Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/46

44 oppressed of her class, in the broad field of learning where she can disseminate knowledge and truth and beauty and high ideals to the world at large. She is half of humanity. She suffers deeply by its wrongs, she should indeed be highly interested in its progress.

We saw that property laws and class rule have been the source of the oppression of woman and the lower classes alike, by the property-holding classes of all ages. We also saw that family relations among the workers were freed to a great extent from the nastiness and degradation that attached itself to misery and property, poverty and wealth alike. We saw that property laws and property relations have little if any influence in the working class family. Even so is this true in the social relations among the workers. The moral influences of the happy stage of being propertyless are most beneficial. We might unhesitatingly say that the wife, sister or daughter of an intelligent workingman, when the family is out of reach of poverty, is about the freest human being in the world to-day. It does not alter the fact that thousands of them do not know or realize it but complain and hanker for the follies of the rich. A fairly well paid workingman when in his health and prime stands, even under capitalism, in a position to shield his wife and daughters from the pangs of wage-slavery. Their lives are active and useful, their work may even be hard but their movements are free. If their visions are clear and their views bright they have every opportunity of equality, friendship and companionship with the men with whom they associate.

While the women's rights advocate wrapped herself in the cloak of the martyrdom of the ages and made war upon man as her tyrant and oppressor, the Socialist woman quietly assumes her position in the labor movement. She becomes a militant on the battlefield of progress, a champion of the right of humanity. In the Socialist organizations there was never a question of woman's right and equality. The So-