Kitabı oku: «Woman under socialism», sayfa 13
The activity on the part of the bourgeois associations of women for the abolition of female labor and for the admission of women to the higher professions, at present mainly, if not exclusively, appropriated by men, aims principally at procuring a position in life for women from the social circles just sketched. In order to secure for their efforts greater prospects of success, these associations have loved to place themselves under the protectorate of higher and leading ladies. The bourgeois females imitate herein the example of the bourgeois males, who likewise love such protectorates, and exert themselves in directions that can bring only small, never large results. A Sisyphus work is thus done with as much noise as possible, to the end of deceiving oneself and others on the score of the necessity for a radical change. The necessity is also felt to do all that is possible in order to suppress all doubts regarding the wisdom of the foundations of our social and political organization, and to prescribe them as treasonable. The conservative nature of these endeavors prevents bourgeois associations of women from being seized with so-called destructive tendencies. When, accordingly, at the Women's Convention of Berlin, in 1894, the opinion was expressed by a minority that the bourgeois women should go hand and hand with the working-women, i. e., with their Socialist citizens, a storm of indignation went up from the majority. But the bourgeois women will not succeed in pulling themselves out of the quagmire by their own topknots.
How large the number is of women who, by reason of the causes herein cited, must renounce married life, is not accurately ascertainable. In Scotland, the number of unmarried women of the age of twenty years and over was, towards the close of the sixties, 43 per cent. of the female population, and there were 110 women to every 100 men. In England, outside of Wales, there lived at that time 1,407,228 more women than men of the age of 20 to 40, and 359,966 single women of over forty years of age. Of each 100 women 42 were unmarried.
The surplus of women that Germany owns is very unevenly distributed in point of territories and age. According to the census of 1890, it stood: —98
Accordingly, of marriageable age proper, 15-40, the surplus of women in the German Empire amounts to 27 women to every 1,000 men. Seeing that, within these age periods, there are 9,429,720 male to 9,682,454 female inhabitants, there is a total female surplus of 252,734. In the same four age periods, the proportion of the sexes in other countries of Europe and outside of Europe stood as follows: —99
It is seen that all countries of the same or similar economic structure reveal the identical conditions with regard to the distribution of the sexes according to ages. According thereto, and apart from all other causes already mentioned, a considerable number of women have in such countries no prospect of entering wedded life. The number of unmarried women is even still larger, because a large number of men prefer, for all sorts of reasons, to remain single. What say hereto those superficial folks, who oppose the endeavor of women after a more independent, equal-righted position in life, and who refer them to marriage and domestic life? The blame does not lie with the women that so many of them do not marry; and how matters stand with "conjugal happiness" has been sufficiently depicted.
What becomes of the victims of our social conditions? The resentment of insulted and injured Nature expresses itself in the peculiar facial lines and characteristics whereby so-called old maids, the same as old ascetic bachelors, stamp themselves different from other human beings in all countries and all climates; and it gives testimony of the mighty and harmful effect of suppressed natural love. Nymphomania with women, and numerous kinds of hysteria, have their origin in that source; and also discontent in married life produces attacks of hysteria, and is responsible for barrenness.
Such, in main outlines, is our modern married life and its effects. The conclusion is: Modern marriage is an institution that is closely connected with the existing social condition, and stands or falls with it. But this marriage is in the course of dissolution and decay, exactly as capitalist society itself, – because, as demonstrated under the several heads on the subject of marriage:
1. Relatively, the number of births declines, although population increases on the whole, – showing that the condition of the family deteriorates.
2. Actions for divorce increase in numbers, considerably more than does population, and, in the majority of cases, the plaintiffs are women, although, both economically and socially, they are the greatest sufferers thereunder, – showing that the unfavorable factors, that operate upon marriage, are on the increase, and marriage, accordingly, is dissolving and falling to pieces.
3. Relatively, the number of marriages is on the decline, although population increases, – showing again that marriage, in the eyes of many, no longer answers its social and moral purposes, and is considered worthless, or dangerous.
