Page:Alexandra Kollontai - Communism and the Family (1920).djvu/8

 in which the wife and mother goes to work outside of the house, for eight hours a day, ten if you include the trip both ways! Her home is necessarily neglected, the children grow up without any maternal care, left to themselves and all the dangerous risks of the street, in which they spend the greater part of their time. The wife, the mother, who is a worker, sweats blood to fill three tasks at the same time: to give the necessary working hours as her husband does, in some industry or commercial establishment, then to devote herself as well as she can to her household and then also to take care of her children. Capitalism has placed on the shoulders of the woman a burden which crushes her: it has made of her a wage-worker without having lessened her cares as a housekeeper and mother. We therefore find the woman crushed under her triple, insupportable burden, forcing from her often a swiftly smothered cry of pain, and more than once causing the tears to mount to her eyes. Care has always been the lot of woman, but never has woman's lot been more unfortunate, more desperate than that of millions of working women under the capitalist yoke to-day, while industry is in its period of greatest expansion.

The more widespread becomes the wage labor of woman, the further progresses the decomposition of the family. What a family life, in which the man and wife work in the factory in different departments; in which the wife has not even the time to prepare a decent meal for her offspring! What a family life when father and mother out of the twenty-four hours of the day, most of which