of progress in this regard? It is evident to every mind not willfully blind that woman is gradually merging into all the employments of life. [She is] being driven to it by the force of circumstances coming from new developments. It is a necessity. Occupation they must have, for not all women even will be content to lead useless lives. This condition is gradually increasing both in volume and extent, and with a persistency which overcomes all opposition custom offers, it proclaims its intentions. Why cannot its drift be recognized as a matter of course and all provisions made to help the cause along? Women who do not perceive these things, from habitual blindness to all that usefulness indicates, may be excused for their supineness; but men, who are habitually provident, stand condemned of inconsistency for all the opposition manifested to the course events will pursue.
In consideration of the fact that woman is entering the active sphere of life and is every day widening this sphere, can she sit in utter quiescence saying she has no desire to establish herself as an element of power politically? In this she voluntarily acknowledges her inferiority and her willingness to remain the political slave, which is but a shade removed from the slavery that cost the country so much life to extinguish.
However much man may at present resist the bold demands of the few now calling for political equality, were the sex as a whole to rouse itself into a comprehension of the situation and its prophecies, with the determination to assert equality of privilege in the control of that in which they have an equality of interest, he would not dare to refuse. Let the question be put home to yourselves in the light of rising events and considered with calmness and wisdom. Are you willing to remain a political nonentity, a dependent upon the consideration of those who do possess political rights, and be subservient to masters of others’ making? Shall you not the rather demand political equality, basing it on an equality of interest in the results to be obtained through the exercise of political rights? The first means continued dependence; the last means the beginning of independence. These are the questions. Consider them.
June 25, 1870
We clip the following sensible remarks from an article in the Philadelphia Daily Chronicle, and commend them to the consideration of our readers:
This is the age when, for the first time in human history, the rights of all living things are, in some way, recognized as existing. We are far enough yet from according to all their rights, but we talk about them; we see them, and thought is busy to determine how they should be best secured.
Even the dumb animals have their advocates. The bird flies, and the horse labors, exempt from many a former abuse, danger, or ill. Man, with his superior muscle and pluck, has secured for himself a recognition that forbids others to trample upon privileges which he calls his own. And woman, too, is rising with her demand that whatever is man’s right should also be conceded as her right as well. It is an age of rights; we wish to give all their due; and those who cannot speak for themselves must be spoken for.
In regard to women, our idea is that their present condition is neither as bad as it has been nor as good as it will be. There has already been so much thought and said about their rights as to receive some modification and a fairer degree of common justice. But in regard to the rights of children very little has been thought, or said, or done. They cannot speak for themselves. There are few to speak for them. They are still looked upon very much as property. It is still conceded that their parents have an exclusive right to them. If those parents wish to send them to beg day after day, it is thought that they have an undoubted right to do so. If they desire to send their children forth as bootblacks at six or eight years of age, there are few interested, or disposed, to dispute their right to do so. Or, if they will that their children must stand all day at the loom, or by the spindles, or do some kind of manual work, instead of going to school, it is usually regarded as right that they should do even this. Nobody, perhaps, regards it as wisdom for them to do any of these things, but there are enough who regard it as an undoubted parental prerogative.
Now it is just this which we wish to stoutly and emphatically deny. The children have rights of their own, rights in which society ought to protect them in all cases where parental wisdom fails to do it. Children are not property. They are not the born servants and slaves of their parents. They belong to themselves, and it is their inalienable right to be, in an age like this, fitted for taking some useful and self-supporting place in the world’s works. It is their right to receive an education according to their capacity, just as good as our public schools can provide. No parental authority has any right to intervene between them and those advantages which shall make their experience and influence in life the best possible. It is really of less consequence that the home of today be uncomfortable, than that both it and the homes of its children should be without promise. And parents should not be allowed to sacrifice the future of their children to their own desire to get on a little further in the world. Children ought to be protected against this shortsighted avarice of their fathers and mothers. Children are not to blame for the ignorance in which they are growing up. The fault is first parental, then social. If parents are poor and ignorant, general laws ought to provide that every child should not suffer unnecessarily from neglect, and humane individuals ought to see to it that in every neighborhood those laws take effect.