4. In almost all the countries of civilization there is a disproportion between the number of the sexes, and to the disadvantage of the female sex, and the disproportion is not caused by births – there are, on the average, more boys born than girls, – but is due to unfavorable social and political causes, that lie in the political and economic conditions.
Seeing that all these unnatural conditions, harmful to woman in particular, are grounded in the nature of capitalist society, and grow worse as this social system continues, the same proves itself unable to end the evil and emancipate woman. Another social order is, accordingly, requisite thereto.
CHAPTER III.
PROSTITUTION A NECESSARY SOCIAL INSTITUTION OF THE CAPITALIST WORLD
Marriage presents one side of the sexual life of the capitalist or bourgeois world; prostitution presents the other. Marriage is the obverse, prostitution the reverse of the medal. If men find no satisfaction in wedlock, then they usually seek the same in prostitution. Those men, who, for whatever reason, renounce married life, also usually seek satisfaction in prostitution. To those men, accordingly, who, whether out of their free will or out of compulsion, live in celibacy, as well as to those whom marriage does not offer what was expected of it, conditions are more favorable for the gratification of the sexual impulse than to women.
Man ever has looked upon the use of prostitution as a privilege due him of right. All the harder and severer does he keep guard and pass sentence when a woman, who is no prostitute, commits a "slip." That woman is instinct with the same impulses as man, aye, that at given periods of her life (at menstruation) these impulses assert themselves more vehemently than at others, – that does not trouble him. In virtue of his position as master, he compels her to violently suppress her most powerful impulses, and he conditions both her character in society and her marriage upon her chastity. Nothing illustrates more drastically, and also revoltingly, the dependence of woman upon man than this radically different conception regarding the gratification of the identical natural impulse, and the radically different measure by which it is judged.
To man, circumstances are particularly favorable. Nature has devolved upon woman the consequences of the act of generation: outside of the enjoyment, man has neither trouble nor responsibility. This advantageous position over against woman has promoted that unbridled license in sexual indulgence wherein a considerable part of men distinguish themselves. Seeing, however, that, as has been shown, a hundred causes lie in the way of the legitimate gratification of the sexual instinct, or prevent its full satisfaction, the consequence is frequent gratification, like beasts in the woods.
Prostitution thus becomes a social institution in the capitalist world, the same as the police, standing armies, the Church, and wage-mastership.
Nor is this an exaggeration. We shall prove it.
We have told how the ancient world looked upon prostitution, and considered it necessary, aye, had it organized by the State, as well in Greece as in Rome. What views existed on the subject during the Middle Ages has likewise been described. Even St. Augustine, who, next to St. Paul, must be looked upon as the most important prop of Christendom, and who diligently preached asceticism, could not refrain from exclaiming: "Suppress the public girls, and the violence of passion will knock everything of a heap." The provincial Council of Milan, in 1665, expressed itself in similar sense.
Let us hear the moderns:
Dr. F. S. Huegel says:100 "Advancing civilization will gradually drape prostitution in more pleasing forms, but only with the end of the world will it be wiped off the globe." A bold assertion; yet he who is not able to project himself beyond the capitalist form of society, he who does not realize that society will change so as to arrive at healthy and natural social conditions, – he must agree with Dr. Huegel.
