Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/26

 24 her feet destroys a woman's health. The whole combination of circumstances unsexes her and makes her unfit to become a wife and mother. It stunts her mentally and makes her stupified and coarse. It forces on moral degradation in the same degree that it destroys healthy family life and physical and mental culture. Nothing is more repugnant than the unsexed, boldfaced, rude, masculine girl, unless it be the weazened, physically deteriorated, effeminate man. Capitalist society produces a plentiful group of each. A likeness is produced between the sexes, but likeness is not equality. Boldness is not independence. To be rude and tough and do as one pleases is not to be free and strong and a person of character and will.

Factory life is the very opposite of freedom. It is wage slavery. There never was a worse slave-driver than the exacting, ignorant, overbearing boss of to-day. Work and toil and worry and strife can only destroy the mental faculties, and freedom can only come from knowledge and understanding. The road to freedom may indeed lead through the industrial workshop, but the goal is not reached until humanity has made the machine its slave, instead of being a slave to it and the few owners thereof.

[t is not only factory work that woman has invaded, but she is probably an even more formidable competitor of man in the educational and professional branches of work. Every such occupation has been invaded by woman. She has taken the pulpit and the professor’s chair. The majority of teachers in the grammar grades and high schools are women. Of clerks, bookkeepers, stenographers, typewriters, there are more women than men.

With the development of a general and complicated system of commerce such as capitalist distribution necessitated, the demand increased greatly for persons to perform this kind of work. Moreover, branches of industry sprung up in which the workers required knowledge, or at least scraps of