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organo del Partito Comunista d’Italia per la propaganda fra le donne |
Economically, China is still in a phase of primitive and patriarchal economy, payments-in-kind still being in use and possessing only a weak industry in a few big cities.
The working masses of China live in much poorer conditions than those in Western countries, for they are subject to double exploitation, by the pirates of world capital and their feudal lords. It is the Chinese woman who suffers even more miserable conditions than the man. At present in China more than 200,000 women are employed in the textile industry, their numbers do not tend to decrease, thus becoming an element of competition among the workers. They work in the night teams like men, losing their health completely. Women workers, with a day of 13 hours and more earn half the man’s wages: as a result, working conditions are terrible. On the other hand, millions of peasant women have been occupied since childhood with the heavy labor of the countryside,
Until the present day, the development of the Chinese woman’s body has always been prevented by traditional customs and religious obligations. Women cannot inherit the fortunes of their relatives. Politically and morally they are inferior to men. Even middle-class women do not have the opportunity to educate themselves; daughters belong to their father, who can even sell them as servants if necessary. And since the immiseration of Chinese peasants is always increasing, there are currently, not only in the cities but also in the countryside, many Chinese girls, sold by their relatives into prostitution.
These conditions naturally form a favorable basis for the development of the revolutionary movement among Chinese women; it can easily be predicted that before long the women of China will represent the great reserve army of the revolutionary proletariat.
At this time the women’s movement is in its initial stage, given the country’s lack of economic development, but the events of recent years have accelerated its development. About 1,500 women took part in the 1919 revolution, forming a revolutionary weapon themselves.
The political movement, because of its weak organization had to fail, but the women students and intellectual women in 1919, when the anti-Japanese movement, penetrated among the students, agreed with the men, making propaganda and staging demonstrations against Japanese imperialism.
It is evident that the women’s movement in China developed very early, because they persuaded themselves that their complete emancipation depends on their economic independence, which in turn can only be achieved through the proletarian revolution. That is why they now unite with the proletarians in the common struggle for social revolution. We can observe how at the Far Eastern Workers’ Congress in Moscow, convened by the Executive of the Communist International, the Chinese women delegates joined the men and that they jointly drafted the Far Eastern workers’ program of struggle. The Communist Party of China directs the organization of the revolutionary movement of women workers on the basis of the resolutions of the Second Congress of the C.I. and the Far Eastern Workers’ Congress. We are convinced that the women workers of China will soon unite under the banner of the Communist International and that they will become a mighty support for the world proletarian revolution.
There are many who dread the emancipation of women in the fear that women will come to lose their femininity. Not femininity understood in the physical sense, for it is now absurd to speak of feminine grace when there are thousands and thousands of women whom necessity drives to the hardest jobs, jobs that range from the harsh toil of the fields that hardens the features, to the unhealthy and heavy atmosphere of the spinning mills where all grace fades in a short time. But of the femininity that is summed up in the gentleness, submissiveness, and spirit of sacrifice that are innate in the soul of every woman still bound to the prejudices of bourgeois upbringing. Qualities that are then reduced to the most absolute lack of will, to the complete abdication of her own personality.
This femininity, which one might rather call moral and intellectual slavery, so dear to the unconscious egoists, so supported by the defenders of the bourgeoisie, is a good prop, indeed, a necessity of capitalist society.
The majority of women still think it is their duty to eternally obey, to always bend before the will of those she deems higher authorities. As a result of this, their life is but a series of sacrifices, labors, self-denial endured with holy resignation, because on the other hand they think that that was also the cross of their mother, of their grandmother, they know that for all other women it is also like that and in the belief that it must be eternally like that they lend themselves to the perpetuation of this mentality by educating their daughters also like that.
This false mentality is the first obstacle in the march toward women’s emancipation, and in it originate all the evils that weigh on the shoulders of working women.
The spirit of adaptability, so innate in the female temperament, if within the domestic walls it can sometimes be a merit, transported to the factory and workshop it is dangerous since it becomes a most powerful weapon in the hands of the capitalist to subject women to greater exploitation.
In fact, it is in grace of the submissiveness, the weakness, let us call it femininity, of the majority of working women if they are still under-salaried.
Working women give to the community their contribution of labor and sacrifice and for this they are entitled to better living conditions, but any improvement can only be achieved through the struggle and with the union of proletarian forces.
