[This is Chapter 19 of Murphey's book Socialist Thought.]
19
WOMEN AND THE FAMILY
Socialist views on women, sexuality and the family have been mixed.
Some authors have been "traditional" in their support of the monogamous marriage unit. They have favored the differentiation between masculinity and femininity, and have considered it advantageous to society for the wife to be centered in the home. These authors have not been anxious to draw women out of the home.
What may be surprising, at least to the beginning student of socialist thought, is how extensive the opposing cluster of views has been within socialist literature. A school of thought favoring "free love" or "a community of wives" goes back as far as the ancient Greeks and the utopian vision of Campanella. This viewpoint often calls for the communal raising of children. Some authors don't go so far as to join the "free love" school, but favor the equality of women, want women to become active in industry, and sometimes join in the criticism of monogamous marriage.
There is nothing in the socialist worldview that makes it logically imperative that a socialist adopt any particular position on these things. By way of comparison, we can see that a classical liberal has significant reasons for wanting monogamous marriage, with child rearing closely associated with the family unit: such a system decentralizes power and pluralizes the society. But socialist thought lacks any such functional relationship, with the exception that any totalitarian viewpoint will see considerable advantage in centralizing child rearing in the state. For those who are not totalitarian, the options are open. The desire to repudiate "bourgeois" norms will tend to propel them away from traditional views about the family, and the egalitarianism in the rest of the philosophy can lead naturally into "equality" as between the sexes; but a socialist can find reasons to resist these tendencies, especially if his cultural background supports monogamy.
Socialists who have favored “free love” or “a community of wives.” Earlier we saw that Aristophanes' comedy Ecclusiazusae spoofed a socialist viewpoint that advocated freely available sex and the communal raising of children. "All women and men will be common and free, no marriage or other restraint there will be" -- other than that "no girl will of course be permitted to mate except in accord with the rules of the State." As to children, "all youths will in common be sons of the old."l Later, Campanella's utopia, "The City of the Sun," involved "sharing all things in common," and this included a "community of wives."2
Kirkup tells us about Fourier's proposed community: "The principle of free attraction would be observed. Love would be free. Free unions should be formed, which could be dissolved, or which might grow into permanent marriage.”3
The anarchist John Henry Mackay defined "free love" in a way that turned it into an obligation: "That it is the duty of every woman to yield to the desire of every man, and that no man has the right to withdraw himself from the desire of any woman; that the children resulting from those unions belong to human society, and that this society has the duty of educating them; that the separate family, like the individual, must disappear in the great family of humanity."4
Chernyshevsky, on the other hand, wanted an obligation-free relationship between the sexes:
“0ne must have a pure heart, an upright soul, and that new and just conception of the human being which prompts respect for the freedom of one's life companion. Recognize her liberty as openly, as explicitly, and with as little reserve, as you recognize the liberty of your friends to be your friends or not.”5
An interesting twist, which illustrates the diversity with which such things can be applied, is that in Nazi Germany the elitist SS felt itself free of "bourgeois" sexual values. Mosse says that "here, among those who considered themselves the racial elite, both the bourgeois values and the nationalism tended eventually to drop away. During the war the SS was made up of not only Germans from the Reich but Aryans from other countries as well. Moreover, the bourgeois morality, the traditional family bonds, had little standing in the eyes of men who regarded themselves as a new order of knights.”6
In the context of "sexually liberated" thinking, monogamous marriage has come under attack as "bourgeois." In 1878, August Bebel spoke of "the slavery that present-day marriage means for countless women." He referred to women “as a sex that has been oppressed, ruled, and wronged by men throughout the course of development of our culture.”7 In The Communist Manifesto, Marx spoke of marriage as a form of bourgeois prostitution.
Socialists who have supported monogamous marriage. George Lichtheim says that Proudhon “regarded the family as the basic unit of society” and that this was “consistent with his puritanical and conservative outlook.”8
In a chapter on anarchism, Thomas Kirkup expressed his own opinion that "with regard to religion and marriage, it is hardly necessary to state that progress lies, not in the abolition, but in the purification and elevation of those great factors of human life."9
Rousseau took a view that may surprise us, since much of what he said has led in countercultural directions: "Marriage . . . (is) the most sacred and inviolable of contracts." He did not favor sexual license: "Up to the age of twenty, the body is still growing and requires all its strength; till that age continence is the law of nature . . . After twenty, continence is a moral duty; it is an important duty, for it teaches us to control ourselves, to be masters of our own appetites."10
Hermann Paull, a Nazi, opposed free love on genetic grounds (although this would not have been inconsistent, perhaps, with the elitist sexual license of the SS): "Monogamy, through the elaboration of perceptible biological hereditary stocks, enables human reason to bring together high-grade hereditary stocks for human breeding and to exterminate stocks of inferior grade. In this context free love means the admission of inferior biological ancestry to human breeding."11 This is an excellent passage to show why I believe that socialist thought is so variable that socialists can differ widely in their attitudes on marriage and the family.