Hence also did Dr. Wichern, the late pious Director of the Rauhen House near Hamburg, Dr. Patton of Lyon, Dr. William Tait of Edinburg, and Dr. Parent-Duchatelet of Paris, celebrated through his investigations of the sexual diseases and prostitution, agree in declaring: "Prostitution is ineradicable because it hangs together with the social institutions," and all of them demanded its regulation by the State. Also Schmoelder writes: "Immorality as a trade has existed at all times and in all places, and, so far as the human eye can see, it will remain a constant companion of the human race."101 Seeing that the authorities cited stand, without exception, upon the ground of the modern social order, the thought occurs to none that, with the aid of another social order, the causes of prostitution, and, consequently, prostitution itself, might disappear; none of them seeks to fathom the causes. Indeed, upon one and another, engaged in this question, the fact at times dawns that the sorry social conditions, which numerous women suffer under, might be the chief reason why so many women sell their bodies; but the thought does not press itself through to its conclusion, to wit, that, therefore, the necessity arises of bringing about other social conditions. Among those who recognize that the economic conditions are the chief cause of prostitution belong Th. Bade, who declares:102 "The causes of the bottomless moral depravity, out of which the prostitute girl is born, lie in the existing social conditions… It is the bourgeois dissolution of the middle classes and of their material existence, particularly of the class of the artisans, only a small fraction of which carries on to-day an independent occupation as a trade." Bade closes his observations, saying: "Want for material existence, that has partly worn out the families of the middle class and will yet wear them out wholly, leads also to the moral ruin of the family, especially of the female sex." In fact, the statistical figures, gathered by the Police Department of Berlin, between 1871-1872, on the extraction of 2,224 enrolled prostitutes, show:
Of 102 the father's occupation was not ascertainable.
Specialists and experts rarely take up investigations of a deeper nature; they accept the facts that lie before them, and judge in the style of the "Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift," that writes in its No. 35, for the year 1863: "What else is there left to the large majority of willing and unwilling celibates, in order to satisfy their natural wants, than the forbidden fruit of the Venus Pandemos?" The paper is, accordingly, of the opinion that, for the sake of these celibates, prostitution is necessary, because what else, forsooth, are they to do in order to satisfy their sexual impulse? And it closes, saying: "Seeing that prostitution is necessary, it has the right to existence, to protection, and to immunity from the State." And Dr. Huegel declares himself in his work, mentioned above, in accord with this view. Man, accordingly, to whom celibacy is a horror and a martyrdom, is the only being considered; that there are also millions of women living in celibacy is well known; but they have to submit. What is right for man, is, accordingly, wrong for women; is in her case immorality and a crime.
The Leipsic Police Doctor, Dr. J. Kuehn, says:103 "Prostitution is not merely an evil that must be tolerated, it is a necessary evil, because it protects the wives from infidelity, [which only the husbands have the right to be guilty of] and virtue also [female virtue, of course, the husbands have no need of the commodity] from being assailed [sic.] and, therefore, from falling." These few words of Dr. Kuehn typify, in all its nakedness, the crass egoism of male creation. Kuehn takes the correct stand for a Police Doctor, who, by superintending prostitution, sacrifices himself, to the end of saving the men from disagreeable diseases. In the same sense with him did his successor, Dr. Eckstein, utter himself at the twelfth convention of the German Associations of House and City Real Estate Owners, held in Magdeburg in the summer of 1890. The honorable house-owners wished to know how they could prevent the numerous instances of prostitutes occupying their houses, and how to protect themselves against fines in case prostitutes are caught living in them. Dr. Eckstein lectured them on this head to the effect that prostitution was a "necessary evil," never absent from any people or religion. Another interesting gentleman is Dr. Fock, who in a treatise, entitled "Prostitution, in Its Ethical and Sanitary Respects," in the "Deutschen Vierteljahrschrift fuer offentliche Gesundheitspflege," vol. xx, No. 1, considers prostitution "an unenviable corollary of our civilized arrangements." He fears an over-production of people if all were to marry upon reaching the age of puberty; hence he considers important to have prostitution "regulated" by the State. He considers natural that the State supervise and regulate prostitution, and thereby assume the care of providing for the supply of girls that are free from syphilis. He pronounces himself in favor of the most rigid inspection of "all women, proven to lead an abandoned life;" – also when ladies of "an abandoned life" belong to the prominent classes? It is the old story. That in all logic and justice also those men should be held under surveillance who hunt up prostitutes, maintain them and make their existence possible, – of that no one thinks. Dr. Fock also demands the taxing of the prostitutes, and their concentration in given streets. In other words, the Christian State is to procure for itself a revenue out of prostitution, and, at the same time, organize and place prostitution under its protection for the benefit of male creation. What was it that the Emperor Vespasian said at a somewhat similar juncture? "Non olet!" – it smells not.