These poor parents plead that they need the work of their children to help in the maintenance of the family, to buy the clothing and the daily bread. In some cases this plea is just. In a larger number of cases it is groundless. Where it is just, it would be a better public economy to keep the family and pay for the children’s schooling than to allow the parents to deprive the children of their early advantages, their right to the privilege of education. The better citizens they would then become would more than repay the community in dollars and cents for its forethought and justice.
It ought to be a recognized first principle that every child born into the bosom of society has a right to the very best we can do for it. The welfare of the whole community is more or less involved in its welfare. If it is so cared for as to be useful and productive, society is the gainer. But if it be left in neglect, becomes a vagrant, a criminal, or a sot, society is continually taxed for its support and has constantly a heavy bill of expenses to defend itself from its vicious depredations. If we do not secure to children their inalienable rights, we suffer grievously for our neglect. We make the public expense greater, the public safety less, the public morality lower, and allow the whole public tone to fall far below the demands of a nominally Christian and enlightened age.
There are many other considerations touching the rights of children which are applicable to their treatment in the home. But today we had in view their treatment by society—its duty to secure them protection against the enslaving desire of poor and ignorant parents. We have abundant occasion to consider the matter. Here stand these twenty thousand children who have no schooling, no wise provisions made for them, who are beggars, vagrants, little bootblacks, newsboys, and who are maturing every day. What are their prospects? What are they likely to become? What are all the Christians, all the philanthropists, all the wealthy and the wise doing to secure them their higher rights?
December 5, 1870
R. Landor
You have asked me to find out something about the International Association, and I have tried to do so. The enterprise is a difficult one just now. London is indisputably the headquarters of the association, but the English people have got a scare, and smell International in everything as King James smelled gunpowder after the famous plot. The consciousness of the society has naturally increased with the suspiciousness of the public, and if those who guide it have a secret to keep, they are of the stamp of men who keep a secret well. I have called on two of their leading members, have talked with one freely, and I here give you the substance of my conversation. I have satisfied myself of one thing: that it is a society of genuine workingmen, but that these workmen are directed by social and political theories of another class. One man whom I saw, a leading member of the council, was sitting at his workman’s bench during our interview, and left off talking to me from time to time to receive a complaint, delivered in no courteous tone, from one of the many little masters in the neighborhood who employed him. I have heard this same man make eloquent speeches in public, inspired in every passage with the energy of hate toward the classes that call themselves his rulers. I understood the speeches after this glimpse at the domestic life of the orator. He must have felt that he had brains enough to have organized a working government, and yet here he was obliged to devote his life to the most revolting task work of a mechanical profession. He was proud and sensitive, and yet at every turn he had to return a bow for a grunt and a smile for a command that stood on about the same level in the scale of civility with a huntsman’s call to his dog. This man helped me to a glimpse of one side of the nature of the International, the result of LABOR AGAINST CAPITAL of the workman who produces against the middleman who enjoys. Here was the hand that would smile hard when the time came, and as to the head that plans, I think I saw that too, in my interview with Dr. Karl Marx.
Dr. Karl Marx is a German doctor of philosophy, with a German breadth of knowledge derived both from observation of the living world and from books. I should conclude that he has never been a worker in the ordinary sense of the term. His surroundings and appearance are those of a well-to-do man of the middle class. The drawing room into which I was ushered on the night of the interview would have formed very comfortable quarters for a thriving stockbroker who had made his competence and was now beginning to make his fortune. It was comfort personified, the apartment of a man of taste and of easy means, but with nothing in it peculiarly characteristic of its owner. A fine album of Rhine views on the table, however, gave a clue to his nationality. I peered cautiously into the vase on the side table for a bomb. I sniffed for petroleum, but the smell was the smell of roses. I crept back stealthily to my seat, and moodily awaited the worst.
He has entered and greeted me cordially, and we are sitting face-to-face. Yes, I am tête-à-tête with the revolution incarnate, with the real founder and guiding spirit of the International Society, with the author of the address in which capital was told that if it warred on labor it must expect to have its house burned down about its ears—in a word, with the APOLOGIST FOR THE COMMUNE of Paris. Do you remember the bust of Socrates? the man who died rather than protest his belief in the Gods of the time—the man with the fine sweep of profile for the forehead running meanly at the end into a little snub, curled-up feature, like a bisected pothook, that formed the nose. Take this bust in your mind’s eye, color the beard black, dashing it here and there with puffs of gray; clap the head thus made on a portly body of the middle height, and the Doctor is before you. Throw a veil over the upper part of the face and you might be in the company of a born vestryman. Reveal the essential feature, the immense brow, and you know at once that you have to deal with that most formidable of all composite individual forces—a dreamer who thinks, a thinker who dreams.
