In Honor of International Women’s Day

(Quote of the Week)

In a pioneering Marxist study, August Bebel, a founding leader of the German Social Democratic Party, explained that women’s emancipation required their full integration into economic and social life. This will be possible only in a socialist society based on material abundance and scientific technique, as the household tasks of the family are carried out by social institutions and the role of women will no longer be defined primarily as breeders of the next generation.

One factor is of leading importance in the question of population in the future—the higher, freer position which all women will then occupy. 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 upon 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....

In Socialist society, where alone mankind will be truly free and planted on its natural basis, it will direct its own development knowingly along the line of natural law. In all epochs hitherto, society handled the questions of production and distribution, as well as of the increase of population without the knowledge of the laws that underlie them,—hence, unconsciously. In the new social order, equipped with the knowledge of the laws of its own development, society will proceed consciously and planfully.

SOCIALISM IS SCIENCE, APPLIED WITH FULL UNDERSTANDING TO ALL THE FIELDS OF HUMAN ACTIVITY.

—August Bebel, Woman Under Socialism (1879)