Proletarian women must make their contribution to the struggle that the proletariat conducts for its emancipation, but in order to make a contribution to the struggle they must find in themselves the courage to assert their own aspirations and personality by freeing themselves from a stupid and harmful femininity.
FELICETTA FERRERO
Perhaps even more than men, proletarian women are affected by the industrial crisis and the reaction that, taking advantage of the crisis, the capitalists have unleashed. Before the war and before unemployment had taken its present severe forms, women were almost exclusively employed in women’s work, which the long hours made heavy and exhausting. At that time the proletarian family drew its sustenance, for the most part, from the wages received by the man, the head of the household, and the woman brought her contribution to the family budget either by so-called housework: washing, making clothes, linen, etc., for the members of the family, especially if the latter was large, or by home work for third parties and only in a few cases by wage and industrial labor.
This state of affairs has now totally changed, however, and the burden of the family comes in many proletarian homes to rest totally on the woman. In fact, as a result of unemployment, thousands and thousands of workers find themselves unable, not only to provide for their homes, but also to provide for themselves, and for their most basic needs. As a result of this state of affairs, it falls to the woman to search with her weak forces, outside the family circle, for ways to provide for her family, at least the bare essentials so as not to die of hunger. And so we see that the, woman, in order to earn a crust of bread, adapts herself to the most strenuous and poorly paid work, bending more to capitalist exploitation and not realizing that she is thus playing into the hands of the industrialists, competing with male labor.
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The industrialist, always ready when, very seldom, the woman tries to reassert her rights, to cry out that the realm of woman must be exclusively the home, that woman is created for the family, etc., is, on the other hand, very little concerned with the fact that at present it is the woman rather than the man who must largely, by her labor, provide for the needs of the family. When he earns more, what else matters?
Looking at the various industries, we can see that the least affected and those that are working even now in full efficiency are precisely those that employ, for the most part the female element. The textile industry, for example, is working at full capacity, but those female workers have suffered even disastrous wage declines: many female workers even work for 30 cents an hour! And the industrialists’ claim that they are trying to reduce the price of their products is no justification for the fall in wages; the textile workers know that the price of the fabrics they produce has not fallen by even that much as the raw materials have fallen. So much for price reductions!
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In other factories the capitalists, while throwing male labor out onto the streets, try to replace it with female labor, precisely because the latter is more submissive and easier to bend. It is therefore necessary that proletarian women cease to be the majority of the reserve army of industrial capitalism. They who know how to make admirable sacrifices in the small circle of the family, who know how to find in themselves, in their affection for their loved ones, a superhuman strength that makes them endure the greatest labors must also, and with greater reason, find the strength to resist the industrial offensive and reaction. The moral strength they need to make these sacrifices, these efforts for their families, proletarian women must know how to find it for the benefit of a larger family, to which they also belong: the working class. Only by uniting their forces with the forces of the men, of the proletarians, by encouraging them to resist and struggle, by resisting and struggling as well, can they hope to one day rescue them and their children, from exploitation and starvation.
TERESA NOCE.
Housewives unfortunately still represent one of those groups who are distant, and sometimes resistant, to the struggles of the working class.
Housewives do not know the nerve-wracking heaviness of monotonous work, the grueling hours, the stubbornness of bosses, the oppressive discipline of the workshops and factories: they have no awareness of the enormous wealth that so painstakingly the working class daily produces for the benefit of a privileged group.
They feel capitalist exploitation only indirectly, so the feeling of rebellion against boss oppression in them is much more muted than in other categories of wage-earning women.
But since housewives are not subject to direct capitalist exploitation, this does not mean that their living conditions are better. They are the ones who run the household and must therefore provide the essentials of family life, which is not easy when - and this is the condition of almost all proletarian families - the wages are not sufficent. And then the housewives, in order to maintain a certain balance, must resort to the most minute economies, make use of all the fallbacks, all the accommodations, not minding the renunciations, the personal sacrifices, as long as the family boat keeps afloat.
It is as a result of these conditions of life that the housewives, in their preoccupation with how to provide for themselves when the meager means of subsistence come to an end, in the struggles between capital and labor perform a work, albeit indirectly, disruptive and sabotaging.
They are a most powerful weapon in the hands of bourgeois society, which it knows how to make use of to great effect. Its emissaries, from the pulpit of the churches, through the newspapers, in conferences, constantly recommend women, albeit in a more or less clear, more or less open form, in the name of their family peace and collective order, to curb the rebellious ideas of their men.
