Page:Lily Gair Wilkinson - Revolutionary Socialism and the Woman's Movement.djvu/26

 23 "Women cannot fight," say certain bourgeois theorists, "and therefore ought not to take part in government." Can women not fight? Because they do not belong to the paid forces organised for the coercion of the oppressed at home and abroad, is that to say they cannot fight? Women certainly are not elegible to belong to troops of hired assassins, but wherever the fight is for freedom, when the class war breaks out in violence and bloodshed, women do not shrink away like cowards and hide themselves in the home. Was it not the women who led the way for the starving people of France in 1789? Did not the women of the Paris Commune of 1871 know how to shoulder their rifles and defend the barricades along with husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons? Did they not know how to die, upright, facing the enemy, with the undaunted cry of "Vive la Commune!" as their last utterance? And only the other day, when the workers of Belfast were shot down by the soldiers of the capitalist government, did the women not face these soldiers again and again just as the men did?

Women can, and do, fight for freedom. In the struggle of the future, whether the warfare be mainly industrial, or whether it be of a more violent nature, as certainly it may, women will take their full share of the burden. For them the inducement is even greater than it is for men, because in general their suffering is even greater.

As the industrial organisation gains in strength it will certainly express itself politically; such political expression will be a natural outcome of unity on the economic field. Civilised men and women avail themselves of civilised methods, and the ballot will be used by the revolutionary workers as a means of expressing their intentions in a civilised manner. But such expression would be a mere farce were it not backed up by the organised might of the workers acting as a class. Behind those workers who may have the vote and use it as a means of revolutionary expression, must be the solid ranks of workers in factories, mines, mills, railways, and in all the other manifold branches of productive activity, united as workers, irrespective of sex or of suffrage privilege, or any other kind of privilege, united because they are the toilers, the producers, the sufferers, by whose toil and suffering society exists.

Here women, enfranchised or not, will have their rightful place. If capitalist governments continue to deny the right of all men and women to vote, then here in the daily life of the workers—on the industrial field—lies the power which will overthrow the economic