Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - Women of the Future - 1916.pdf/11

 they have been before the age of machinery, steam-power and electricity. It would cut them loose from public life; it would suppress all their manifold interests and abilities; it would sacrifice their social usefulness, and maintain them in economic dependence. It would not mean freedom; it would not mean equality; it would not mean opportunity. It would only mean an old slavery in a new garb. Moreover, it would be impossible for the women of the future to limit their activities to the home and the family because there would not be enough work to keep all healthy women usefully employed. Already the home is stripped of most of those industrial occupations that used to keep our grandmothers busy from morning till night; already the education of children has become largely a social function. As progress marches on all industries will be socialized more and more, and public education will become ever better and more highly developed. Woman's work has moved out of the home into the store and the factory, the office and the laboratory, the school and the university. It has ceased to be woman's work and has become human work. There is not enough work left in the home to-day to keep all women in it; there will be less in the future. As surely as the machine will never again be exchanged for the manual tool, as surely as the electric lamp will never again be discarded for the home-made tallow candle, so surely will woman never again abandon her larger social life for a narrow domestic one. To assume that women wilt not work under Socialism, or that they will be limited to any special kind of work, implies a grave misunderstanding of the logic and the natural applicability of Socialism.

Who are the women who do not work to-day? They are a small, insignificant group of useless members of society, the parasite women, whose very uselessness and self-indulgence leads to childlessness and degeneration. Who are the women who work? All women except the parasites. In office, store and factory, in school, college and university, in kitchen and nursery, on the field and in the farm-yard, in public and private life all women are working, Not only are almost all women working to-day,