And unfortunately too many housewives still lend themselves to this game, and indirectly contribute to increasing the misery of their families, and to maintaining the slavery of their class.
Yet beyond the domestic walls ferments the struggle where their interests as proletarians are being agitated.
The consequences of this struggle affect the lives of the housewives, yet this huge mass of suffering and exploited proletarian women does not pull its weight in the scales of class struggle.
The capitalist class moves the offensive against wages, which are a source of new worries and annoyances to housewives. The capitalist class with its policy ripens the germs of new wars which so terribly affect the material, moral and intellectual lives of women. The capitalist class has unleashed the fiercest reaction humanity has known, which inexorably affects the entire proletariat without distinction of sex.
The housewives who suffer all the pains from which the proletarian class suffers must make an effort, get out of the narrowness of the small circles of ideas and raise their minds to the interests of their own class, even if in attending to these it will be necessary to neglect their own personal interests a little; for while the housewives toil to repair the small breaches in their domestic budget, the bourgeois offensive will make ever larger breaches to this which, with all their good will, they will no longer be able to repair.
The interests of housewives are closely linked to those of the proletarian class so they must not desert the ranks.
FELICITA FERRERO
The woman says: Politics, and how can that interest me? Politics, a somewhat vague word, a word that gives the impression of brutality, of boredom.
Politics for her is the dive bar and the public rally: the booze, the fist and again the long speech that appears in several newspaper columns and of which nothing is understood.
But the day comes in which one must go from door to door begging for work. Bread is expensive. The family huddles in the evening in an airless room, and the woman complains.
The war comes, her loved ones are taken from her, one of them dies, she encloses herself in her grief and thinks, “That’s the way fate wills it!”
Isolated in her home, in the thoughts of her family, she does not know!
She does not know that politics is bread, work and also war. She does not know that in diplomatic conferences today we argue about oil or coal, calculate debts and credits, as she does in the evening in front of her grocery book. She does not know that the politics that frightens her so much, is today mainly economics, and that the larder is empty in Europe, because, like unprepared housewives, the rulers have madly consumed their reserves and find themselves poor and hungry before an empty table.
In Russia the revolutionaries teach the people to read, in France the people read the newspapers but cannot read from the book of life, to the revolutionaries, the task of this teaching. The workers, the peasant women suffer. They do not know why, they do not know that there is a remedy, that all this can be changed, that it will change if they want it. Women need to understand that the affairs of the country are their affairs as well as the affairs of men. Are these going badly? All the more reason to take an interest in them, to try to get to the bottom of it. The woman does not vote. What does it matter? It is not the ballot, without a doubt, which gives common sense, clarity. It is not with the ballot that the people made the revolution and the Commune.
Without fuss, without big words it is necessary for women to educate themselves, for them to learn to see everything, understand everything. Not an unreflective enthusiasm born of vague sentimentality, no, but a slowly matured conviction, born of their lives, of their suffering. I would like all our comrades to know Maxim Gorky’s book: “The Mother”. It is the story of a poor, old woman, who has known nothing but a brutal life, brutal men. She does not know how to read. She knows how to reflect. She sees her eldest son change with her, she did not believe that a man could change. She sees him good and sweet to her. She sees him leaning over books, sometimes telling her about extraordinary things that she does not yet understand well, telling her about a life in which men will love each other and where everyone will have land and bread. She knows that these things should not be spoken loudly and trembles when he leaves her to go from village to village to speak to the workers and peasants. Her son’s faith becomes her own. She will work with him. She will carry pamphlets and books under her cloak until the day when without fear she will fall under the policemen’s whip.
In France as in Russia, it is with the obscure work of hundreds of comrades, patient and tenacious work, work of months and years that the Revolution can triumph. When it is made in the hearts and spirits of the women workers it will be close to taking place on the streets as well.
GELTRUDE CHARLES.
On the other hand, real sections of Communist Party membership were formed in the Ravenna, Veneto, Bologna and several other places, living a life of their own, detached from the youth and adult sections.
If because of woman’s politically and spiritually backward state it is sometimes necessary to draw her to us by special propaganda, when she joins our party there should no longer be in the face of it any difference between her and another comrade in the Section, neither of duties, nor of rights, nor of interests, she should work side by side with her comrades with the same faith, intensity and good will.
