Socialism and 
 Motherhood* 
 
 John Spargo
 
 LIBKArtY 
 
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 ^,\N DIE. GO
 
 tl /?/',
 
 Socialism and Motherhood
 
 BOOKS BY JOHX SPARCO 
 
 SOCIALIST THEORY 
 
 The Spiritual Signifieince of Modern Social- 
 ism. 
 
 The Substance of Socialism. 
 
 Sidelights on Contemporary Socialism. 
 
 Applied Socialism. 
 
 Socialism and Motherhood. 
 
 The Socialists, Who They Are and What 
 They Stand For. 
 
 Socialism, A Summary and Interpretation of 
 Socialist Principles. 
 
 Capitalist and Laborer. 
 
 The Common Sense of Socialism. 
 
 Socialist Readings for Children (illustrated). 
 
 SOCIAL QUESTIONS 
 
 Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Social- 
 ism. 
 
 The Bitter Cry of the Children (illustrated). 
 
 The Common Sense of the Milk Question 
 (illustrated). 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES 
 Karl Marx: His Life and Work (illustrated). 
 The Socialism of William Morris (illus- 
 trated). 
 The Marx He Knew (illustrated).
 
 SOCIALISM 
 AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 BY 
 JOHN SPARGO 
 
 XE\Y YORK 
 
 B. \V. 1IUKBSCH 
 
 1914
 
 Copyright, 1914, by 
 B. W. HUEBSCH 
 
 Printed in U. S. A.
 
 TO 
 
 MY WIFE AND COMRADE 
 
 MARY SPARGO
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 BECAUSE I have written somewhat ex- 
 tensively upon various phases of ma- 
 ternity and child welfare, many Social- 
 ist comrades, in various cities, asked me to 
 lecture upon the relation of Socialism to 
 Motherhood. 
 
 In response to these invitations I delivered 
 a lecture entitled " Socialism and Mother- 
 hood " in many cities. The substance of the 
 lecture somewhat amplified is contained in 
 the following pages. It is my hope that the 
 little book will make clear the promise of 
 Socialism to many mothers and drive the fear 
 of Socialism from their hearts and minds. 
 
 J. S. 
 
 " Xestledovvn," 
 
 Old Bennington, Vt., 
 
 End of October, 1913.
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 OVER the Garden of Life dark clouds 
 hang like a funeral pall. The sun is 
 darkened. 
 
 Through the garden sounds a moaning 
 cry the cry of children hungry of body 
 and soul. They cry tor Bread and Beauty, 
 for Life and Love. 
 
 Poor little flowers of the garden! They 
 droop and fade for the blight of Poverty is 
 upon them. 
 
 A mother, broken-hearted, weeps because 
 ot the desolation of the garden. The beauty 
 and pride of the flowers that glow like 
 flaming torches amid the gloom of the gar- 
 den do not comfort her. She sees only the 
 drooping and fading flowers. 
 
 But lo ! a "\oice is heard in the garden. 
 It speaks from the heart of a sunbeam: 
 
 " I , Socialism, Spirit of Life and Progress, 
 come bringing priceless gifts, 
 
 7
 
 8 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 " Bread and Beauty I bring to the chil- 
 dren. Life and Love to all the blossoms. 
 
 " Freedom and Hope I bring to thee, O 
 Mother of Men, and to thy children Op- 
 portunity." . . . 
 
 But the mother does not believe. Fear 
 holds her in bondage to her grief. She 
 weeps and will not be comforted. 
 
 The Voice speaks again: 
 
 " Fear not, O Mother of Men. I, too, 
 am a mother. 
 
 "I have borne all. I have mothered 
 / have nourished Life "H'itJi Hope. I have 
 endured the Great Agony. 
 
 "Fear me not: I am thy Sister." . . . 
 
 Now the sun dispels the clouds and the 
 Garden of Life is filled with rosy light. 
 
 The drooping flowers lift their heads. 
 
 The moaning cry is turned to laughter 
 and song. 
 
 The mother rises. The light of Hope is 
 in her eyes. She walks blithely, like one in 
 whose heart Faith is reborn.
 
 I 
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 
 
 i 
 
 ONE of the great masterpieces of mod- 
 ern sculpture is The Captive Mother, 
 by Stephan Sincling, the Norwegian 
 sculptor whose art unites to the weird 
 witchery of Grieg's music the profound 
 psychological insight of Ibsen's dramas. In 
 The Captive Mother Sinding symbolizes 
 the supreme tragedy of modern society, the 
 Bondage of Motherhood. With her hands 
 tied behind her back a young mother bends 
 to the ground in agony of body in order 
 that her baby may draw nourishment from 
 her copious breasts. Despite her torturous 
 posture, her face wears an expression of 
 patient tenderness and resignation. 
 
 Curiously enough, some have seen in 
 Binding's master-work nothing more than a 
 glorification of maternal love and devotion. 
 For them, the marble represents Mother- 
 hood Triumphant, the strong love ot the 
 
 9
 
 io SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 mother overcoming all obstacles and bear- 
 ing the fountain of life to her child. 
 
 What a narrow and restricted interpre- 
 tation! That Sinding intended thus to ex- 
 alt and glorify motherhood may be freely 
 granted, but he had another, larger purpose. 
 With fine insight and inspiration he has 
 carved in marble the gravest indictment of 
 modern civilization, the bondage of the 
 mother. Woman, mother and nourisher of 
 the race is bound and hampered in the per- 
 formance of her sublime function. She is 
 bound to the debris of all the ages by po- 
 litical, social and economic disabilities, by 
 false conventions, useless duties and out- 
 worn lies. Centuries of oppression and de- 
 nial of freedom to develop limit and bind 
 her and condemn her to nourish blindly and 
 ignorantly the offspring which she as 
 blindly and ignorantly bears. 
 
 Amid the confusion and clamor occa- 
 sioned by the world-wide uprising of woman 
 demanding equal political and economic 
 status with men, recognition of this relation
 
 T HE ANGEL'S GIFTS 
 
 of political and economic servitude to the 
 limitations and degradation of motherhood 
 makes itself felt. Through woman's loud 
 protest vibrates her passionate yearning for 
 liberation from all that stands in the way 
 of her fulfillment of her divinest function, 
 motherhood, with wisdom and joy. Her 
 dream is not limited to the right to vote 
 upon the same terms as men, or even to 
 equality with man in the labor market. 
 These are at best beginnings they are 
 the foundation stones upon which the free- 
 dom of motherhood is to be built. 
 
 Socialism appeals to the mother with pe- 
 culiar force. It is the Liberator. At all 
 times and in all places the Socialist move- 
 ment has waged war against every political, 
 social and economic disability of woman and 
 proclaimed the gospel of her emancipation. 
 With unfaltering courage and constancy it 
 has proclaimed its faith that until woman 
 is set free so that she can stand erect and 
 unbound, free to achieve her highest and 
 noblest aims, tree to love and choose ma-
 
 12 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 ternal responsibilities with fullness of 
 knowledge and power, the race-life can 
 never attain its perfect blossoming, the Su- 
 perman never be born. 
 
