The heroic struggle of individual young women of the bourgeois world, who fling down the gauntlet and demand of society the right to ādare to loveā without orders and without chains, ought to serve as an example for all women languishing in family chains ā this is what is preached by the more emancipated feminists abroad and our progressive equal righters at home. The marriage question, in other words, is solved in their view without reference to the external situation; it is solved independently of changes in the economic structure of society. The isolated, heroic efforts of individuals is enough. Let a woman simply ādareā, and the problem of marriage is solved.
But less heroic women shake their heads in distrust. āIt is all very well for the heroines of novels blessed by the prudent author with great independence, unselfish friends and extraordinary qualities of charm, to throw down the gauntlet. But what about those who have no capital, insufficient wages, no friends and little charm?ā And the question of maternity preys on the mind of the woman who strives for freedom. Is āfree loveā possible? Can it be realised as a common phenomenon, as the generally accepted norm rather than the individual exception, given the economic structure of our society? Is it possible to ignore the element of private property in contemporary marriage? Is it possible, in an individualistic world, to ignore the formal marriage contract without damaging the interests of women? For the marital contract is the only guarantee that all the difficulties of maternity will not fall on the woman alone. Will not that which once happened to the male worker now happen to the woman? The removal of guild regulations, without the establishment of new rules governing the conduct of the masters, gave capital absolute power over the workers. The tempting slogan āfreedom of contract for labour and capitalā became a means for the naked exploitation of labour by capital. āFree loveā, introduced consistently into contemporary class society, instead of freeing woman from the hardships of family life, would surely shoulder her with a new burden ā the task of caring, alone and unaided, for her children.
Only a whole number of fundamental reforms in the sphere of social relations ā reforms transposing obligations from the family to society and the state ā could create a situation where the principle of āfree loveā might to some extent be fulfilled. But can we seriously expect the modern class state, however democratic it may be, to take upon itself the duties towards mothers and children which at present are undertaken by that individualistic unit, the modern family? Only the fundamental transformation of all productive relations could create the social prerequisites to protect women from the negative aspects of the āfree loveā formula. Are we not aware of the depravity and abnormalities that in present conditions are anxious to pass themselves off under this convenient label? Consider all those gentlemen owning and administering industrial enterprises who force women among their workforce and clerical staff to satisfy their sexual whims, using the threat of dismissal to achieve their ends. Are they not, in their own way, practising āfree loveā? All those āmasters of the houseā who rape their servants and throw them out pregnant on to the street, are they not adhering to the formula of āfree loveā?
But we are not talking of that kind of āfreedomā object the advocates of free marriage. On the contrary, we demand the acceptance of a āsingle moralityā equally binding for both sexes. We oppose the sexual licence that is current, and view as moral only the free union that is based on true love.ā But, my dear friends, do you not think that your ideal of āfree marriageā, when practised in the conditions of present society, might produce results that differ little from the distorted practice of sexual freedom? Only when women are relieved of all those material burdens which at the present time create a dual dependence, on capital and on the husband, can the principle of āfree loveā be implemented without bringing new grief for women in its wake. As women go out to, work and achieve economic independence, certain possibilities for āfree loveā appear, particularly for the better-paid women of the intelligentsia. But the dependence of women on capital remains, and this dependence increases as more and more proletarian women sell their labour power. Is the slogan āfree loveā capable of improving the sad existence of these women, who earn only just enough to keep themselves alive? And anyway, is not āfree loveā already practised among the working classes and practised so widely that the bourgeoisie has on more than one occasion raised the alarm and campaigned against the ādepravityā and āimmoralityā of the proletariat? It should be noted that when the feminists enthuse about the new forms of cohabitation outside marriage that should be considered by the emancipated bourgeois woman, they speak of āfree loveā, but when the working class is under discussion these relationships are scornfully referred to as ādisorderly sexual intercourseā. This sums up their attitude.
But for proletarian women at the present time all relationships, whether sanctified by the church or not, are equally harsh in their consequences. The crux of the family and marriage problem lies for the proletarian wife and mother not in the question of the sacred or secular external form, but in the attendant social and economic, conditions which define the complicated obligations of the working-class woman, of course it matters to her too whether her husband has the right to dispose of her earnings, whether he has the right by law to force her to live with him when she does not want to, whether the husband can forcibly take her children away etc. However, it is not such paragraphs of the civic code that determine the position of woman in the family, nor is it these paragraphs which make for the confusion and complexity of the family problem. The question of relationships would cease to be such a painful one for the majority of women only if society, relieved women of all those petty household cares which are at present unavoidable (given the existence of individual, scattered domestic economies), took over responsibility for the younger generation, protected maternity and gave the mother to the child for at least the first months after birth.
In opposing the legal and sacred church marriage contract, the feminists are fighting a fetish. The proletarian women, on the other hand, are waging war against the factors that are behind the modern form of marriage and family. In striving to change fundamentally the conditions of life, they know that they are also helping to reform relationships between the sexes. Here we have the main difference between the bourgeois and proletarian approach to the difficult problem of the family.
The Social Basis of the Woman Question, Alexandra Kollontai
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