Page:Lily Gair Wilkinson - Revolutionary Socialism and the Woman's Movement.djvu/23

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Emancipation from the power of the private owners of the means of production will be true emancipation for women, because it will be complete. When all are collectively, or socially, the owners and. operators of the means of production, all will have equal access thereto, and thus women will at last be placed upon an equal footing with men.

Through generations of suffering capitalism has forced women to take a part in production, not merely in domestic life as dependents of men (as in pre-capitalist days), but socially, and as independent of men. The foundation of a lasting independence for women has indeed been laid, since women now take part in the co-operative productive work of society; but while the conditions of the workers' lives remain conditions of wage-labour, their labour is slave-labour, and they are despoiled of its fruits by their masters. When all women, with all men, shall be the owners of those things wherewith they work, and by which production is carried on, then their labour will be the labour of the free, and they will themselves reap its fruits.

The enemy of the women workers is not the male sex, but the capitalist class. That class is made up both of men and women. Many women are direct employers of labour; many are shareholders in capitalist industries; and as employers and shareholders they have equality with men. Do we find that their influence is used in favour of their women employees? By no means. Where their class interests are concerned women capitalists in general act no more mercifully than men capitalists. Their interests are to extract the fattest possible dividends out of the life-blood of the workers, without considering, or even knowing, whether the labour that creates these dividends is that of men or women. Would it not be folly in working women to expect these luxurious capitalist ladies to recognise common interests with them?

But the bourgeois feminists make a special appeal to the women workers under the pretence that their interests can be served along with the interests of wealthy women—that the privileged section will fight the male tyrant for the benefit of all women. The different