 II 
 
 Socialism appeals most strongly to the 
 mother through its fundamental demand for 
 the equalization of opportunity. Men do 
 not see as vividly as women do, nor feel as 
 keenly, the terrible injustice of unequal op- 
 portunity in childhood, or the limitless suf- 
 fering and wrong arising from it. A man 
 may assent heartily, without reservation, to 
 the Socialist demand for an equal chance for 
 every child born into the world, but only 
 in rare instances will he comprehend the 
 full significance of the demand as readily 
 as a woman will, especially if she be a 
 mother. A mother will understand that 
 the demand for equality of opportunity as 
 the birthright of every child voices the most 
 revolutionary aspiration ever born of hu- 
 man hopes and nurtured by human hearts.
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 13 
 
 The claim for an equal chance for every 
 child born into the world carries with it that 
 most fundamental of claims, that every child 
 has a right to he well-born into the world. 
 And that ideal can never be realized until 
 every mother-to-be is safeguarded by all 
 the arts and resources of our civilization to 
 the end that she may bring her baby into the 
 world with joy healthy of body, glad of 
 heart, serene of soul, unafraid of the future, 
 unterrified by want or the fear of it, secure 
 in the consciousness that the child she bears 
 is heir to all the riches and advantages of 
 earth. 
 
 It is sometimes charged that the demand 
 for equality of opportunity is a modification 
 of the revolutionary aim and temper of true, 
 uncompromising Socialism. Nothing could 
 be farther from the truth ! So long as the 
 Socialist movement unequivocally stands for 
 that principle, and directs all its policies 
 toward its realization, it will be revolution- 
 ary, the incarnate voice of Social Revolu- 
 tion. As so often happens, its simple, in-
 
 i 4 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 flexible justice gives to the demand a sweet 
 reasonableness which induces many to 
 assent to it lightly without any serious ex- 
 amination of all that it involves. The 
 witchery of words lures men on and on un- 
 til they find themselves far beyond their 
 depths in the great ocean of thought. Sim- 
 ple as it may be to say, " I believe in an equal 
 chance for every child born into the world," 
 an intelligent understanding of all that the 
 declaration implies would limit its acceptance 
 to those who realize the necessity of a com- 
 plete reconstruction of society. 
 
 Ill 
 
 We cannot separate the demand for 
 equality of opportunity as the child's birth- 
 right from the claim that every woman who 
 assumes the peril, pain and responsibility of 
 motherhood is entitled to all the care and 
 protection which the collective power and 
 knowledge of civilization make possible. 
 With this as our standard of judgment, let 
 us with full candor face the facts that are
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 15 
 
 and then sec if we cannot visualize in our 
 imagination the facts which might be. 
 
 Upon the Avenue, in a home of refine- 
 ment, beauty and comfort dwells a woman. 
 She has never felt the bitterness of pov- 
 erty, or the fear of it. She has never had 
 to toil in weariness, fearful lest she lack 
 food, raiment or shelter. As a child she 
 was carefully nurtured and protected from 
 every evil influence. She enjoyed her birth- 
 right of play and laughter and song. No 
 factory's gloom ever chilled her spirit, no 
 harsh machines ever hushed her song with 
 their angry clangor. Wisdom and love ten- 
 derly watched and nurtured both her body 
 and her mind, so that she grew into woman- 
 hood strong and beautiful of body and 
 mind. 1 hus we see her in her home, splen- 
 didly equipped for motherhood, as every 
 woman ought to be. 
 
 When the sweet sense of dawning moth- 
 erhood comes to her it comes as a beautiful 
 dream. She does not contemplate with 
 terror the thought that the Unborn nestling
 
 i6 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 beneath her heart may have a childhood like 
 unto her own. She looks to the future with 
 serene confidence. She lives over again in 
 memory her own happy childhood. 
 
 As the critical days draw near, what in- 
 finite resources she commands for her own 
 peace and the welfare of the Unborn! 
 What care is expended, what art employed, 
 to shield her from danger, from weariness 
 of body or distress of mind! And then, 
 when the first low cry falls upon her ear like 
 angel-music, no fear chills her heart. She 
 rejoices in the consciousness that her child 
 is heir to all the ages, that all the treasuries 
 of art, of science, of beauty belong to it. 
 She can say with the Psalmist: 
 
 ' The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places ; 
 Yea, I have a goodly heritage." 
 
 By way of contrast, let us watch the un- 
 folding of another life: On a side street, 
 in a tenement that is mean and poor and 
 void of beauty, dwells another woman. She 
 dwells in the same city as her fortunate sis-
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 17 
 
 tcr, but not in the same world. The gulf 
 which separates the two is well-nigh as 
 broad and impassable as that which sepa- 
 rates mankind from the anthropoid apes. 
 Wonderfully unlike in their lives, they are 
 yet wonderfully alike in one respect. Tlicy 
 are both mothers. 
 
 The tenement mother has never known 
 the bliss of freedom from poverty. The 
 fear of Want has darkened every stage of 
 her life. Its ugly shape brooded over her 
 birth and perched upon her cradle. It 
 spoiled her birthright of play and laughter 
 and song. When she ought to have been 
 playing in the enchanted gardens of child- 
 hood, an Invisible Power made her captive 
 and bound her to the remorseless wheels of 
 industry. The same great Invisible Power 
 took the light of hope from her eyes, the 
 bloom of health from her cheeks, the song 
 ot the joy of life from her heart, and trans- 
 muted them into gold. Overworked, un- 
 derfed, and forever afraid of the morrow, 
 she grew somehow into a pathetic sort of
 
 i8 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 womanhood, weak and weary of body, un- 
 trained, tragically ill-equipped for mother- 
 hood. 
 
 When first she feels the gentle stirrings 
 of a new life the pride of motherhood's shy 
 dawning is soon dispelled. The Great 
 Fear which haunted her childhood rises to 
 mock her pride and turn her cup of joy to 
 bitterness. She lives her own childhood 
 over again, and in her terror sees the Un- 
 born hunger as she hungered, weep as she 
 wept, toil as she toiled, faint and fall be- 
 neath the heavy burden as she fainted and 
 iell. She sees the Unborn despoiled by the 
 Invisible Power as she has been despoiled. 
 
 As the critical days draw near her terror 
 increases with the pain caused by the rest- 
 less life of the Unborn. The pains of the 
 body are as nothing when compared with 
 the anguish caused by the fearful thought 
 that the Unborn must face a future like her 
 own past a tragic struggle with sordid 
 poverty. She longs for rest for the sake of 
 the Unborn, that it may rest, but in vain.
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 19 
 
 Daughter of toil and privation, she must toil 
 on, despite her pain. The arts and re- 
 sources of civilization are not available to 
 shield such as she from danger, from weari- 
 ness of body or distress of mind! 
 
 At last there comes a day when she sinks 
 by her unfinished task exhausted. She hears 
 the low wail of her child. It falls upon her 
 frightened ears like the reproach of an out- 
 raged spirit. In the moment of her deliv- 
 erance from the pain of the body, the an- 
 guish of her soul increases. She sees, as 
 only a mother can, the heritage of toil and 
 privation to which her child is born. 
 
 IV 
 
 The contrast is not overdrawn. It is 
 tragic and terrible, but we must face it and 
 reckon with it if we would understand all 
 that is implied in the demand that every 
 woman who assumes the functions of moth- 
 erhood shall have equal protection, equal ad- 
 vantage, equal opportunity, so far as the 
 gift of these lies within human power.
 
