Bebel and Social Democracy
Still, many socialists—especially those outside France—embraced the cause of women's rights. The German social democrats considered hopelessly reformist by orthodox Marxists were a case in point.
August Bebel's Woman and Socialism, first published in 1879 and widely translated, became an international bestseller. By 1910 it had gone through fifty editions and far outsold the critique that Engels had penned. 17 Bebel strongly supported feminist efforts. Within the Second International Workingmen's Association, left-wing militant Vladimir Lenin argued that issues such as sexuality, marriage, and divorce were diversionary, because they were not classbased. 18 Still, Bebel' s views influenced some of the policies implemented by the Bolshevik regime in Russia in1917, and exerted an even stronger influence on the platforms of social democratic political parties all over Western Europe.The first sentence of Woman and Socialism boldly asserted the parallels between class and gender: ‘‘Woman and the workingman have, since old, had this in common—oppression.''19 Bebel went on to argue that all social dependence and oppression were rooted in economic dependence, or lack of independent property rights. He recited a catechism of arguments in defense of women's capabilities, rebutting misogyny from Plato to Schopenhauer. His sweeping history of the emergence of patriarchal and capitalist hierarchy dwelt on the role of force and violence and the establishment of arbitrary laws and social norms. It asserted the need for sweeping democratic reform.
Bebel addressed issues that political economists had typically ignored, ranging from general themes such as asymmetric property rights to colorful specifics, such as the Prussian law giving the husband the right to dictate how long his wife should be required to suckle his child.20 The increased costs of raising children, Bebel argued, were forcing women to resort to illegal abortions that threatened their health.21 He documented new laws in France and Germany making it difficult for unwed mothers to gain any support from the fathers of their children. He deplored the increasing use of contraception not because it was immoral, but because under a socialist regime all children would be considered economic assets.
Like John Stuart Mill, he predicted that improvements in women's position would result in fertility decline:Leaving exceptions aside, intelligent and energetic women are not as a rule inclined to give life to a large number of children as ‘‘the gift of God'' and to spend the best years of their own lives in pregnancy, or with a child at their breasts. This disinclination for numerous children, which even now is entertained by most women, may—all the solicitude notwithstanding that a Socialist society will bestow on pregnant women and mothers—be rather strengthened than weakened. In our opinion, there lies in this the great probability that the increase of population will proceed slower than in bourgeois society.22
Like Engels, Bebel saw children as essentially women’s responsibilities, cheerfully predicting that under socialism ‘‘nurses, teachers, female friends, and the rising female generation’’ would be on hand to help individual mothers.23 Also like Engels, he believed that housework would soon be obsolete. His evidence on this count included a glowing description of the centralized modern kitchen exhibited at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and details of a recently invented shoe-polishing machine.24 But unlike Engels and other orthodox Marxists, Bebel refused to blame women’s oppression simply on the interests of the ruling class. He emphasized, instead, men’s collective interest in protecting their own privilege.25 ‘‘The icy waters of egotistical calculation,’’ it seems, could lap at many different shores.