If at first some reluctance will be found in the women comrades to move into the mixed sections, they will recognize after some time that this measure has given them more opportunities to learn and deepen themselves in the questions of program and tactics that affect our Party and they will more easily become useful elements in the sections themselves.
Let the comrades immediately prepare for this merger and see to it that it takes place without dispersion of forces, the comrades prove with good will, seriousness and energy, with the spirit of discipline and combativeness that they are worthy militants of the Communist Party.
In Issue 9 of Compagna in an article titled “For the Defense of the Rights of the Female Proletariat”, I noted how during the congress of the Amsterdam International, in a brief discussion devoted to women’s problems and held amidst the indifference and hilarity of the congressmen, a proposal was put forward that women workers should organize separately from workers which, along with other women’s problems, was postponed for consideration at the next congress. In the same article I set out the reasons why I found such a proposal unacceptable; I noted how the Amsterdam International had never cared to examine, let alone protect, the special rights and interests of women workers, and I set out the program of the Moscow Trade Union International in this field of activity.
A few days later in Battaglie Sindacali, organ of the General Confederation of Labor, appeared an article entitled: About the Women’s Trade Union Organization – The International of Women Workers and the International of Trade Unions in which the history of the International Federation of Women Workers is given, the friendly relations it had in the past and has at present with the Amsterdam International, the likelihood of this federation being admitted, such as it is, into the Trade Union International is mentioned, and to which the following statement follows:
“These few lines are especially addressed to Piccolato Rina who in the “Compagna”, organ of the Communist Party of Italy for propaganda among women, has written a short article in good or bad faith but in which she shows the greatest ignorance of the history of these movements which tends precisely with all its forms to squeeze workers and working women into one movement”.
How Mr. or Mrs. IC, author of the piece can, with the help of their logic, justify this statement is not easy to imagine since the preceding writing, instead of disproving it, confirms the statements I made, illustrating and supplementing the report that of that moment of the congress appeared in Battaglie Sindicali and which I reproduce here, so that Mr. or Mrs. IC may also take note of it and adjust accordingly in their future writings:
“For the International of Women Workers”
SHAW: English, secretary of the International Textile Workers Federation. – Demonstrates the need for the labor movement to be assisted by the organization of women workers and calls on all trade unions to give work so that women’s labor may be regulated and women may be members of the Workers’ Unions with equal rights.
GHEVENARD, French, laments that the design of women’s organization presented by the Bureau has not yet been well appreciated. He pauses to explain the advantages of the Women’s International. The women’s question is vast and complex, because in addition to all the protections common with workers of the opposite sex, it involves the difficult problem of the pursuit of motherhood, child protection, etc. Such problems have not been practically addressed by any women’s organization so far. The Women’s International is ready to join the Amsterdam International, provided the latter undertakes to deal with the above issues by giving a guarantee of this by the inclusion of women’s representation in the Steering Committee.
PHILIPS, secretary of the women’s organization, is in favor of a more intimate union of proletarian women’s organizations with men’s organizations for struggle on the terrain of action and thought”.
She laments that the labor movement has never dealt as it needed to with the problems affecting working women. She is of the opinion that the division of unions between the two sexes is a necessity.
It is not true that women feel less solidarity than we do: in America female workers’ organizations are ready to join Amsterdam, while American men’s unions are outside the International.
After all, many national centers have realized the need to devote themselves to women’s propaganda by forming special unions. He recommends that the Bureau’s proposal be approved.
Mr. or Mrs. IC in their paper quotes verbatim the proposal alluded to here, clearing up any possible doubt as to the truth of my statements. Here it is:
“The International Federation of Trade Unions admits as such the International Federation of Women Workers to which the number of women organized in National Centers affiliated to the International Federation is to be reported, which will pay the contribution to the Federation for the actual number of women organized”.
The above report continued:
The chairman, noting that some disagreement has arisen on the proposal, proposes to vote on a motion in which he resolves to postpone the matter to a future congress, while admitting the need on the part of the trade union centers to intensify propaganda among the female proletariat.
D’ARAGONA makes a statement regarding what Mrs. Philips had to say about the accession of the Italian C. G. d. L. to the concept of unions divided by sex.
He agrees to postpone the discussion until the next congress, but is opposed to the paragraph which, by recognizing special women’s organizations, admits that new ones may arise in countries where they do not exist. In Italy the trade union movement is understood without distinction of sex and without any prevention against organized or organizing women etc.