 20 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 It is no answer to our demand to urge 
 that absolute equality of equipment for 
 motherhood is a beautiful but unattainable 
 ideal; that there are factors which are be- 
 yond human control. Let so much be 
 granted: there still remain the awful in- 
 equalities which are of human causation and 
 remediable by collective action. In the case 
 of the two mothers of our illustration all the 
 advantages of the mother of good fortune 
 and all the disadvantages of the mother of 
 ill fortune are of human origin. The 
 beautiful home of the mother of good for- 
 tune is an environmental condition of hu- 
 man making. The skill and care which pro- 
 tected her and equipped her for motherhood 
 are human forces. Likewise the squalid 
 tenement home of the less fortunate mother 
 is an environmental condition of human 
 origin. The poverty which blasted her life 
 is a social condition of our human making. 
 The labor in childhood which wrecked her 
 body is a social condition, too, for which we 
 are collectively responsible.
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 
 
 There is no reason other than our short- 
 comings, our social ignorance, indifference or 
 greed why any of these evils should continue 
 to exist. It is well within our collective 
 power to make the advantages enjoyed by the 
 fortunate mother on the Avenue equally acces- 
 sible to every mother in the civilized world. 
 There is no good, sensible reason why a sin- 
 gle ugly tenement should be built anywhere, 
 or why those we have already suffered to be 
 built should continue to exist and blight and 
 dwarf the bodies and souls of the dwellers 
 in them. It- is well within our social power 
 to make all human habitations conform to the 
 splendid ideal of Ibsen's Master Builder 
 Solness : 
 
 ". . . homes for human beings. Cozy, 
 comfortable, bright homes, till ere father and 
 mother and the ichole troop of children can 
 lii'c in safety and gladness, feeling what a 
 happ\ thing it is to be alii'c in the icorld - 
 and most of all to belong to each other in 
 great things and in small." 
 
 There is no good, sensible reason why any
 
 22 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 little child anywhere within the boundaries 
 of civilization should be denied the precious 
 birthright of joyful play and forced to per- 
 form body and soul destroying tasks in fac- 
 tory, workshop or mine, while strong men 
 stand idle in the market place and complain, 
 " No man hath hired us." 
 
 And surely there is no good reason why 
 anywhere within the limits of civilized so- 
 ciety a mother must imperil her own life and 
 that of her offspring by working her body to 
 weariness during the period of her preg- 
 nancy; no reason why the health and happi- 
 ness of mother and child should be menaced 
 by the mother's fear of the hideous monster, 
 poverty. It has been shown by Pinard and 
 others that overwork during pregnancy seri- 
 ously affects the offspring and is an impor- 
 tant cause of premature birth and of still- 
 birth. 1 If we take a hundred working 
 women and enable them to rest during the 
 last three months of pregnancy, we shall find 
 
 1 In Boston more than five per cent, of the births are 
 still-births.
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 23 
 
 that their offspring arc larger and finer than 
 those of a hundred similar working women 
 who have pursued their regular employment 
 until a short time before their confinement. 
 Moreover, there will be fewer premature 
 births. It is not as generally known as it 
 ought to be that prematurity of birth is one 
 of the important causes of excessive infant 
 mortality. Prematurity means immaturity. 
 The prematurely born child comes into the 
 world ill-equipped to withstand the perils 
 of infancy and childhood. How important 
 this is may be guessed from the fact that, ac- 
 cording to Ilavelock Ellis, about one-third 
 of the babies born in civilized countries to- 
 day are prematurely born. 2 
 
 If the right of the child to be well-born 
 means anything at all, if it is more than a 
 cant phrase, it means the right of every 
 mother to be surrounded by all the care, all 
 the skill, all the safeguards of the health and 
 happiness of herself and her child, which 
 
 - HAVE LOCK KI.LIS, The Problem of Race-Regeneration, 
 p. 18.
 
 24 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 human lo\ T e and knowledge make possible. 
 So much the intelligent and humane breeder 
 of animals provides for the brood mare. 
 Even the poor ignorant Kaffir aims to as- 
 sure so much to the mother of his children. 
 
 x 
 
 Elie Reclus tells us that savages almost uni- 
 versally exempt their women from toil for 
 long periods before and after childbirth. 3 
 It is only among civilized human beings that 
 this fundamental claim of motherhood re- 
 ceives no recognition! 
 
 Socialism, then, demands that every so- 
 cial condition, every art and every power of 
 science which now contribute to the health- 
 fulness and happiness of motherhood for the 
 privileged few shall be democratized and 
 made common to all mothers. It would 
 transform the privilege of a class into an 
 inalienable right for all. Its cardinal prin- 
 ciple, the communism of opportunity, 
 touches the whole octave of life, but no- 
 where is it of more vital significance to the 
 life of the race than where it touches the 
 
 3 ELIE RECLUS, Primitive Folk, p. 35.
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 25 
 
 fundamental claims of motherhood in this 
 far-reaching and revolutionary proposal. 
 
 But it is not enough that the mother shall 
 be given an opportunity to bring her baby 
 into the world with all the advantages of 
 healthful and beautiful preparation and of 
 healthful and beautiful surroundings for the 
 child. Motherhood needs a larger free- 
 dom yet. Every mother needs and should 
 have the perfect freedom of a full oppor- 
 tunity to be a mother in the most complete 
 sense of that much too narrowly interpreted 
 word freedom to remain with her child 
 to nourish and guard its body and soul dur- 
 ing all the dependent years. Nothing less 
 than that will suffice. 
 
 Motherhood is not for all women, per- 
 haps, but it is surely woman's highest anil 
 holiest mission. A curse rests upon the so- 
 cial system which tears millions of mothers 
 away from the cradles of their babies, from 
 their true vocation as builders of the bodies
 
 26 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 and souls of their sons and daughters, and 
 forces them into factories, workshops, stores, 
 counting-houses and other women's kitchens 
 to labor while their children are neglected. 
 A social system which finds larger profit in 
 the making of paper bags and shoddy cloth- 
 ing for the sake of dividends to an exploit- 
 ing class than in the development of strong, 
 well-nurtured children, is doomed. 
 
 Yet this wrong is going on all the time, 
 practically unchecked, all over the civilized 
 world. The shockingly heavy mortality of 
 our large factory towns, where many moth- 
 ers are employed in factories, leaving their 
 babies in the charge of old women, or of 
 small girls, is very largely due to the em- 
 ployment of the mothers away from the 
 home. 4 There is no food for a baby which 
 
 4 At the Fifteenth International Congress of Hygiene 
 and Demography, held at Washington, D. C., September, 
 1912, Dr. (ieor.ee Reid, public health officer of Stafford, 
 England, gave an account of an inquiry which he had 
 conducted, on behalf of the British government, to deter- 
 mine, if possible, the effect of the labor of married 
 women on infant mortality. According to The Survey, 
 October 5, 1912, the twelve months' life history of 5000 
 infants in the families of Staffordshire artisans was
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 27 
 
 can compare with its mother's milk. The 
 mortality of hand-fed babies is generally 
 three times that of breast-led babies. Some- 
 times the difference is even greater than that. 
 There are many mothers who cannot nurse 
 their offspring for physical reasons. They 
 and their babies are to be pitied. There are 
 women who can, but will not. They refuse 
 to make the sacriiice oi social enjoyment 
 which nursing their babies would involve. 
 Such women are to be condemned. Their 
 sin comes perilously near to that form of 
 selfishness which prompts infanticide. 
 
