Page:Alexandra Kollontai - Communism and the Family (1920).djvu/11

 the populous industrial regions have for a long time had no idea.

In the days of our grandmothers this domestic work was an absolutely necessary and useful thing, on which depended the well-being of the family; the more the mistress of the house applied herself to these duties, the better was life in the house and the more order and affluence it presented. Even the State was able to draw some profit from this activity of woman as a housekeeper. For, as a matter of fact, the woman of other days did not limit herself to preparing potato soup either by herself or to be prepared by the family, but her hands also created many products of wealth, such as cloth, thread, butter, etc., all of which were things which could serve as commodities on the market and which therefore could be considered as merchandise, as things of value.

It is true that in the time of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers their labor was not estimated in terms of money. But every man, whether he was a peasant or a worker, sought for a wife a woman with "hands of gold," as is still the proverbial saying among the people. For the resources of man alone, "without the domestic work of woman," would have been insufficient to keep their future household going. But on this point the interests of the state, the interests of the nation, coincided with those of the husband: the more active the woman turned out to be in the bosom of her family, the more she created products of all kinds: cloth, leather, wool the surplus of which was sold in the neighbouring market; and thus the economic prosperity of the country as a whole was increased.