Did we exaggerate when we said: Prostitution is to-day a necessary social institution just as the police, standing armies, the Church and wage-mastership?
In the German Empire, prostitution is not, like in France, organized and superintended by the State; it is only tolerated. Official public houses are forbidden by law, and procuring is severely punishable. But that does not prevent that in a large number of German cities public houses continue to exist, and are winked at by the police. This establishes an incomprehensible state of things. The defiance of the law implied in such a state of things dawned even upon our statesmen and they bestirred themselves to remove the objection by legislative enactments. The German Criminal Code makes also the lodging of a prostitute a penal offense. On the other hand, however, the police are compelled to tolerate thousands of women as prostitutes, and, in a measure, to privilege them in their trade, provided they enter themselves as prostitutes on the Police Register, and submit to the Police regulations, – for instance, periodically recurring examinations by a physician. It follows, however, that, if the Government licenses the prostitute, and thereby protects the exercise of her trade, she must also have a habitation. Aye, it is even in the interest of public health and order that they have such a place to ply their trade in. What contradictions! On the one hand, the Government officially acknowledges that prostitution is necessary; on the other, it prosecutes and punishes the prostitute and the pimp. But it is out of contradictions that bourgeois society is put together. Moreover, the attitude of the Government is an avowal that prostitution is a Sphinx to modern society, the riddle which society can not solve: it considers necessary to tolerate and superintend prostitution in order to avoid greater evils. In other words, our social system, so boastful of its morality, its religiousness, its civilization and its culture, feels compelled to tolerate that immorality and corruption spread through its body like a stealthy poison. But this state of things betrays something else, besides the admission by the Christian State that marriage is insufficient, and that the husband has the right to demand illegitimate gratification of his sexual instincts. Woman counts with such a State in so far only as she is willing, as a sexual being, to yield to illegitimate male desires, i. e., become a prostitute. In keeping herewith, the supervision and control, exercised by the organs of the State over the registered prostitutes, do not fall upon the men also, those who seek the prostitute. Such a provision would be a matter of course if the sanitary police control was to be of any sense, and even of partial effect, – apart from the circumstance that a sense of justice would demand an even-handed application of the law to both sexes. No; "supervision and control" fall upon woman alone.
This protection by the State of man and not woman, turns upside down the nature of things. It looks as if men were the weaker vessel and women the stronger; as if woman were the seducer, and poor, weak man the seduced. The seduction-myth between Adam and Eve in Paradise continues to operate in our opinions and laws, and it says to Christianity: "You are right; woman is the arch seductress, the vessel of iniquity." Men should be ashamed of such a sorry and unworthy role; but this role of the "weak" and the "seduced" suits them; —the more they are protected, all the more may they sin.
Wherever men assemble in large numbers, they seem unable to amuse themselves without prostitution. This was shown, among other instances of the kind, by the occurrences at the German Schuetzenfest, held in Berlin in the summer of 1890, which caused 2,300 women to express themselves as follows in a petition addressed to the Mayor of the German capital: "May it please your Honor to allow us to bring to your knowledge the matters that have reached the provinces, through the press and other means of communication, upon the German shooting matches, held at Pankow from the 6th to the 13th of July of this year. The reports of the matter, that we have seen with indignation and horror, represent the programme of that festival with the following announcements, among others: 'First German Herald, the Greatest Songstress of the World;' 'A Hundred Ladies and Forty Gentlemen:' Besides these smaller cafes chantants and shooting galleries, in which importunate women forced themselves upon the men. Also a 'free concert,' whose gaily-clad waitresses, seductively smiling, brazenly and shamelessly invited the gymnasium students and the fathers of families, the youths and the grown men alike, to the 'shooting retreats.'… The barely dressed 'lady' who invited people to the booth of 'The Secrets of Hamburg, or a Night in St. Pauli,' should have been enough to justify her removal by the police. And then the shocking announcement, almost incredible of the much boasted about Imperial capital, and hardly to be believed by plain male and female citizens in the provinces, to the effect that the managers of the festival had consented to the employment, without pay, of 'young women' in large numbers, as bar-maids, instead of the waiters who applied for work… We, German women, have thousands of occasions, as wives, mothers and as sisters, to send our husbands, children, daughters and brothers to Berlin in the service of the fatherland; we, consequently, pray to your Honor in all humbleness and in the confident expectation that, with the aid of the overpowering influence, which, as the chief magistrate of the Imperial capital, lies in your hand, you may institute such investigations of those disgraceful occurrences, or adopt such other measures as to your Honor may seem fit, to the end that a recurrence of those orgies may not have to be apprehended at the pending Sedan festival, for instance…" (!!)