 But there are other mothers whose 
 breasts arc full, and who would gladly nurse 
 their babies, yet do not. They cannot. 
 They are prevented from doing so by that 
 great Invisible Power which drives them into 
 
 studied. The employment of married women in the pot- 
 tery towns of Staffordshire i> common, Says The Sur- 
 i'ry: ''The infant mortality among the class of work- 
 ing mothers was found to exceed that among the house- 
 wives by 43 per cent. BY a shift in the statistic; 1 ! clas- 
 sifications it was found that the mortality amonc; infants 
 pr.rtly artificially fed exceeded that of the naturally fed 
 class by 79 per cent., that those wholly artificially fed 
 exceeded the breast-ted babies by 157 [per cent.J."
 
 28 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 the industrial world to become wage earners. 
 Of all the wastes of which civilized society 
 is guilty, the worst and most tragic is the 
 waste of motheriiood. The talents of un- 
 counted thousands of mothers are wasted, 
 perverted to base and unworthy ends. 
 Sometimes members of the employing class 
 experience some qualms of conscience as a 
 result of the recognition of this waste, and, 
 in a spirit of philanthropy, build nurseries in 
 connection with their factories, so that the 
 mothers may suckle their babies at stated 
 intervals of their work. So keen is the de- 
 sire to reduce the infant death rate, to stop 
 some of the waste of baby lives, that many 
 of our social reformers welcome this hideous 
 compromise. They do not ask themselves 
 why motherhood should thus be subordinated 
 to profit-making; why in our social economy 
 the maternal function of building up the 
 body and soul of the child should be sub- 
 ordinated to the production of commodities. 
 In The blaster Builder, one of the pro- 
 foundest of his dramas, and the most beauti-
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 29 
 
 ful, Ibsen describes with vivid power the 
 true vocation of the mother, to be a builder 
 of the bodies and souls of little children. 
 Halvard Solness, the Master Builder, tells 
 little Hilda Wangel, that elfin-like creature 
 whose radicalism challenges him, the story 
 of the great tragedy which wrecked his 
 wife's life and made her the wraith-like 
 creature that she is. He tells her that his 
 wife's vocation has been crushed and stunted, 
 in order that his own success might be 
 achieved. lie tells his bewildered com- 
 panion that Aline, his wife, had a talent for 
 building. 
 
 "Not houses and towers, a-nd spires - 
 not such things as I work away at," he ex- 
 plains, and Hilda asks, "Well, but what 
 then?'' He replies with bitter agony: 
 
 " For building up the souls of little chil- 
 dren, Hilda. For building up children's 
 souls in perfect balance, and in noble and 
 beautiful forms. For enabling tJiem to soar- 
 up into erect and full-grown Jiuman souls. 
 That nas .-1 line's talent. And there it all
 
 30 SOCIALISM AND M O T II E R H O O D 
 
 lies now unused and unusable forever 
 of no earthly service to anyone just like 
 the ruins left by a fire." 
 
 In all our industrial towns there are nu- 
 merous women like Aline Solness. Their 
 name is legion. Dowered by nature with 
 the wonderful talent of motherhood, for 
 " building up children's souls in perfect bal- 
 ance, and in noble and beautiful forms," they 
 are compelled to give their lives to other, 
 less noble, work. Their talents lie " unused 
 and unusable forever of no earthly serv- 
 ice to anyone --just like the ruins left by a 
 fire." 
 
 Nothing in the world can take the place 
 of maternal affection and attention. From 
 time to time amiable theorists generally 
 childless! 'have propounded plans for sup- 
 planting the individual mother in the rearing 
 of children. All sorts of communal nurs- 
 eries with " scientific direction and manage- 
 ment " have been advocated. If there is any 
 one thing about which we may speak with 
 assurance it is the folly of the basic idea of
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 31 
 
 these schemes. All observed facts go to 
 show that it is a calamity for a child to be 
 deprived of the attention of its mother. The 
 most elaborate communal or cooperative 
 nursery ever devised, despite the most sci- 
 entific direction and management, cannot 
 equal in efficiency the care of a healthy 
 mother of average intelligence. For or- 
 
 o * > 
 
 phans and foundlings such institutions may, 
 in some cases, be necessary, but they are nec- 
 essary evils. Experience plainly teaches 
 that it is far better to place the little ones in 
 real homes, no matter how humble the homes 
 may be. Every little human child needs and 
 should have " a pair of mother's arms all its 
 own." 
 
 Even the practice, formerly much more 
 common than now, of handing infants over 
 to wet-nurses to be suckled, should never be 
 resorted to if the mother can nurse the child 
 herself. Such nursing is better than bottle 
 feeding, but the mortality oi iniants suckled 
 by others than their own mothers is double 
 that of babies nursed, as nature intended
 
 32 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 them to be, by their own mothers. Plato, 
 in his immortal Utopia, provided that no 
 mother should be able to nurse, or to iden- 
 tify, her own child. We know now that 
 Plato, profound thinker though he was, 
 made the fundamental error of regarding 
 maternity as a purely animal function, and of 
 disregarding the subtle psychic factors which 
 enter into it. 
 
 The whole authority of modern science 
 supports the demand of the Socialist for such 
 a change in our industrial system as will free 
 motherhood and make it possible for every 
 mother to devote herself to the care of her 
 children. The world does not need it 
 will be infinitely better without the great 
 universal waste of the talents of mother- 
 hood. 
 
 VI 
 
 It is just a hundred years ago since Rob- 
 ert Owen, in the first of his Essays on the 
 Formation of Human Character, wrote: 
 " Any general character, from the best to
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 33 
 
 the worst, irom the most ignorant to die 
 most enlightened, may be given to any com- 
 munity, even to the world at large, by the 
 application of proper means; which means 
 are to a great extent at the command and 
 under the control of those who have influ- 
 ence in the affairs of men." Owen's experi- 
 ence at New Lanark had convinced him that 
 human character depended upon heredity to 
 a very much smaller degree, and upon en- 
 vironment to a very much larger degree, 
 than was generally believed. lie was not 
 slow to perceive that here was a fact of tre- 
 mendous significance to the worker for so- 
 cial reformation. So long as men believed 
 that the physical and moral decay by which 
 they were confronted had its roots in the 
 past, that children were literally " damned 
 before they were born," they could not un- 
 dertake the task of social redemption with 
 the faith and confidence essential to success. 
 Owen's success was due to his profound be- 
 lief that environment was far more im-
 
 34 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 portant than heredity, and he bravely did 
 his part to dispel the fear of heredity which 
 paralyzed the hearts and hopes of men. 
 
 We know to-dny that Owen was right. 
 The overwhelming bulk of scientific evidence 
 supports his conclusion. It was the belief 
 of the late Dr. Barnardo, the famous Eng- 
 lish philanthropist, that heredity is a practi- 
 cally negligible factor in the general problem 
 of poverty, vice, crime and racial degen- 
 eration. He gathered the human drift- 
 wood of the great English metropolis, the 
 foundlings picked up in the gutters and ash- 
 cans, the orphans of the criminal and vicious 
 and shiftless denizens of the slums, the waifs 
 and strays who found their way into the 
 clutches of the police. From such unprom- 
 ising material, he reared men of good health 
 and character, from w r hose ranks Canada, 
 South Africa and Australia have recruited 
 thousands of their finest citizens. 
 
