Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/39

 Rh As a peculiar manifestation of the manner in which progress works it cannot fail to be noted in this connection that it is under the most tyrannic government in the civilized world, in the Czar's domain, over in little Finland, that the women to-day stand out conspicuously with the highest political rights both as to the use of the suffrage and as to actually having been elected to the nation's highest legislative body. There we hail it indeed as progress and cheer it as one of woman's greatest accomplishments of the ages. It is progress indeed over there, as it greatly increases the vote of the oppressed class and the political forces opposed to autocracy. That country is not as yet ready for the Socialist revolution. Every reform lessens the powers of the Czar and the powers of the State. The spirit with which these Finnish women enter into this work is a glorious sign of woman's progress.

Morally it seems to be conceded that women have the same tights as men in the trade unions of the A. F. of L., and many people really think that they have so in fact, if they only took advantage of it. But these unions are capitalistic unions, i. e., they have for their basic principle that the interests of capital and labor are identical. As far as they serve labor it is only the pure self-interest, not the class interest, of a few favored members of a craft. From the nature of these facts they cannot be of much, if any, help to women in their struggle. Capital's interest in women's labor is to get cheap labor, and to interfere with that would be too much against the "mutual" interest. The only union we know that has declared for equal rights and equal wages for women and held strictly to the declaration is the Typographical Union. The result has been, not by any means, that it opened a branch of high paid labor for women but that they have been almost entirely kept out of a trade that they were as well fitted to work in as any other. So we see that the selfish interest of the typos has been served by their "spirit of equal-