Käte Duncker 1910
First Published: in Freie Volkszeitung, (Goeppingen), September 24, 1910.
Source: Käte und Herrmann Duncker: Ein Tagebuch in Briefen (1894-1953), Heinz Deutschland, Berlin 2016, USB-file, pp. 5362-5386.
Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive 2021
Translated and Transcribed: by a MIA volunteer
HTML Markup: Zdravko Saveski
Of course, the lot of the male proletarians is anything but easy and pleasant. But the women of the proletariat are even less well off: they are the real, proper beasts of burden of today's society. Millions of them toil for their daily bread in factory and workshop, in field and forest, as washerwomen and cleaners or as home workers. But when they have earned their meager wages in nine- to ten-hour shifts - and often even longer - most of them begin another working day of several hours for their own needs. The single ones at least have only their own apartment and clothes to put in order. But the working mothers are completely overburdened and overworked. Early in the morning, when the husband is still asleep, the wife has to get up, prepare breakfast, do the first tidying up, dress the children and take them to the nursery and the school. At lunchtime, she rushes home to prepare the meal or to heat up what she had prepared the night before. In the evening, when she comes home tired from working, the chores start all over again: there is still cleaning and mending, cooking and washing to be done. In addition, there are the special burdens and worries of a woman as a mother: the pregnancy, the care of the infant, which often takes away her night's rest. This is a simply crushing overload that even the most robust health cannot withstand in the long run.
However, while women are exploited twofold and threefold - through gainful employment, household and family - they are also doubly disenfranchised. She has no share in the admittedly modest political rights of her male class comrades. Like them, she must pay direct state and municipal taxes from her meager income, but she has no say in the rate or the use of these taxes, for she has no right to vote in local councils or state parliaments. The indirect taxes on salt, sugar, beer, matches, the duties on grain, meat, coffee, etc., etc., by which the German Empire raises the billions for its splendid military and naval services, oppress no one more than the working woman who is expected to support her family on so few hard-earned marks. But still she does not have the possibility to shout "Stop" against this policy of robbery and armament by participating in the Reichstag elections. As a worker in the factory, as an employee in trade, she is allowed to display her strength and health, occasionally even her honor; but she is not allowed to contribute to social legislation, in which she is just as interested as her male colleagues. She is even deprived of the right and the ability to participate in the disputes of her female colleagues as an assessor at the trade and merchant courts. She is allowed to bear and raise the children on whom the elementary school then lays its heavy hand in the 6th or 7th year, but she has almost no seat or voice in the school supervisory authorities. The penal code considers the woman to be of full value everywhere; she is held responsible for offenses and crimes just as much as the man. But she is not allowed to participate as a juror in the sentencing of the crimes of her female colleagues, in whose situation or mental condition she can certainly put herself more easily than men can.
In the past, when the four walls of the house protected the woman's world of work and interests, she did not feel her lack of rights, or at least not so oppressively. However, since she has been working alongside her husband, since she has been exposed to the rough air of the struggle for existence, women have gradually become aware that they have innumerable duties but no rights. And ever larger crowds of women are raising their voices and demanding equal rights, so that they can work together with their male class comrades to improve their situation. Who is helping women in their double struggle against exploitation and disenfranchisement? The bourgeois parties have only ridicule and scorn for their legitimate demands. It is the Social Democratic Party alone which, together with the abolition of exploitation, has also written gender equality on its banner. Over thirty years ago, August Bebel, the party's elderly champion, proved in his book "Die Frau und der Sozialismus" ("Women and Socialism") - a book that has since gone through fifty editions - that only socialism can free women from the double yoke of exploitation and disenfranchisement.
How can social democracy help women? One thing - and this must be stated first of all - Social Democracy cannot and will not do: namely, to banish women back into their own four walls, as still demanded here and there by short-sighted and petty-bourgeois party comrades. It cannot do so, because 9 ½ million working women, who already work in the German Empire, can neither now nor in the future be dispensed with in the procurement of society's goods. Nor does it want to, because it recognizes the independent participation of women in the production of goods as the lever for the economic, social and spiritual liberation of women in general.
What the Social Democrats can and will do, however, is to make gainful employment easier for women and thus compatible with their position as wife and mother without harm. To this end, Social Democracy demands the reduction of working hours to a maximum of 8 hours and the prohibition of women's work in all those branches of employment which either place too great a demand on the inferior physical strength of women or which - as, for example, the processing of poisonous substances - are by their very nature dangerous to women as bearers of the future generation.
Furthermore, the Social Democrats also seek to make motherhood easier for women. It does this by calling for legislation to provide support facilities that will enable women to forego their own earnings during the last period of pregnancy as well as during the first months after childbirth. Social Democracy also demands the establishment of nurseries, kindergartens, and school homes where children can be well cared for and supervised free of charge during the mother's working hours, without being left to the Church's influence, as is the case in most existing institutions today.
Our party demands all this from today's capitalist social order. In the socialist social order which it wants to build, however, the production and education of healthy and capable people will take precedence over the production of dead goods, and the mothers of small children will be exempt from taking part in the procurement of goods, unless they expressly wish otherwise.
Social Democracy, however, is also anxious to put an end to the lawless status of women in all spheres of public and private life. In its program it demands: "Universal, equal, direct suffrage and voting rights with secret ballots for all citizens over twenty years of age, without distinction of sex, for all elections and votes," and "abolition of all laws which disadvantage women in relation to men in public and private life.
From all this it is clear that there is only one means for the women of the proletariat to free themselves from wage and domestic slavery and to fight for equal rights, namely by joining the ranks of the Social Democratic struggle. Even if they cannot yet cast their votes for Social Democracy in the elections, they can still join the Social Democratic organization and work in it, can work to ensure that no other than the workers' press is read in the workers' dwellings, can support their husbands and educate their children in the spirit of Socialism.
And if women join the Social Democrats in ever-increasing numbers, the latter will not only grow in size, but their clout and confidence in victory will also increase. The man who has an unenlightened and indifferent wife at home is only half a fighter, an uncertain one. The unenlightened wife grumbles when the man pays his club dues, she grumbles when he goes to the meeting. She prefers the bourgeois newspapers with their gossip, with their court stories and the broad painting of all misfortunes and sordid stories to the workers' press, which needs its columns for more important things than for such trifles. The unenlightened woman scolds her husband a loafer and makes his home a living hell if he ever stops his work to struggle for better working conditions. She brings up her children in the world of thoughts and feelings of past times. The enlightened woman, on the other hand, is a zealous agitator for our organization and press; she is a support and comrade to her husband in all his troubles and struggles; in her children she raises brave and enthusiastic recruits to the Socialist Army. Women need social democracy, but social democracy also needs women.
Therefore, men must do away with all sorts of petty-bourgeois prejudices about the position of women that still haunt some people's minds. They must abandon the ridiculous conceit that makes many of them still pray the old Bible word: "And he shall be your master." They must make a start in their own homes with the freedom and equality they aspire to.
Men and women, as free and equal, must work together to realize our high goal: the abolition of wage slavery and thus the preparation of the soil on which a better and happier human race can and will grow.