Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - Women of the Future - 1916.pdf/9

 of human labor. The workers will be its representatives. The state will be an organization for the protection and promotion of human life and happiness.

When we say workers to-day we picture a definite social class. In the military societies of the past the workers were looked down upon as the lowest social class. The soldier regarded the producer as being very inferior to himself. The peasant who tilled the soil that fed knight-errant and feudal baron was the last and lowest member of that carefully graded order of caste in feudal society. In the world's most ancient civilizations, Egypt, Greece and Rome, the worker was not only an inferior creature, but an absolute slave. All productive labor was performed by slaves—and by women. The women and the male workers of the world have borne a common lot through the ages. They who supplied the world's needs, on whose quiet labor all human progress depended, have been the most despised and subjected members of human society. Therefore it was not mere chance but a natural result of historical development that the workers and the women awoke to a consciousness of their wrongs at the same time; that they began almost simultaneously to voice their demands for greater social justice; that the present-day labor movement and the present-day woman movement are closely linked.

It was the machine, it was the factory with steam power and electricity and socialized methods of production, it was the industrial revolution that gave the worker and the woman a new power and importance in human society and made their liberation possible. In our present capitalistic society, labor is no longer despised as it was among the patricians of Rome and the lords and knights of medieval Europe. But still labor is the hand-maid of capital, and still the laborer is the social inferior of the capitalist. Even the smallest, most insignificant capitalist who feeds on rents and profits considers himself superior to the man who works for wages. The propertied classes, by virtue of their property, also have the social superiority of knowledge, education and culture, of a better environment, larger opportunities, and a greater chance for life,