Page:Alexandra Kollontai - Communism and the Family (1920).djvu/22

 lot of creatures who are conscious of themselves and of the life which surrounds them. This free union, which is strong in the comradeship with which it is inspired, instead of the conjugal slavery of the past—that is what the Communist Society of to-morrow offers to both men and women. Once the conditions of labor have been transformed, and the material security of the working women has been increased, and after marriage such as was performed by the Church—this so-called indissoluble marriage which was at bottom merely a fraud—after this marriage has given place to the free and honest union of men and women who are lovers and comrades, another shameful scourge will also be seen to disappear, another frightful evil which is a stain on humanity and which falls with all its weight on the hungry working woman: prostitution.

This evil we owe to the economic system now in force, to the institution of private property. Once the latter has been abolished, the trade in women will automatically disappear.

Therefore let the woman of the working class cease to worry over the fact that the family as at present constituted is doomed to disappear. They will do much better to hail with joy the dawn of a new society which will liberate the woman from domestic servitude, which will lighten the burden of motherhood for woman, and in which, finally, we shall see disappear the most terrible of the curses weighing upon women, known as prostitution.

The woman who is called upon to struggle in the great cause of the liberation of the