 At the First International Congress on 
 Eugenics, held in London in the summer of 
 1912, Mr. Arthur J. Balfour, the former
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 
 
 Prime Minister of England, pointed out that 
 there is far less dogmatism, and far more 
 divergence of opinion, upon the subject of 
 heredity to-day than in the seventies and 
 eighties of the last century. That is true, 
 at least to the extent that it is now generally 
 admitted that environment is the more im- 
 portant factor. Sir John MacDonald, per- 
 haps the leading English authority on the 
 subject, stoutly maintained that, in the ma- 
 jority of cases, the habitual criminal is made 
 so by his environment and training, that 
 heredity is a far less important factor. 
 Morals depend upon physical health and 
 good environment far more than upon her- 
 itage. Professor S. G. Smith, of the Uni- 
 versity of Minnesota, epigrammatically 
 summed up the case in his declaration that 
 he would " rather be the son of a healthy 
 burglar than of a consumptive bishop." He 
 took the view of Dr. Eichholz, expressed in 
 his testimony before the famous British In- 
 terdepartmental Committee on Physical De- 
 terioration, that there " is a lack of any real
 
 36 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 evidence of any hereditary taint or strain of 
 deterioration even among the poor popula- 
 tions of our cities . . . our physical degen- 
 eracy is produced afresh by each generation 
 . . . there is every chance under reasonable 
 measures of amelioration of restoring our 
 poorest population to a condition of normal 
 physique. . . . The interpretation would 
 seem to be that Nature gives every genera- 
 tion a fresh start." 
 
 From the point of view of the Socialist 
 seeking to remove poverty, vice and crime, 
 and from the point of view of the mothers 
 of the race, this is the most inspiring and 
 encouraging message science has ever given 
 to the world. It means that the wrongs of 
 our ancestors affect us much less than an 
 older generation of scientists taught us to be- 
 lieve. It means that if we can surround the 
 children from the moment of birth with de- 
 cent conditions, maintain them in a proper 
 environment, solve the problem of the distri- 
 bution of wealth and do away with poverty, 
 we can move upward, and onward practically
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 37 
 
 unhampered by the sins of past generations, 
 unaff righted by the terrible specter of physi- 
 cal heredity damning our babies while yet 
 they lie in the wombs of their mothers. 
 
 \Ve Socialists do not deny an important 
 influence to heredity. Still less do we deny 
 the importance of many of the things our 
 inends, the Eugenists, are so vigorously con- 
 tending lor. That certain hereditarily 
 transmissible diseases and weaknesses ought 
 to bar marriage and procreation is in nowise 
 incompatible with our faith. As Dr. Sa- 
 Iceby reminds us, recent study has clearly 
 shown the importance of heredity in the 
 realm of idiocy and insanity, but it has 
 shown also, with equal clearness, that c-i'cn 
 in cretinic idiocv, the addition of " one single 
 ingredient to the diet may concert the poor 
 idiot into a -person of fair and normal 
 mind." :> Tt is only when eugenics is offered 
 as an all-sufficient solution of the social prob- 
 lem that we Socialists need have any conflict 
 with the Eugenists. 
 
 C. W. SALFF.BY, Methods of Race-Regeneration, p. 12.
 
 3 8 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 So long as it was believed that tuberculosis 
 was perpetuated mainly, if not wholly, 
 through the channels of heredity, that " it 
 ran in families," and was " born in the 
 blood " of its victims, so long we were help- 
 less to effectually combat it. We only be- 
 gan to effectually fight the disease when we 
 set ourselves free from the tear of heredity. 6 
 And so it is with the great problem of race 
 degeneration, including in that term poverty, 
 vice and crime. We can only address our- 
 selves hopefully and confidently to the task 
 of regenerating the race when, no longer op- 
 pressed and dominated by the fear of hered- 
 ity, which is beyond human control, so far 
 as all the countless generations of the past 
 are concerned, we turn our attention to the 
 living present, to the great facts of environ- 
 ment, which are within our control. 
 
 r ' In a paper read at the Academy of Medicine, New 
 York City, on January igth, 1914, it was declared by the 
 eminent medical authority, Lieut. -Colonel Woodruff, late 
 of the U. S. A. medical corps, that it is the consensus of ex- 
 pert opinion that no child is ever born with tuberculosis.
 
 Til E ANGEL'S GIFTS 39 
 
 VII 
 
 The hope of the race, then, lies in the 
 equalization of opportunity which is the 
 Alpha and Omega of Socialism. And 
 to the mothers of the race that ideal must 
 make its strongest appeal. Socialism is 
 a living protest against the waste of human 
 life represented by the appalling volume of 
 needless infant mortality. Our gravest 
 peril is not " race suicide," but race homi- 
 cide. The heart of our problem is not a 
 low birthrate, but a needlessly high death- 
 rate. More than thirty per cent, of our 
 babies die without reaching the age of two 
 years. One-fourth of all the babies born 
 to the mothers of America die without reach- 
 ing the age of one year. Each year, in the 
 United States, we needlessly sacrifice fully 
 i ^0,000 baby lives. These are victims of 
 poverty, of neglect, of ignorance in a 
 word, of the frightful inequality of oppor- 
 tunity which characterizes our social order. 
 
 Socialists are olten accused of hugging to
 
 4 o SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 themselves the delusion of a world in which 
 all men and women will he equal. Their 
 enemies taunt them with aiming to bring 
 about " the dull level of equality." In point 
 of fact, only through the equalization of op- 
 portunity can we ever realize anything ap- 
 proaching true individualism. The Social- 
 ist ideal is not at all incompatible with the 
 development of individual genius and char- 
 acter. On the contrary, until we socialize 
 all the opportunities for healthful living, so 
 that they are the common heritage of all, we 
 shall waste an incalculable amount of poten- 
 tial individual genius. 
 
 There must be inequality of capacity, of 
 character, of achievement. That is Na- 
 ture's universal and immutable law. But if 
 we are to obtain the best results from that 
 inequality of capacity, character and achieve- 
 ment, we must give to every child born full 
 and free access to every social gift, so that 
 he may develop all his gifts. The inevitable 
 result of this communism of opportunity 
 must be a glorious individualism of achieve-
 
 TII i: AN c; EL'S c; i FTS 4 i 
 
 nicnt. Socialism, then, is not aiming at 
 equality and a level plain of mediocrity, but 
 rather at a glorious inequality through the 
 equality of advantage which it seeks to es- 
 tablish. 
 
 That there is a much greater degree of 
 equality in human capacity and talent than 
 we have hereto! ore recognized is certain. 
 As we have seen, within the species, environ- 
 ment counts tor more than heredity. A 
 great deal of the moral and intellectual su- 
 periority which exists among men is due to 
 exceptional advantages, rather than to an 
 inherited superiority. To admit so much is 
 not to claim that with the destruction of the 
 harriers which now deny to the many the 
 advantages enjoyed by the few there would 
 no longer be differences among men. Equal- 
 ity could only be attained by holding down 
 the stronger to the level of the weaker, 
 r.quality of opportunity, on the other hami. 
 would simply unbind those who are now 
 bound down by lack of opportunity and set 
 them free.
 