During the session of the Reichstag, from 1892 to 1893, the united Governments made an effort to put an end to the contradiction that governmental practice, on the one hand, and the Criminal Code on the other, find themselves in with regard to prostitution. They introduced a bill that was to empower the police to designate certain habitations to prostitutes. It was admitted that prostitution could not be suppressed, and that, therefore, the most practical thing was to tolerate the thing in certain localities, and to control it. The bill – upon that all minds were agreed – would, if it became a law, have called again to life the brothels that were officially abolished in Prussia about 1845. The bill caused a great uproar, and it evoked a number of protests in which the warning was raised against the State's setting itself up as the protector of prostitution, and thereby favoring the idea that the use of prostitution was not in violation of good morals, or that the trade of the prostitute was such that the State could allow and approve of. The bill, which met with the strongest opposition both on the floor of the Reichstag and in the committee, was pigeon-holed, and dared not again come into daylight. That, nevertheless, such a bill could at all take shape reveals the embarrassment that society is in.
The administrative regulation of prostitution raises in the minds of men not only the belief that the State allows the use of prostitution, but also that such control protects them against disease. Indeed, this belief greatly promotes indulgence and recklessness on the part of men. Brothels do not reduce sexual diseases, they promote the same: the men grow more careless and less cautious.
Experience has taught that neither the establishment of houses of prostitution, controlled by the police, nor the supervision and medical inspection, ordered by the police, afford the slightest guarantee against contagion. The nature of these diseases is frequently such that they are not to be easily or immediately detected. If there is to be any safety, the inspection would have to be held several times a day. That, however, is impossible in view of the number of women concerned, and also of the costs. Where thirty or forty prostitutes must be "done" in an hour, inspection is hardly more than a farce; moreover, one or two inspections a week is wholly inadequate. The success of these measures also suffers shipwreck in the circumstance that the men, who transmit the germs of disease from one woman to another, remain free from all official annoyance. A prostitute, just inspected and found healthy, may be infected that same hour by a diseased man, and she transmits the virus to other patrons, until the next inspection day, or until she has herself become aware of the disease. The control is not only illusory: These inspections, made at command, and conducted by male, instead of female physicians, hurt most deeply the sense of shame; and they contribute to its total ruination. This is a phenomenon confirmed by many physicians. Even the official report of the Berlin Police Department admits the fact by stating: "It may also be granted that registration causes the moral sense of the prostitute to sink still lower."104 Accordingly, the prostitutes try their utmost to escape this control. A further consequence of these police measures is that they make it extraordinarily difficult, even impossible, for the prostitute ever again to return to a decent trade. A woman, that has fallen under police control, is lost to society; she generally goes down in misery within a few years. Accurately and exhaustively did the fifth Congress at Geneva for Combatting Immorality utter itself against the police regulation of prostitutes, by declaring: "The compulsory medical inspection of prostitutes is an all the more cruel punishment to the woman, seeing that, by destroying the remnants of shame, still possible within even the most abandoned, such inspection drags down completely into depravity the wretched being that is subjected thereto. The State, that means to regulate prostitution with the police, forgets that it owes equal protection to both sexes; it demoralizes and degrades women. Every system for the official regulation of prostitution has police arbitrariness for its consequence, as well as the violation of civic guaranties that are safeguarded to every individual, even to the greatest criminal, against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Seeing this violation of right is exercised to the injury of woman only, the consequence is an inequality, shocking to nature, between her and man. Woman is degraded to the level of a mere means, and is no longer treated as a person. She is placed outside of the pale of law."
