Page:Alexandra Kollontai - Communism and the Family (1920).djvu/15

 italist system only people with well-lined purses could afford to take their meals in a restaurant, in the Communist city, anyone who likes may come to eat in the central kitchens and restaurants. The case will be the same with washing and other work: the working woman will no longer be obliged to sink in an ocean of filth or to ruin her eyes in darning her stockings or mending her linen; she will simply carry these things to the central laundries each week, and take them out again each week already washed and ironed. The working woman will have one care less to face. Also, special clothes-mending shops will give the working women the opportunity to devote their evenings to instructive readings, to healthy recreations, instead of spending them as at present in exhausting labor. Therefore, the four last duties still remaining to burden our women, as we have seen above, will soon also disappear under the triumphant Communist regime. And the working women will surely have no cause to regret this. Communist society will only have broken the domestic yoke of woman in order to render her life richer, happier, freer, and more complete.

But what will remain of the family after all these labors of individual housekeeping have disappeared? We still have the children to deal with. But here also the state of the working comrades will come to the rescue of the family by substituting for the family; society will gradually take charge of all the formerly was on parents. Under the capitalist regime, the instruction of the child has ceased to be the duty of the parents. The children were taught in schools. Once the child had attained school age, the parents