 42 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 Poverty must be abolished, because it is 
 anti-social, and denies millions of souls an 
 adequate opportunity to develop their in- 
 born powers. The disease-breeding tene- 
 ment and the slum must go for the same rea- 
 son. Child labor must go, because it stunts 
 the body and the mind, destroying the physi- 
 cal, intellectual and spiritual forces which 
 are essential to the highest and noblest de- 
 velopment of a human being. When we 
 turn back to the Athens of Pericles, where 
 individualism flourished and produced the 
 noblest art the world has ever known, we are 
 struck at once by the fact that there was in 
 Athens then, for the free citizens, a splendid 
 communism of opportunity. Athens found 
 that the highest individualism was the nat- 
 ural fruitage of her fundamental communism 
 which placed the means of the common life 
 under the control of the whole body politic. 
 In like manner, we Socialists believe, the 
 most generous individualism of intellectual 
 and spiritual culture will result from the so- 
 cialization of production and exchange and
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 43 
 
 the social advantages based upon production 
 and exchange. 
 
 VIII 
 
 To-day the production and the exchange 
 of wealth are functions carried on with 
 an anti-social object, namely, the profit of a 
 class of non-producers. That is the funda- 
 mental wrong of capitalism. That is the 
 source of its poverty, its vice, its crime, its 
 inefficient lives, its inequality of opportunity. 
 Those who make the bread of the world 
 cannot eat the bread their hands have made. 
 No one is poor because there is not enough 
 for all. No child in America suffers hunger 
 because there is a dearth of food in America. 
 No child wears rags or goes without shoes 
 because good clothes and shoes cannot be 
 made in sufficient quantity to supply all. 
 
 No! When the hunger-cry is loudest the 
 storehouses groan with their burden of food. 
 When there is the greatest lack of clothing 
 and shoes, warehouses are filled to overflow- 
 ing with them. And even if it w r ere other- 
 wise, there is always a well-nigh inexhaustible
 
 44 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 reserve of productive capacity available to 
 supply every human need. Machinery and 
 labor and raw materials are plentiful. On 
 the one side we have abundant natural re- 
 sources and wonderful powers of production; 
 on the other side we have a great unsatisfied 
 need which could be easily satisfied by the ap- 
 plication of a moiety of our powers to an 
 infinitesimal portion of our resources. But 
 we have not as yet learned to direct our pro- 
 ductive capacity to the social good. 
 
 If our economic activities were inspired 
 and controlled by a social purpose and vision, 
 no human want would remain unsatisfied so 
 long as there were unexhausted productive 
 powers and opportunities. All our re- 
 sources and our skill and might would be 
 combined to meet the needs of every human 
 being. If we found ourselves incapable of 
 producing plenty for all, we should, if we 
 were trulv social, see to it that all shared in 
 the dearth due to the lack of productive 
 capacity. On the other hand, finding our- 
 selves capable of producing infinitely more
 
 THE AN GEL'S GIFTS 45 
 
 than \vc need, we should, if we were truly 
 social, see to it that all shared the advantages 
 oi our triumph as producers. We should 
 aim to make life better, richer, happier and 
 more beautiful for all. \Ve should see that 
 the result of our triumph was more beauty 
 in the homes of all and larger leisure for all 
 to enjoy the beauty. Inspired and controlled 
 by the ideal of social well-being, we should 
 see that no human being performed in pain a 
 task which might have been performed in 
 joy; that nothing ugly was produced which 
 might have been made beautiful; that noth- 
 ing was made which was unworthy of our 
 best power; that our work was the worthiest, 
 and performed under the worthiest condi- 
 tions, of which we were capable. 
 
 So long as the prevailing capitalist system 
 lasts this social ideal will remain unattaina- 
 ble. For capitalism is essentially anti- 
 social. Its entire structure rests upon the 
 production of thing,; primarily for sale to the 
 end that a ruling class may profit, instead oi 
 \ipon the social principle of production for
 
 46 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 use, for social gain, for the common good 
 and joy of all. 
 
 There is no other adequate explanation of 
 our social shortcomings. The only reason 
 why men who are capable of building beauti- 
 ful homes as is shown by the palaces they 
 build for the rich build ugly, prison-like, 
 gloomy tenements for themselves and their 
 wives and children to dwell in is the fact that 
 their labor is governed, not by the desire to 
 attain supreme usefulness, but by the desire 
 for profit. The only reason that a man's 
 burdens are fastened upon a child's frail back 
 is profit. The only reason for the adultera- 
 tion of the milk of the helpless child and 
 the bread of the father is profit. And it is 
 that same anti-social thing, profit, which ex- 
 plains the wanton destruction of the food for 
 which men, women and children pine, and 
 for lack of which they starve and die. In 
 1911, amid a nation-wide outcry against the 
 prevailing famine prices and the increasing 
 difficulty of making ends meet experienced 
 by millions of people, the newspapers told
 
 THE A NOEL'S GIFTS 47 
 
 the story of cold storage warehouses being 
 opened up and iood wantonly destroyed, of 
 a million dozen eggs destroyed in New York 
 alone, in order that the supply might be les- 
 sened and the high price of eggs arbitrarily 
 maintained. 7 Only in a society which pro- 
 duces primarily for profit and class advantage 
 could such a condition ever exist. 
 
 To whom can the abolition of these and 
 the manifold other evils of capitalism be of 
 greater interest than to the mothers? Who 
 better than they can know the bitter cost of 
 production for profit? Who is better able 
 than the mother to translate the tale of capi- 
 talist profit into the terms of social loss 
 of poverty, of suffering, of dwarfed bodies 
 and souls, of wrecked hopes and lives? 
 Who can have a greater interest than the 
 mother in the promise which Socialism brings 
 of a world redeemed from the curse which 
 production for profit has laid upon our civ- 
 ilization? 
 
 7 l'idc daily newspapers, October 28, 1912.
 
 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 Production for use instead of profit, 
 for the common good instead of for the 
 gain of a few at the cost of the many, can 
 only be made possible through the col- 
 lective ownership of the resources of na- 
 ture and the principal means of production. 
 And so everywhere the Socialist movement 
 is striving to bring about the collective own- 
 ership and democratic control and manage- 
 ment of all those means of production which 
 so long as they are owned and controlled by 
 individuals, or by groups of individuals, en- 
 able their owners to build thrones of pride 
 and power upon the degradation of the many, 
 the users of the tools, the actual producers. 
 Collective ownership of the means ol pro- 
 duction, with democratic management, is the 
 central demand in the Socialist programme 
 everywhere. 
 
 This programme does not contemplate the 
 destruction of all forms of private property, 
 and the making of all things common to all.
 
 T II E ANGEL'S GIFTS 49 
 
 On the contrary, it is quite certain that col- 
 lective ownership of the great social 
 agencies of production and exchange would 
 result in making private property far more 
 general than it is now. Millions of people 
 have practically no private property at all 
 to-day. They do not own the homes in 
 which they live. They do not own the things 
 they produce. They do not own enough to 
 provide the necessities of a decent existence 
 during a month of enforced abstention from 
 labor. When sickness, accident, or other 
 misfortune, compels them to be idle for a 
 few weeks they are reduced to dependence 
 upon charity as the only alternative to starva- 
 tion. Even in the most prosperous times 
 millions of people are so divorced from prop- 
 erty of all kinds that they never have enough 
 good lood to eat, enough good clothes to 
 wear, or decent homes in which to live. 
 How idle, therefore, it is to urge as a rea- 
 son for opposing Socialism and remaining 
 content with the existing order the fear that 
 Socialism would do away with private prop-
 
 50 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 erty ! Capitalism has never provided all 
 people with private property. Socialism on 
 the other hand, would make it possible for 
 every human being to have and own all the 
 private property which that human being 
 could use to advantage and without imposing 
 any disadvantage upon another human 
 being. 
 