The proposal to bring women workers into their own organization separate from that of the workers was therefore presented by the Bureau of the Amsterdam International; it was supported by some delegates, and by the secretary of the Women Workers’ International, and was postponed to the consideration of the next congress, which is precisely what I was stating.
In the above-mentioned report we are, of course, silent about the resounding laughter with which D’Aragona’s insistence was received and commented upon, which, however, cannot be refuted and justify my assertion that the congressmen showed that they considered the discussion of women’s problems merely amusing, or at least superfluous, and the opposition I made to their principles and attitude of our principles and attitude, expressed in the resolution voted on by the congress of the Red International of Trade Unions on the participation of women workers in the revolutionary trade union movement and quoted in my article, is one to which we shall continue to draw the attention of women workers.
RINA PICOLATO
The increasingly effective and conscious union of all proletarian forces worries the bourgeoisie, which tries by many means to stir up misunderstandings and discord between the different categories of workers, exploiting the weaknesses of one and the other and fomenting petty rivalries or base passions.
Thus, for example, by the insidious means that are usual to it, it tries to divide the peasants from the workers and to stir them up against each other.
It tells the peasants that while the workers in the fields were sent en masse to the war, the workers in the cities earned high wages in the munitions and arms factories, and that today the workers continue to earn fabulous wages by working eight hours a day, while the peasants are at work from morning to night, earning less.
To the workers then are revealed the rich savings that the peasants accumulate from year to year at the expense of the citizens, silent, of course, about agricultural wages, miserable almost all the time, and the large landowners who here amass truly fabulous wealth, no less than the great industrial exploiters.
The capitalist attempts to divide the proletariat of the countryside from that of the cities fail in the face of the clear political consciousness which the workers are increasingly acquiring.
In any case, they must be combated by active propaganda among the rural proletarians, and especially among rural women who are not yet sufficiently guarded against bourgeois pitfalls, through effective education.
The organization and political education of peasant women naturally presents special difficulties; for while the women workers in the workshops, as a result of the educative work of the factory itself, now feel the necessity of proletarian union and the struggle of the coffers, those in the fields are still, for the most part, resistant to any organization, to any form of interest and participation in political life. Many of them are under the influence of those who suggest as fatally necessary resignation to the evils of the land and submission to the powerful, promising all the joys desirable in a better world, and thus favoring the exploiters.
Rural women, dominated by these prejudices, which have been deeply ingrained in their minds for centuries, hardly attend propaganda meetings held in their countries and therefore have no opportunity to be enlightened and persuaded.
It is therefore necessary to exert private propaganda among them by means of family conversations, with a continuous work of persuasion that the communist comrades must by no means neglect, making use of their newspapers, exploiting daily events that can always become topics of criticism of the present regime, showing the faults and the crimes committed by capitalism to the detriment of the workers, trying in every way to penetrate their convictions, their communist faith, into the consciousness of the still backward women, to make known to the peasant women, and particularly to the wage-earners in the fields, their true social position, the strength of their trampled rights, which will also have to be used in the coming social revolution. It will help to make them consider the difficult and distressing conditions in which the women of the countryside live; who almost always perform work that is too burdensome for their strength and with excessively long hours, and ascribe to themselves an existence made up only of toil and hardship, devoid of any form of relief, of any means of elevation.
The women of the fields are also more sacrificially exploited than the agricultural laborers, for they are allowed lower wages than those granted to men, even where the work done is equal; and like the proletarian women of the city, they are also burdened with all the work of the house; which is sometimes even more numerous, for the country women do the bread, the laundry and the cloth and an infinity of other chores that the city women are spared.
In every way, with every argument, efforts must be made to prepare the women of the fields for the understanding of this fundamental truth: that their own, painful conditions and those equally sad conditions of their comrades condemned all their lives to toil for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and for the interests of the bourgeoisie, forced perhaps to fight and die, that all the odious servitudes to which the proletarians and proletariat of the fields as well as those of the cities are condemned will cease when their causes are eliminated; when, that is, the capitalist regime is destroyed and a new order is established which assures the collectivity of the producers of the fruits of toil and of the earth, proposes to make the life of all men freer, more intense and higher, and is also concerned with facilitating, with improving all work, even the burdensome work of the fields, with machines and instruments and means more and more perfected, so that the agricultural workers are also made partakers of a life that is materially less miserable, and spiritually better.