I went straight to my business. The world, I said, seemed to be in the dark about the International, hating it very much but not able to say clearly what thing it hated. Some, who professed to have peered further into the gloom than their neighbors, declared that they had made out a sort of Janus figure, with a fair, honest workman’s smile on one of its faces, and on the other a murderous conspirator’s scowl. Would he light up the case of mystery in which the theory dwelt?
The professor laughed—chuckled a little, I fancied, at the thought that we were so frightened of him. “There is no mystery to clear up, dear sir,” he began, in a very polished form of the Hans Breitmann dialect, “except perhaps the mystery of human stupidity in those who perpetually ignore the fact that our association is a public one, and that the fullest reports of its proceedings are published for all who care to read them. You may buy our rules for a penny, and a shilling laid out in pamphlets will teach you almost as much about us as we know ourselves.”
R. L.: Almost—yes, perhaps so, but will not the something I shall not know constitute the all-important reservation? To be quite frank with you, and to put the case as it strikes an outside observer, this general claim of depreciation of you must mean something more than the ignorant ill-will of the multitude. And it is still pertinent to ask, even after what you have told me, What is the International Society?
Dr. M.: You have only to look at the individuals of which it is composed—workmen.
R. L.: Yes, but the soldier need be no exponent of the statecraft that sets him in motion. I know some of your members, and I can believe that they are not of the stuff of which conspirators are made. Besides, a secret shared by a million men would be no secret at all. But what if these were only the instruments in the hands of a bold and—I hope you will forgive me for adding—not overscrupulous conclave.
Dr. M.: There is nothing to prove it.
R. L.: The last Paris insurrection?
Dr. M.: I demand firstly the proof that there was any plot at all—that anything happened that was not the legitimate effect of the circumstances of the moment; or, the plot granted, I demand the proofs of the participation in it of the International Association.
R. L.: The presence in the communal body of so many members of the association.
Dr. M.: Then it was a plot of the Freemasons too, for their share in the work as individuals was by no means a slight one. I should not be surprised, indeed, to find the Pope setting down the whole insurrection to their account. But try another explanation. The insurrection in Paris was made by the workmen of Paris. The ablest of the workmen must necessarily have been its leaders and administrators, but the ablest of the workmen happen also to be members of the International Association. Yet the association, as such, may be in no way responsible for their action.
R. L.: It will seem otherwise to the world. People talk of secret instructions from London, and even grants of money. Can it be affirmed that the alleged openness of the association’s proceedings precludes all secrecy of communication?
Dr. M.: What association ever formed carried on its work without private as well as public agencies? But to talk of secret instruction from London, as of decrees in the matter of faith and morals from some center of Papal domination and intrigue, is wholly to misconceive the nature of the International. This would imply a centralized form of government for the International, whereas the real form is designedly that which gives the greatest play to local energy and independence. In fact, the International is not properly a government for the working class at all. It is a bond of union rather than a controlling force.
R. L.: And of union to what end?
Dr. M.: The economical emancipation of the working class by the conquest of political power. The use of that political power to the attainment of social ends. It is necessary that our aims should be thus comprehensive to include every form of working-class activity. To have made them of a special character would have been to adapt them to the needs of one section—one nation of workmen alone. But how could all men be asked to unite to further the objects of a few? To have done that, the association must have forfeited its title of International. The association does not dictate the form of political movements; it only requires a pledge as to their end. It is a network of affiliated societies spreading all over the world of labor. In each part of the world some special aspect of the problem presents itself, and the workmen there address themselves to its consideration in their own way. Combinations among workmen cannot be absolutely identical in detail in Newcastle and in Barcelona, in London and in Berlin. In England, for instance, the way to show political power lies open to the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work. In France, a hundred laws of repression and a mortal antagonism between classes seem to necessitate the violent solution of social war. The choice of that solution is the affair of the working classes of that country. The International does not presume to dictate in the matter, and hardly to advise. But to every movement it accords its sympathy and its aid within the limits assigned by its own laws.