 The collective ownership of the principal 
 means of social production that is, the 
 natural resources, the mines, factories, rail- 
 ways, machinery, and so on would not 
 take away anything from the great majority 
 of people. True, the worker would not 
 himself own the machine used by him, but 
 that is his condition to-day. The workers 
 in our great factories and workshops do riot 
 own the tools with which they labor. They 
 do not own the raw materials upon which 
 they labor. They do not own the places in 
 which they labor. They do not own the 
 things which they produce by their labor. 
 All these are owned by an exploiting class of 
 non-producers, whose interest it is to see that
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 51 
 
 the producers get in the form of wages as 
 little as they can manage to live upon, and 
 produce as much more than they receive as 
 possible. This is the inevitable interest of 
 the owning class, because its own income is 
 derived from that which the workers pro- 
 duce over and above what they receive In the 
 form of wages. 
 
 Collective ownership and democratic con- 
 trol of the means of production would not 
 give the ownership of the tools of labor to 
 the individual worker. That was once pos- 
 sible, in the days when production was of 
 necessity carried on by hand labor. It is 
 not possible with machine production, which 
 is only carried on by the organized labor 
 of masses of workers. But collective owner- 
 ship would make it impossible for the idle few 
 to exploit the industrious many. It would 
 make it possible for the workers themselves 
 to exercise an effective control over the prod- 
 ucts of their labor and their distribution. 
 It would make certain a fuller enjoyment by 
 the producers of the wealth they produce.
 
 52 S O C I A L I S M AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 This is what we mean when we say that col- 
 lective ownership of the forces of social 
 production would result in a greater dif- 
 fusion of real private property. 
 
 It is not difficult for the mother to under- 
 stand how common ownership of the means 
 of production can be combined with private 
 ownership in consumption goods in social 
 economy. Every mother can see that the 
 principle is the same as that which governs 
 the home. The ideal home is, indeed, only 
 a microcosm of the ideal state. In the well- 
 regulated home there is equal care for the 
 collective interest of the family as a whole 
 and for the individual interest of each mem- 
 ber. The comfort and advantage of each 
 individual member of the family depends 
 upon the denial of the power to monopolize 
 many things in the home, and maintaining 
 them as the common property of all the 
 members. Xo one member could assert and 
 exercise a right to the sole ownership and 
 control of these things without injuring every 
 other member of the family. On the other
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 53 
 
 hand, there are many things which must be re- 
 garded as belonging to individual members, 
 if harmony is to prevail. 
 
 Kvery mother sees this and comprehends 
 the philosophy of distribution upon which 
 it is based. If there arc things essential to 
 the welfare and happiness of all the members 
 of the family, the control of which by a 
 single member would give that member a 
 power to rule all the rest, and to deny them 
 corniort and happiness except upon irksome 
 and humiliating conditions, the safety of the 
 family is only assured by making those things 
 common to all. But things which the indi- 
 vidual needs to own and control lor the at- 
 tainment of personal happiness and well-be- 
 ing, the ownership and exclusive use of which 
 does not subject other members of the family 
 to discomfort, properly belong to the indi- 
 vidual, and the happiness of the family de- 
 pends upon the ability of each individual in 
 it to secure all such things necessary to the 
 satisfaction of his or her wants. 
 
 Socialism, then, is an attempt to realize
 
 54 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 in the larger life of the community that ra- 
 tional and fair adjustment of collective and 
 individual power and responsibility which is 
 exemplified by the family at its best. And 
 to the mother-genius with its full understand- 
 ing of family life Socialism may well bear 
 its programme, confident of a sympathetic 
 understanding. 
 
 x 
 
 Many a thoughtful mother sees in 
 the Socialist ideal a beautiful inspira- 
 tion and yet remains aloof from the Social- 
 ist movement because the goal seems so far 
 off and unattainable. She measures the task 
 by the narrow span of her own lifetime and 
 is overwhelmed. On every hand she sees 
 poverty and suffering. The need is im- 
 mediate, and Socialism seems so far remote. 
 She wants to feel that her life and her work 
 benefit those who are suffering now, not the 
 unborn generations alone. The social re- 
 form which promises immediate improve- 
 ment, however small, makes a strong claim 
 for her support, weaning her from service in
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 55 
 
 the struggle to bring about the great com- 
 prehensive change which must take such a 
 long time for its consummation. She wants 
 to feel here and now that by her labors life 
 is made happier for the children of mis- 
 fortune. 
 
 Such a mother needs the assurance which 
 comes from a full knowledge of the Social- 
 ist movement, and the important work it has 
 accomplished in the sphere of practical social 
 reform. Xo greater mistake could possibly 
 be made than to regard the Socialist as one 
 whose passionate yearning for the millennium 
 of his dreams causes him to refuse to deal 
 with present problems and to disdain such 
 measures of relief as lie close at hand. Yet 
 that is a widely prevailing conception. 
 
 It is not the least of the glories of the 
 Socialist movement, and certainly not the 
 least of its claims upon the thoughtful 
 mother, that it is the most powerful force 
 at work in the world for the amelioration 
 of present evils and for present social bet- 
 terment. This is the natural result of its
 
 56 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 class character and origin: born of the suf- 
 fering and striving of the disinherited and 
 downtrodden, voicing their sorrows and their 
 visions, it could not remain indifferent to the 
 possibilities of relief and betterment during 
 the long struggle toward its goal. Socialism 
 has caused those who most feared it to work 
 for social reforms in the vain hope that these 
 might appease the people and wean them 
 from Socialism. " Social revolutions are 
 averted by judicious social reforms," said 
 Turgot. It was in that spirit that Bismarck 
 inaugurated the social reform policies of 
 Germany. They have signally failed to ac- 
 complish Bismarck's subtle purpose, but have 
 had the opposite effect of helping Socialism 
 by improving the equipment of the people 
 for the great struggle. Similar results have 
 attended the efforts of all those who, in 
 various countries, have followed Bismarck's 
 example. Politicians may attempt to lessen 
 the number of Socialist ballots by granting 
 social reforms, but as surely as these reforms 
 increase the physical, mental and moral
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 57 
 
 stamina of the workers, making them 
 stronger and wiser, they will devote their 
 newly acquired powers to the struggle against 
 capitalism. 
 
 But it is not alone by frightening conces- 
 sions from the master class that the Socialist 
 movement promotes social reform. In every 
 country in which the Socialist movement has 
 taken root it has been the pioneer of all ef- 
 fective social reform. F.ven if we go back 
 to the famous Communist ^Manifesto of 
 Marx and Engels, we shall find the need 
 and value of social reform recognized. In- 
 deed, many a present day reform programme 
 reads almost as if it were taken from the 
 second section of that Socialist classic. 
 
 Xo mother can be indifferent to the splen- 
 did record of the Socialists as fighters for re- 
 forms dealing with the weliare of children. 
 There is hardly a single measure in the 
 programme which the most thoughtful and 
 progressive social reformers of today are 
 advocating which has not long been zeal- 
 ouslv advocated by Socialists. In most
 
 58 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 cases, the Socialists were the first to see the 
 necessity of the reforms and to advocate 
 them. 
 