CAMILLA RAVERA.
Hear our voice which is the voice of the exploited, the dispossessed, the oppressed; of all the victims of social injustice. It comes from the deafening workshops, the fiery fields, the gloomy mines, the sad and dark hovels. It is the yearning of the rebellious multitudes, who, weary of suffering, struggle for a little light and sunshine; for a little life.
We wish, O sister, for this voice to reach you, to overcome all obstacles, and to reach into the dusty spinning mill where your youth fades, into the field where severe toil too soon bends you, into the dark solitude of your hearth where your soul withers, that it may descend into the deepest depths of your heart to bring you faith and hope.
We know your life because it is ours, we know your pain because it is ours, and we want our faith to be yours.
You aspire to a better lot, you ask life for some joy. Do not hope for joy in easy ways, they conceal the abyss.
You ask for some relief from your sufferings, do not seek this relief in a vain faith, do not try to mitigate your pain in asceticism; your pain is holy, do not obfuscate it, do not suffocate it in lies; live it entirely in all its greatness, measure all its intensity but do not let yourself be crushed by its power.
It is the source of a new life.
From the sorrows that undermine the souls of all the oppressed, whose sufferings have their origin in social injustices, is born the sentiment of rebellion against the society that generates these injustices, a sentiment that brings together, that unites the workers of all countries, that is not the aspiration of individuals but the aspiration of the proletarian masses struggling against bourgeois power for their redemption.
Join, O sister, with these masses; their fate of misery is yours as well; let their struggles and hopes be yours as well.
The road ahead is winding, and fraught with thorns; it will cost you many sacrifices.
Do not recoil from the sacrifice that awaits you.
Your life as a proletarian is and always will be a life of sacrifice, a sacrifice doubly painful because it is imposed by the hard necessities of life; while our sacrifice is voluntary, conscious suggested by faith, by passion, by enthusiasm; not in vain because it is an example, an incitement, it is a particle of the immense revolutionary work.
How many have fallen affirming our faith!
They fell launching a word of encouragement to those who remained.
Listen to that word, sister; listen…
F. F.
We do not do psychological studies or treatises on womanhood and feminism. Instead, let us observe our woman, the one who is a more backward variety of the “subspecies”. She is affected by all the evil that holds the proletariat in bondage. She is the slave par excellence. She is not the “slave of the male”, as the feminists say, because only in rare pathological cases does the male offend her by force and bullying, but she is the slave of a situation that the proletarian “male” did not create, and of which he too is a victim.
In what does this “slavery” consist?
The proletarian child almost always has many siblings, and does not receive – by being born – too much special attention and care. She lives by herself, without “loving care”. At seven or eight years old, she is already useful to the household. Her labor is put to use in domestic work. At fourteen, she goes to the spinning mill, to the rice mill, to any establishment, to earn something to bring home. She gets little money. Women’s labor is depreciated, but maiden labor is hardly worth anything. She, the maiden, is ignorant. She does not go to school because she goes to work. Sometimes she attends “evening” classes, but her education is very limited. Let us pass over the all too frequent cases in which the maiden kills her body by early application to work. Some may think of the usual sentimental cliché. Let us also pass over the thousand and one cases in which the daughter of the laborer or peasant goes to the city to increase the number of servant women from among whom prostitution largely harvests. Let us consider the healthy and robust young proletarian at the age of marriage. Only in novels can the daughter of a laborer or a bumpkin marry a prince. In real life, the young proletarian marries a laborer or a peasant. Neither has mansions or other assets. They each have two arms. They come from large families – also – raised by scapegoating and thrown prematurely into the workshop or behind the oxen or into the pasture. But the maiden who as a child toiled to help her mother, and then got up in good time to bring in some money, has not reached the time for rest. And to say that the maiden sees her rest in marriage! Children come and the home does not contain them; anxieties come that she cannot sufficiently support them; sometimes war comes and takes them away; almost always unemployment comes to cast terror! Of such a situation the one who suffers most is the woman. If she is a mother, and must provide for her husband’s unemployment, her life becomes a martyrdom that only workers can appreciate. A sum of prejudices, then, shackle her. She feels that she is “less” than man, but does not know why. She ignores the fact that in herself there is the power to break out of the shell within which she is enclosed by centuries of servitude, out of the state of backwardness into which she has been thrown by the iniquitous regimes, by the populist religions which the regimes cleverly made use of. The proletarians have also placed their women in a tightly closed niche to increase their suffering. They are not to blame. They inherit deep states of mind, rooted in centuries-old lineages, which demand that the woman be pleasing, pierce her ears, cover herself with amulets and hairstyles like idols, be ignorant, believe in god, have many children and take care of nothing else. But do they – the workers – not also await redemption? How could they draw their women to the light? Let there, therefore, be accomplished, in parallel with the work of the revolutionary education of the proletariat, a work of proselytizing among the women of the workers. It is certain that this work is extremely difficult. But it must also be accomplished. The enslavement of proletarian women is moral and material slavery. It can only be destroyed by destroying the very reasons that give rise to it: capitalist society, the economic relations between capitalism and the proletariat, the political state of the bourgeois class. Our task is to make our proletarians understand why they are in their present state. Many of them, living in tormenting unconsciousness, will finally feel “understood”. Perhaps in order to speak “true words” to women, that is, “heartfelt” and capable of penetrating the soul, we must turn more to our women comrades than to our male comrades. But the men must do EVERYTHING to contribute to the good work of propaganda among women. It is their duty of which they must feel the value. Simple things must be said to women workers, who would not understand otherwise.