R. L.: And what is the nature of that aid?
Dr. M.: To give an example, one of the commonest forms of the movement for emancipation is that of strikes. Formerly, when a strike took place in one country, it was defeated by the importation of workmen from another. The International has nearly stopped all that. It receives information of the intended strike; it spreads that information among its members, who at once see that for them the seat of the struggle must be forbidden ground. The masters are thus left alone to reckon with their men. In most cases the men require no other aid than that. Their own subscriptions or those of the societies to which they are more immediately affiliated supply them with funds, but should the pressure upon them become too heavy and the strike be one of which the association approves, their necessities are supplied out of the common purse. By these means a strike of the cigar makers of Barcelona was brought to a victorious issue the other day. But the society has no interest in strikes, though it supports them under certain conditions. It cannot possibly gain by them in a pecuniary point of view, but it may easily lose. Let us sum it all up in a word. The working classes remain poor amid the increase of wealth, wretched amid the increase of luxury. Their material privation dwarfs their moral as well as their physical stature. They cannot rely on others for a remedy. It has become then with them an imperative necessity to take their own case in hand. They must revise the relations between themselves and the capitalists and landlords, and that means they must transform society. This is the general end of every known workmen’s organization—land and labor leagues, trade and friendly societies, cooperative stores and cooperative production are but means toward it. To establish a perfect solidarity between these organizations is the business of the International Association. Its influence is beginning to be felt everywhere. Two papers spread its views in Spain, three in Germany, the same number in Austria and in Holland, six in Belgium, and six in Switzerland. And now that I have told you what the International is, you may, perhaps, be in a position to form your own opinion as to its pretended plots.
R. L.: And Mazzini, is he member of your body?
Dr. M. (laughing): Ah, no. We should have made but little progress if we had not got beyond the range of his ideas.
R. L.: You surprise me. I should certainly have thought that he represented most advanced views.
Dr. M.: He represents nothing better than the old idea of a middle class republic. We seek no part with the middle class. He has fallen as far to the rear of the modern movement as the German professors, who, nevertheless, are still considered in Europe as the apostles of the cultured democratism of the future. They were so at one time—before ’48, perhaps, when the German middle class, in the English sense, had scarcely attained its proper development. But now they have gone over bodily to the reaction, and the proletariat knows them no more.
R. L.: Some people have thought they saw signs of a positivist element in your organization.
Dr. M.: No such thing. We have positivists among us, and others not of our body who work as well. But this is not by virtue of their philosophy, which will have nothing to do with popular government as we understand it, and which seeks only to put a new hierarchy in place of the old one.
R. L.: It seems to me, then, that the leaders of the new international movement have had to form a philosophy as well as an association for themselves.
Dr. M.: Precisely. It is hardly likely, for instance, that we could hope to prosper in our war against capital if we derived our tactics, say, from the political economy of Mill. He has traced one kind of relationship between labor and capital. We hope to show that it is possible to establish another.
R. L.: And the United States?
Dr. M.: The chief centers of our activity are for the present among the old societies of Europe. Many circumstances have hitherto tended to prevent the labor problem from assuming an all-absorbing importance in the United States. But they are rapidly disappearing, and it is rapidly coming to the front there with the growth, as in Europe, of a laboring class distinct from the rest of the community and divorced from capital.
R. L.: It would seem that in this country the hoped-for solution, whatever it may be, will be attained without the violent means of revolution. The English system of agitating by platform and press until minorities become converted into majorities is a hopeful sign.
Dr. M.: I am not so sanguine on that point as you. The English middle class has always shown itself willing enough to accept the verdict of the majority, so long as it enjoyed the monopoly of the voting power. But mark me: as soon as it finds itself outvoted on what it considers vital questions, we shall see here a new slaveowner’s war.
I have here given you as well as I can remember them the heads of my conversation with this remarkable man. I shall leave you to form your own conclusions. Whatever may be said for or against the probability of its complicity with the movement of the Commune, we may be assured that in the International Association the civilized world has a new power in its midst with which it must soon come to a reckoning for good or ill.
August 12, 1871