Attitudes on the equality of women. Here again, the points of view have been mixed.
Kirkup tells us that "the school of Saint-Simon advocated the complete emancipation of women and her entire equality with man.”12 He says that Bakunin's anarchist Alliance "demands above all things the definite and complete abolition of classes, and political, economic, and social equality of individuals and sexes . . . .”
Chernyshevsky exclaimed "O human degradation! Depravity! to possess! . . . Each of us, men, possesses some one of you, our sisters! Are you, then, our sisters? You are our servants . . . There are the facts of life, bruising and crushing woman every hour because she is a woman.”13
An article by Hall Draper and Anne Lipow in the 1976 volume of the Socialist Register says that at the Erfurt Congress in 1891 the German Social Democratic Party, which was "the nearest thing to a Marxist party that had been formed," made "a complete programmatic endorsement of militant support to a consistent position for women's equality." Draper and Lipow make clear, though, that to the Marxist the primary struggle is between the classes, not between the sexes, so that women should become part of the class struggle: "We have no special women's agitation to carry on but rather socialist agitation among women . . . The main task, surely, is to arouse class-consciousness among women and involve them in the class struggle.”14
The Dolbeares explain that the New Left viewed the women's movement in a similar fashion; i.e., as an issue that must be seen as just a part of the much larger need to overhaul society in keeping with socialist values: "For the new left, women were as fully exploited in as institutionalized a manner as blacks, and their true liberation would require overhaul of dominant societal values and the economic relationships that sustain them.”15
Quite the contrary views were expressed by Rousseau. In Emile he wrote that "when Greek women married, they disappeared from public life; within the four walls of their home they devoted themselves to the care of their household and family. This is the mode of life prescribed for women alike by nature and reason." He went on to say that "to make woman our superior in all the qualities proper to her sex, and to make her our equal in all the rest, what is this but to transfer to the women the superiority which nature has given to her husband?”16
Proudhon again was socially conservative: "Society does no injustice to woman by refusing her equality before the law . . . If you alter this system you alter the natural order of things. You impoverish man without giving woman more dignity or more happiness.”17
Schoenbaum says about Nazism that "the entire complex of attitudes National Socialism represented drove it inevitably to anti-feminism . . . The three officially sanctioned areas of feminine activity (were) reproduction, the home, and 'womanly work."'18 Hitler himself said that "so long as we possess a healthy manly race -- and we National Socialists will attend to that -- we will form no female mortar battalions and no female sharpshooter corps. For that is not equality of rights, but a diminution of the rights of woman . . . An unlimited range of work opportunities exists for women . . . I am often told: You want to drive women out of the professions. Not at all. I wish only to create the broadest measure of possibility for her to co-found her own family and to be able to have children, because by so doing she most benefits our Volk!”19
NOTES1. Joseph B. Gittler, Social Thought Among the Early Greeks (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1941), pp. 152, 153.
2. Famous Utopias (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., no year given), p. 282.
3. Thomas Kirkup, History of Socialism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909), p. 37.
4. Leonard I. Krimerman and Lewis Perry (ed.s), Patterns of Anarchy (Garden City: Doubleday & Comany, 1966), p. 27.
5. N. G. Chernyshevsky, What Is To Be Done? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p. 301.
6. George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966), p. xli.
7. Ralph Miliband and John Saville (ed.s), The Socialist Register 1976 (London: The Merlin Press, 1976), p. 190.
8. George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 61.
9. Kirkup, Socialism, p. 247.
10. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile (New York: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1911), pp. 289, 299.
11. Mosse, Nazi Culture, p. 35.
12. Kirkup, Socialism, pp. 29, 242.
13. Chernyshevsky, What Is To Be Done?, pp. 41-2, 67.
14. Miliband and Saville, Socialist Register 1976, pp. 187, 198.
15. Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Patricia Dolbeare, American Ideologies (Chicago: Markham Publishing Company, 1971), p. 171.
16. Rousseau, Emile, pp. 330, 345.
17. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Selected Writings (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1960), pp. 255, 256.
18. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966), p. 187, 190.
19. Mosse, Nazi Culture, p. 39.