Of how little use police control is, England furnishes a striking illustration. In the year 1866 a law was enacted on the subject for places in which soldiers and marines were garrisoned. Now, then, while from 1860 to 1866, without the law, the lighter cases of syphilis had declined from 32.68 to 24.73 per cent., after a six years' enforcement of the new law, the percentage of diseased in 1872 was still 24.26. In other words, it was not one-half per cent. lower in 1872 than in 1866; but the average for these six years was 1-16 per cent. higher than in 1866. In sight of this, a special Commission, appointed in 1873, to investigate the effect of that law, arrived at the unanimous conclusion that "the periodical inspection of the women who usually have sexual intercourse with the personnel of the army and navy, had, at best, not occasioned the slightest diminution in the number of cases," and it recommended the suspension of periodical inspections.
The effects of the Act of Inspection on the women subjected thereto were, however, quite different from those on the troops. In 1866, there were, to every 1,000 prostitutes, 121 diseases; in 1868, after the law had been in force two years, there were 202. The number then gradually dropped, but, nevertheless, still exceeded in 1874 the figure for 1866 by 16 cases. Under the Act, deaths also increased frightfully among the prostitutes. In 1865 the proportion was 9.8 to every 1,000 prostitutes, whereas, in 1874 it had risen to 23. When, towards the close of the sixties, the English Government made the attempt to extend the Act of Inspection to all English cities, a storm of indignation arose from the women. The law was considered an affront to the whole sex. The Habeas Corpus Act, – that fundamental law, that protects the English citizen against police usurpation – would, such was the sentiment, be suspended for women: any brutal policeman, animated by revenge or any other base motive, would be free to seize any decent woman on the suspicion of her being a prostitute, whereas the licentiousness of the men would remain unmolested, aye, would be protected and fed, by just such a law.
Although this intervention in behalf of the outcasts of their sex readily exposed the English women to misrepresentation and degrading remarks from the quarter of narrow-minded men, the women did not allow themselves to be held back from energetically opposing the introduction of the law that was an insult to their sex. In newspaper articles and pamphlets the "pros" and "cons" were discussed by men and women; in Parliament, the extension of the law was, first, prevented; its repeal followed later. The German police is vested with a similar power, and cases that have forced themselves into publicity from Berlin, Leipsic and other cities, prove that its abuse – or be it "mistakes" in its exercise – is easy; nevertheless, of an energetic opposition to such regulations naught is heard. Even in middle class Norway, brothels were forbidden in 1884; in 1888 the compulsory registration of the prostitutes and the inspection connected therewith were abolished in the capital, Christiania; and in January, 1893, the enactment was made general for the whole country. Very rightly does Mrs. Guillaume-Schack remark upon the "protective" measures adopted by the State in behalf of the men: "To what end do we teach our sons to respect virtue and morality if the State pronounces immorality a necessary evil; and if, before the young man has at all reached mental maturity, the State leads woman to him stamped by the authorities as a merchandise, as a toy for his passion?"
Let a sexually diseased man, in his unbridled career of licentiousness, contaminate ever so many of these poor beings – who, to the honor of woman be it said, are mostly driven by bitter want or through seduction to ply their disgraceful trade, – the scurvy fellow remains unmolested. But woe to the woman who does not forthwith submit to inspection and treatment! The garrison cities, university towns, etc., with their congestion of vigorous, healthy men, are the chief centers of prostitution and of its dangerous diseases, that are carried thence into the remotest corners of the land, and everywhere spread infection. The same holds with the sea towns. What the moral qualifications are with a large number of our students the following utterance in a publication for the promotion of morality may give an idea of: "With by far the larger number of students, the views entertained upon matters of morality are shockingly low, aye, they are downright unclean."105 And these are the circles – boastful of their "German breed," and "German morals" – from which our administrative officers, our District Attorneys and our Judges are in part recruited.
