Page:Alexandra Kollontai - Communism and the Family (1920).djvu/10

 the support of the children while very young. Let us now see whether the family is not about to-be relieved also even of this task just mentioned.

There was a time when the entire life of women in the poorer class, in the city as well as in the country, was passed in the bosom of the family. Beyond the threshold of her own house, the woman knew nothing and doubtless hardly wished to know anything. To compensate for this, she had within her own house a most varied group of occupations, of a most necessary and useful kind, not only to the family itself but also to the entire state. The woman did everything that is now done by any working woman or peasant woman. She cooked, she washed, she cleaned the house, she went over and mended the family clothing; but she not only did that. She had also to discharge a great.number of duties which are no longer done by the woman of to-day: she spun wool and linen; she wove cloth and garments, she knitted stockings, she made lace, and she took up, as far as her resources permitted, the pickling and smoking of preserved foods; she made beverages for the household; she moulded her own candles. How manifold were the duties of the woman of earlier times! That is how the life of our mothers and our grandmothers passed. Even in our own days, in certain remote villages way off in the country, far from the railroads and the big rivers, you may still run across little spots where this mode of life of the good old time has been preserved unchanged, in which the mistress of the house is overburdened with labors of which the working woman of the big cities and of