Suzanne La Follette

“ But for those who wanted to avoid the terrors of autonomy there would still be marriage; and for those who wanted to walk in the strait and ennobling way of freedom, there would be the right to love without official permission, and to bring forth children unashamed. Those who wished to sell themselves would be free to do so if they could find buyers; but no one would be forced to live by violating the law of love which is the law of life. Freedom implies the right to live badly, but it also implies the right to live nobly and beautifully ”

“ War releases all that is brutal in man, and places woman in a peculiarly helpless position; therefore it is a prolific immediate source of prostitution. But the ultimate and permanent source is the source of war itself, the economic exploitation of man by man. So long as society is organized to protect the exploiter, so long will peace be an incessant struggle—for more wealth with the privileged classes; for existence with the exploited masses—and war will be, as it has always been, merely a final explosion of the struggling forces. ”

“ The only way to protect married people against the bad faith which one may show toward the other, is to leave the door wide open for either of them to be quit of the union the minute it ceases to be satisfactory. If society for any reason sees fit to close the door to freedom, it sets union by law above the union by affection on which alone true marriage is based; and in so doing it is responsible for an amount of injustice, spiritual conflict, and suffering which no attempt at equitable regulation can ever compensate. ”

“ If it be woman’s nature, as some people still believe, to wish to live at second hand, then in a free society they will freely make that choice, and no one can complain of it—unless it be the men on whom they elect to depend. However, to assume from past experience that they do want to live at second hand is to assume that all the social and legal injustices which have been employed to force them to do so, were unnecessary; and when have Governments and communities wasted their power in exercising compulsion where no compulsion was needed? ”

“ As marriage ceases to be a vested interest with women, and as their growing freedom enables them to perceive the insult to their humanity that this kind of morality involves, they will refuse to stand for it. Those who prefer to regard woman as a function will devote their energy to securing conditions under which she may bear and bring up children with a greater degree of freedom and self-respect than conventional morality allows her. As for those who prefer to regard her as a human being, they will naturally demand the abolition of all discriminations based on sex ”

“ But this is merely to say that most husbands are more humane than the law; and the fact may not be ignored that so long as legal discriminations bar her from an equal share with her husband in the control and guardianship of her children, she exercises parental rights only on sufferance. It is the law which finally fixes her status in this as in other matters; and as long as she may legally be made to suffer injustice on account of her sex, she can hardly be called her husband’s equal, no matter what privileges she may enjoy by virtue of his indulgence. ”

“ Women have equality almost within their grasp; they may lose it if this civilization shall follow the path of its predecessors to ruin and oblivion. There is one way to avert this tragedy, and one only—the way of economic justice. If the women who have been active in the struggle to emancipate their sex shall enlarge their conception of freedom, and with it the scope of their demand, they can help mightily to preserve civilization through the establishment of justice. ”

“ There is only one remedy for prostitution, and that remedy is economic freedom—freedom to labour and to enjoy what one produces. When women have this freedom there will be no more prostitution; for no woman will get a living by doing violence to her deep-rooted selective instinct when opportunities are plentiful and a little labour will yield an ample living. There may still be women who are sexually promiscuous; but there is a vast gulf between promiscuity and prostitution: the sexually promiscuous woman may choose her men; the prostitute may not. ”

“ While society discriminates against her sex, for whatever reason, she can not be free as an individual.
Should nothing, then, be done to protect women from the disabilities and hazards to which they are subject in the industrial world? Better nothing, perhaps, than protection which creates new disabilities. Laws which fix fewer hours of work for women than for men may result in shortening men’s hours also in factories where many women are employed; but they may result in the substitution of men—or children—for women in factories where but few have been employed. ”

“ Those anxious critics who protest that women have got more freedom than is good for Society make the mistake of supposing that Society can exist only if its organization remains unchanged. The same conservatism has opposed all the revolutionary adaptations which have fitted the social order to the breakdown of old forms and their replacement by new ones. Yet when the need for such adaptations ceases, the growth of the social organism ceases with it, and we have such a spectacle of arrested development as the civilization of India presents. ”

“ The women who now enjoy this comparative freedom, and accept it more or less as a matter of course, are indebted to a long line of women who carried on the struggle—sometimes lonely and discouraging—against political, legal, social and industrial discrimination, and to the men, as well, who aided and encouraged them. Thanks to the efforts of these pioneers, the women of today have a new tradition to maintain, a nobler tradition than any of those which women were expected to observe in the past: the tradition of active demand for the establishment of freedom. ”

