Woman under socialism

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Bebel August. Woman under socialism

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

PART I. WOMAN IN THE PAST

CHAPTER I. BEFORE CHRISTIANITY

CHAPTER II. UNDER CHRISTIANITY

PART II. WOMAN IN THE PRESENT

CHAPTER I. SEXUAL INSTINCTS, WEDLOCK, CHECKS AND OBSTRUCTIONS TO MARRIAGE

CHAPTER II. FURTHER CHECKS AND OBSTRUCTIONS TO MARRIAGE – NUMERICAL PROPORTION OF THE SEXES – ITS CAUSES AND EFFECTS

CHAPTER III. PROSTITUTION A NECESSARY SOCIAL INSTITUTION OF THE CAPITALIST WORLD

CHAPTER IV. WOMAN'S POSITION AS A BREADWINNER; HER INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES; DARWINISM AND THE CONDITION OF SOCIETY

CHAPTER V. WOMAN'S CIVIC AND POLITICAL STATUS

CHAPTER VI. THE STATE AND SOCIETY

CHAPTER VII. THE SOCIALIZATION OF SOCIETY

PART III. WOMAN IN THE FUTURE

PART IV. INTERNATIONALITY

PART V. POPULATION and OVER-POPULATION

PART VI. CONCLUSION

Отрывок из книги

Bebel's work, "Die Frau und der Socialismus," rendered in this English version with the title "Woman under Socialism," is the best-aimed shot at the existing social system, both strategically and tactically considered. It is wise tactics and strategy to attack an enemy on his weakest side. The Woman Question is the weakest link in the capitalist mail.

I might stop here. The ethic formula commands self-effacement to a translator. More so than well-brought-up children, who should be "seen and not heard," a translator should, where at all possible, be neither seen nor heard. That, however, is not always possible. In a work of this nature, which, to the extent of this one, projects itself into hypotheses of the future, and even whose premises necessarily branch off into fields that are not essentially basic to Socialism, much that is said is, as the author himself announces in his introduction, purely the personal opinion of the writer. With these a translator, however, much in general and fundamental accord, may not always agree. Not agreeing, he is in duty bound to modify the ethic formula to the extent of marking his exception, lest the general accord, implied in the act of translating, be construed into specific approval of objected-to passages and views. Mindful of a translator's duties as well as rights, I have reduced to a small number, and entered in the shape of running footnotes to the text, the dissent I thought necessary to the passages that to me seemed most objectionable in matters not related to the main question; and, as to matters related to the main question, rather than enter dissent in running footnotes, I have reserved for this place a summary of my own private views on the family of the future.

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A still more passionate sensuousness is attested in her hymn to the handsome Atthis.

While in Athens, along with the rest of Greece, the father-right ruled, Sparta, the rival for supremacy with Athens, still continued under the mother-right, a condition that had become wholly foreign to most Greeks. The story runs that one day a Greek asked a Spartan what punishment was meted out in Sparta to the adulterer. He answered: "Stranger, among us there are no adulterers." "But if there should be any?" "For punishment," the Spartan replied, sarcastically, "he must donate an ox, so large as to be able to reach over Taygetus with his head, and drink out of Eurotas." Upon the startled question, put by the stranger, "How can an ox be so large?" the Spartan answered laughing: "How is it possible that there could be an adulterer in Sparta?" At the same time the self-consciousness of the Spartan woman appears in the proud answer given a stranger by the wife of Leonidas. On his saying to her: "You female Lacedaemonians are the only women who rule over your men," she answered: "So are we the only women who bring men into the world."

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