Avoid repeating certain empty formulas of feminism, remembering that human society can group itself around two classes, which are not male and female, but bourgeois and proletarian who want, united, young and old, men and women, to fight and overcome their natural enemies.
The female “subspecies”, created by the economic and political regimes of the past, will be elevated and fused to the human species of the redeemed workers, when the proletariat has demolished and destroyed the power of capitalism and elevated, formidably, its status.
R. G.
There are a great number of proletarian women, who, although they follow our movement with sympathy, live completely apart from it. They are convinced that their only task is to look after the home; hence a certain disdainful disregard for everything outside the narrow circle of the four walls that surround them.
All of them understand their ability as good housewives who can serenely overcome the usual difficulties that governing a home gives, especially when it is a proletarian home, conscious of their wisdom and spirit of sacrifice, they have the pride of those who are convinced that they are entirely fulfilling their duty. Indeed, they make themselves resourceful to make the home dear and comfortable, and sometimes their self-sacrifice in enduring the same of the family the most bilious characters and the harshest humiliations.
There can be no comfortable home if there is no woman in it. And who does not appreciate women’s skills in household governance?
But this does not mean that it should be fossilized within the domestic walls.
Proletarian women who persist in this notion, who truly believe that that is their only task, are in error and are guilty toward their own class.
All these unknown treasures, of sacrifice, energy and self-denial, which they employ to keep the family and the home upright and firm, are useless.
The economic imbalance and imperialism of capitalist society have given rise to the most monstrous war humanity has known, blind and brutal force. War has dealt the most powerful blows to the family structure, opened deep cracks that women vainly try to stem. The war has spawned a great crisis, workers are thrown on the scrap heap, and how can one live when unemployment lasts for months on end, when the scant savings are gone?
It is the superfluous items of the home that begin to go, it is those items bought with sacrifice, kept with care, that made the home intimate and dear, that go; and most often these superfluous items are followed by the necessary ones.
Housewives thought they had a home of their own, because it was created by labor, by daily sacrifice, and for that reason more loved; but black misery is unforgiving, even to sentiment.
Capitalist society does not ensure bread for workers, and consequently women are not assured a home either.
It is the bourgeoisie itself, which preaches that the home is the realm of women, that with its system brings down this impoverished realm. It removes women from it in order to send them to the factory, it removes their men in order to send them to the war, and with unemployment it makes them lack bread.
These are the disruptive elements of family and home against which women should fight.
It is not by shrinking into one’s selfishness that one secures bread, it is not by raising submissive people that one is saved from wars, it is not by trusting in God that one solves social problems.
The home and the family are closely connected to the system of capitalist society, the home must be rebuilt on other foundations, to build these foundations one must tear down those of the old bourgeois society.
Even the women of the home must sometimes leave the hearth to take part in the struggle that the proletarian army conducts for its redemption.
In this age of ours, of profound unraveling and, at the same time, of tormenting rebirths, there is perhaps no longer any individual who does not feel disturbed by the dark and disturbing picture of the present social life, who does not understand how the fate of each person is fatally connected to the fate of collective life, who does not suffer from the uneasiness that oppresses all humanity today: humanity that seems to be reduced without a will, without a discipline, without a soul and above all without a direction.