“ The man who is entirely dependent for his livelihood upon the will of an employer is an industrial slave, and the man who may be drafted into an army and made to fight and perhaps die for a cause in which he can have no possible interest is the slave of the State; yet one can not see that this proves Aristotle’s assumption that there are free natures and slave natures, any more than the subjection of women proves that they want to be subjected. What the slavery of men, as of women, implies is the existence of an economic and social order that is inimical to their interests as human beings ”

“ So long as the basic assumption goes unchallenged that the State may grant to man and woman lifelong monopoly-rights in one another, or monopoly-rights which shall endure, despite the inclination of the persons concerned, during the State’s pleasure, so long will complaints of harsh or unjust marriage or divorce laws prove the truth of Mill’s dictum that “no enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once ... those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise.” ”

“ In the foregoing chapters I have spoken of the effect that freedom would have upon this or that phase of human relations. There is really no field of human activity that would not be profoundly affected by it. A system of free economic opportunity would exert upon the lives of human beings precisely as great an influence as that exerted by the present economic system: that is to say, their mode of life, their education, their quality of spirit, their cast of thought, would all be determined by their command of wealth, precisely as they now are. ”

“ When men, in a society so organized as to give them an economic advantage over women, can no longer earn enough to maintain their dependents even at the subsistence-level, the chance of women, for the most part untrained to breadwinning, to do so will be poor indeed. Under such circumstances the woman thrown on her own resources may, through some extraordinary stroke of luck, find a way to self-sufficiency through labour; but more often she is obliged, after her possessions have been disposed of, to take refuge from starvation by selling the only marketable commodity that is left her—her sex. ”

“ One pays the price in spiritual deterioration. There is probably no more striking testimony to this than the first part of Goethe’s “Faust.” Consider what we know of the nature of Goethe’s relations with women; and then consider the spiritual insensitivity, the failure to perceive and draw upon the inexhaustible spiritual treasures that life holds in store, that are implied in his failure to devise for Faust, brought back from the brink of the grave at cost of his immortal soul, any more animating employment for his new-found youth than a low intrigue with an ignorant peasant girl. ”

“ There is in all this bungling effort to ameliorate the ills of working women and to safeguard through them the future of the race, a tacit recognition of economic injustice and a strange incuriousness about its causes. One would naturally expect that the conditions which move people to seek protective legislation would move them to question the nature of an economic system which permits such rapacity that any class of employees requires to be protected from it. ”

“ Under our present system of tenure, to be sure, the purchase price of land—that is, the investment of capital that the owner has made in order to get title—may represent human labour—but this is merely to say that the owner has invested his capital in privilege, or law-made property; that he has purchased, under governmental guarantee, a certain delegation of taxing-power, precisely as the investor in governmental securities purchases a governmental guarantee that a certain share of future labour-products will be taken from the producers and turned over to him. ”

“ It is to the industrial revolution more than anything else, perhaps, that women owe such freedom as they now enjoy; yet if proof were wanting of the distance they have still to cover in order to attain, not freedom, but mere equality with men, their position in the industrial world would amply supply it. Men in industry suffer from injustices and hardships due to the overcrowding of the labour-market. Women suffer from these same injustices and hardships; and they have an additional handicap in their sex. ”

“ If it is freedom that women want, they can not be content to be legally equal with men; but having gained this equality they must carry on their struggle against the oppressions which privilege exercises upon humanity at large by virtue of an usurped economic power. All human beings, presumably, would gain by freedom; but women particularly stand to gain by it, for as I have shown, they are victims of special prepossessions which mere legal equality with men may hardly be expected to affect. ”

“ Of course the effect of the attempt to make the chastity of women a matter of morality and law, has been the precise opposite of the one aimed at. Society can never be made virtuous through arbitrary regulation; it can only be made unhappy and unamiable. The attempt to suppress all unauthorized expression of the sex-impulse in women tended to make them not only miserable and abject, but hypocritical and deceitful; and it tended also to make men predatory. This was its inevitable result in a society where women paid an exorbitant penalty for unchastity and men paid no penalty at all ”