Page:Lily Gair Wilkinson - Revolutionary Socialism and the Woman's Movement.djvu/12

 Rh not to forget that the question of Socialism is essentially a working class question, and for all practical purposes must be regarded from the working class point of view.

The feminist movement, like other reform movements, is of direct interest to the bourgeoisie only, and not to the workers. Feminism, in its larger sense, claims equal political and social rights for women as for men within the framework of the present social system. Socialism claims that even if this were fully achieved it would be no true emancipation of women. Only those women would benefit who belong to the privileged, or propertied, class in society. The majority of women, like the majority of men, belong to the wage-earning class, and this class cannot benefit by the reform of capitalism owing to its condition of social life—the selling of labour-power—which gives to capitalist masters of both sexes the means of carrying on industry by an ever-increasing robbery of the workers.

To those who see effects only and do not trace back to causes woman's struggle appears merely as a struggle of sex against sex; but a wider issue is really involved. The woman question is but a part of the wider question of social evolution from the earliest times.

The basic mistake of the feminists is that they do not recognise this, and therefore cannot trace the true cause of the inequality of the sexes. Sometimes they attribute women's social inferiority to her physical weakness; sometimes to the moral weakness of man. But these differences of the sexes, if they exist at all, are more likely to have arisen as effects of sex-inequality than to be causes thereof.

Socialism, on the other hand, does not look for an explanation of social enigmas in any such vague theories. Socialism holds that