Humanity has been extraordinarily enriched with knowledge, skills, tools, machines, but it has been equally immiserated of true human values by the unnecessary sacrifice of the basic conditions for the development of autonomous personality; it has been equally parched by the elimination of everything that was not exploitation, speculation, hoarding of wealth and means to enrich.
Today everyone suffers from this immiseration and barrenness. Above all women, to whom for millennia were particularly reserved the values, joys, goods, now decayed and destroyed; who for millennia had been almost alienated from everything to which life is now almost exclusively reduced.
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Social life, which has become a pure mechanism of production and consumption poorly distributed and therefore violently contested, excludes its living gear, for the most part, the women, who also suffer it, are dragged and swept away by it with a dismay and discomfort that is painful and profound, though sometimes almost unconscious because they are not yet enlightened by a sufficient critical spirit, and which bring about in women, along with many other even more practical and urgent causes, a lively desire, a new effort to penetrate the machinery of collective life and to have an active and conscious part in it.
We exclude, of course, the minority of bourgeois women, who, all turned to luxury, elegance and enjoyment degrade their femininity in the cares and contrivances of a superficial, stupid and insincегe life.
Dressed in luxury and refined elegance, bourgeois costume decays and decomposes; moral sanity is placed in the international working class, the only one capable of a rebirth of human civilization.
Among working women we see appearing the crisis of malaise of discontent, of anxiety that heralds the formation of new spiritual elements in the great masses of women, who manifest in this profoundly revolutionary epoch their desire for freedom, for activity, for life.
It is true that of this first emergence into collective life they suffer today only the difficulties, the torments, the opposition aroused by age-old prejudices. That is why perhaps women have never had such a difficult and hard-fought life.
By entering to work in factories and offices, they have apparently acquired a freedom and rights never before enjoyed: in reality they have almost always burdened themselves with double work, and have become more directly wage-earners.
This has brought about, on the one hand, an understanding, especially in women workers, of their condition as an exploited class and the necessity of proletarian struggle; on the other hand, the desire, the will to secure economic independence before men for the conquest of their freedom.
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Today, as a result of the severe unemployment crisis afflicting the workers, women are fought by the maimed and unemployed who regard them as inappropriate competitors; and they must defend themselves, not only in the name of their own independence, but because of the necessity of preserving their bread by work, a necessity that was the first to drive them into the workshops and offices.
Regarded as temporary workers destined to be disposed of, they are employed in the most tedious and burdensome and physical work; in the offices they are used to free men from the most oppressive occupations and in which personal initiative not only cannot appear, but dies out, stifled.
A woman’s natural adaptability is that imposed on her by the difficulties that are created wherever she appears to work, make her accept this condition of a thoughtless machine, which increases the emptiness and barrenness of her world.
Women who think, who toil, who struggle, feel the absurdity of their situation; they recognize that their aspirations collide with impossibilities inherent in the present form of social organization. They realize that only with a radical change in the life of humanity can the women’s question be solved; women’s right to participate in collective life, and at the same time to manifest and develop and utilize their specific qualities, their real strengths, can be recognized.
Respect for the human being will restore respect for the woman. A broader and more serious understanding of freedom in its true meaning will recognize woman’s right to cooperate with man in the creation and beautification of life. The effective achievement of economic independence for every human being will also assure woman of economic independence as a natural fact and not as a feminist artifice. In the great family of labor, woman will regain her place.
The women who are closest to understanding the great upheaval that is taking place are naturally the women workers; they are living it in the factories from where the lively and profound forces of the revolution spring; they are actually entering into the cog of the social machine mixed with their fellow workers in the continuous and bitter struggle; they acquire consciousness and seriousness; they collaborate with the workers in the preparation of the future, in the creation of the new order; they become capable of regaining for woman a value, a meaning, an office in the world.
Among women workers, women’s issues must also be raised; those problems whose resolution they will have to contribute to must be agitated.
Above all, women workers must be given the exact and profound consciousness of the principles on which communist society will be founded, which will inform the life of humanity liberated by the world revolution.
From the precise understanding of communism will flow the understanding of all aspects of human life in the new society. Communism must be explained and clarified to women workers with the precision and seriousness with which a science is taught, with the enthusiasm with which a faith is communicated.
C.R.