Page:Alexandra Kollontai - Communism and the Family (1920).djvu/12



But capitalism has changed all this ancient mode of living. All that was formerly produced in the bosom of the family is now being manufactured in quantity in workshops and factories. The machine has supplanted the active fingers of the wife. What housekeeper would now occupy herself in moulding candles, spinning wool, weaving cloth? All these products can be bought in the shop next door. Formerly, every young girl would learn to knit stockings. Do you ever see a young working woman now knitting her own stockings? In the first place she would not have the time. Time is money, and no one wants to waste money in an unproductive manner, that is without getting some profit from it. Now every housekeeper who is also a working woman is more interested in buying her stockings ready-made than losing her time by making them herself. Few and far between are the working women who could take up their time in pickling cucumbers or in making preserves when they remember that the grocery store next door has pickles and preserves ready to sell. Even if the product sold in the store is of an inferior quality, and even though the factory preserves are not as good as those made at home by the hands of an economical housekeeper, the working woman nevertheless has neither the time nor the strength which must be applied in any extensive operations of this kind for her own household. However this may be, the fact is that. the contemporary family is becoming more and more liberated from all domestic labors, without which concern our grandmothers could hardly have imagined a family. What was formerly produced in the bosom of the family is now produced by the common