 Wherever Socialists have been elected to 
 parliamentary bodies, or to administrative of- 
 fices, they have fought for the protection of 
 motherhood. Many years before the Inter- 
 national Congress of Hygiene, in 1900, 
 passed a resolution declaring that " every 
 working woman is entitled to rest during the 
 last three months of her pregnancy," and 
 urging that legislation be enacted to that ef- 
 fect, the Socialists in many countries had 
 vigorously urged that reform. Moreover, 
 they had faced the need of providing for the 
 mother during her enforced idleness and ad- 
 vocated the payment of " maternity sub- 
 sidies " by the state or the municipality to 
 atone for the loss of wages. It is now very 
 generally admitted that some such provision 
 must be made before the demand of the 
 International Congress of Hygiene can be 
 effectively met. The Socialists have gone 
 even further and urged that society must, in
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 59 
 
 its own interest, put an end to the employ- 
 ment of mothers during the infancy of their 
 children. They have pointed to the fright- 
 ful mortality of infants whose mothers are 
 compelled to work away from their homes, 
 and to the ill effects of inadequate and im- 
 proper care among the children who survive. 
 They have urged that society ought to make 
 it possible for the mother to be a mother in 
 the full sense of the word, to care for her 
 baby during the first years of its life. In 
 many European cities where the Socialists 
 have secured the necessary power they have 
 actually made this possible. To the mother, 
 soon after the birth of her baby, goes a rep- 
 resentative of the city, bearing this message: 
 " Mother, our city cannot afford to have you 
 neglect your baby for the sake of going to 
 work in factory, workshop or store. That 
 would be an ill exchange for the city and for 
 the nation. The highest service you can 
 render society, the most valuable labor you 
 can perform, is to bring up your baby in 
 strength of body and character. For that
 
 60 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 service the city feels that it can well afford 
 to pay you as much as any manufacturer can 
 afford to pay you for tending a soulless 
 machine. Not as a dependent upon charity, 
 but as a valuable servant of the city, you are 
 to be paid for the best work of which you are 
 capable building up the soul of your child 
 in a healthy and noble body." 
 
 There is not a single measure for the 
 physical welfare of children upon which ex- 
 perts are now agreed which the Socialists of 
 the world have not long advocated. They 
 were the first to see the close relation be- 
 tween high infantile mortality and a milk 
 supply conducted for profit. They were 
 pioneers in demanding the establishment of 
 municipal depots for the supply of whole- 
 some milk for infant feeding. They were 
 the first, also, to recognize the plight of the 
 under-nourished school child and the need 
 of providing school lunches for tens of thou- 
 sands of children, either free of charge or 
 at a small cost. Finally, the Socialists are 
 justly entitled to most of the credit for the
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 61 
 
 splendid development of the system of 
 medical inspection and attention in our pub- 
 lic schools. They were among the first in 
 modern times to rediscover the close relation 
 of educability to physical health. They 
 were among the first to see the utter futility 
 of the old methods of medical inspection, 
 which simply sought for cases of contagious 
 disease and excluded the children from the 
 schools, heedless of the fact that they were 
 often uncared for and, through playing with 
 other children in their homes and upon the 
 streets, were as dangerous as though they 
 had remained in school. 
 
 Nowadays, in our most enlightened and 
 progressive cities, medical inspection aims 
 not at the detection of contagious diseases 
 alone, but at the detection of every physical 
 weakness or defect which may be a hindrance 
 to the soundest development of the child, 
 physically, mentally and morally. Defects 
 of vision, of hearing and of breathing are 
 sought out and, in many cases, properly 
 treated, so that the child is given a chance
 
 62 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 to attain the mens sana in corpore sano, 
 which is the ideal of the wise teacher and the 
 wise parent. Dental clinics in connection 
 with the schools, outdoor schools for weak 
 and convalescent children and school sani- 
 toria have been advocated at first almost 
 exclusively by Socialists, and have been es- 
 tablished as a result of the growing accept- 
 ance of the Socialist ideal of social respon- 
 sibility for the welfare of the children. 
 
 The true Socialist conceives of society as 
 a great Over-Parent, not supplanting the 
 protection and responsibility of the natural 
 parents, but supplementing them by other 
 and more far-reaching protection and respon- 
 sibility. He would have society, like a great, 
 universal mother, with all the wisdom and 
 power of all the ages, protect all children 
 from harm and tenderly lead them in the 
 ways of Righteousness and Fellowship and 
 Peace. 
 
 XI 
 
 Socialism and motherhood are one in their 
 hatred of war and militarism and one in
 
 THE AN GEL' S GIFTS 63 
 
 their love of peace. Every mother's heart 
 holds dear the great vision of world-peace, 
 of a time coming when the red ruin of Mars 
 shall no longer ravage the earth. And in 
 the heart of every Socialist the same precious 
 vision is held equally dear. As the greatest 
 single force in the world aiming to destroy 
 militarism and bring about peace, the Social- 
 ist movement must appeal to mothers. 
 
 Ask the thoughtful mother why she hates 
 war and militarism, and she will answer: 
 " I am a woman a mother. All the 
 strength and pride of men which war has 
 disfigured, maimed and slaughtered upon all 
 the battlefields of history have been carried 
 beneath the hearts of mothers like myself, 
 mothers who dreamed of joyous and beauti- 
 ful lives for their sons. We, the mothers 
 of the race, have been most despoiled by 
 war: we have paid the supreme forfeit. 
 The lives blotted out in the bloody mists of 
 war have all been conceived in our wombs and 
 nursed at our breasts. The lives broken 
 and marred by war have all been blood of
 
 64 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 our blood, bone of our bone, flesh of our 
 flesh. Why, then, should we mothers do 
 aught but hate war and love peace?" 
 
 Ask the thoughtful Socialist why he hates 
 war and militarism, and he will answer: 
 " I am a Socialist. All my hope and faith 
 I repose in the working class, the makers of 
 bread. To it I belong. Its woes are my 
 woes, its foes are my foes. In every war 
 the burdens fall most heavily upon my class. 
 It is from my class that most of the victims 
 of war are drawn. It is upon my class that 
 the heavy task of paying for war's wicked 
 waste inevitably falls. The labor spent in 
 making the implements of war, even during 
 the years of so-called peace, would feed all 
 the children of my class who now perish 
 from hunger. Why, then, should we of the 
 working class do aught but hate war and love 
 peace? " 
 
 It is not strange, therefore, that the Social- 
 ist movement is universally recognized as a 
 mighty force making for universal peace, 
 and that every political victory of the Social-
 
 ists is interpreted as a fresh blow at mili- 
 tarism. " The Social Democracy is Ger- 
 many's greatest peace organization," 
 declared Professor Mommsen, the famous 
 German historian, and that is becoming so 
 well understood that the Socialists are ad- 
 mitted to be the most powerful preservers 
 of peace in Europe, even by those who are 
 most opposed to them. When the first news 
 of the sweeping Socialist victories in the 
 Reichstag elections of 1912 was conveyed to 
 August Bebel, the veteran Socialist leader, 
 he is reported to have exclaimed with deep 
 emotion, "Good! The peace of Europe is 
 now assured! " That was no idle boast. It 
 is safe to say that in England, where fear of 
 a war with Germany rested like a menacing 
 cloud, the Socialist victory was hailed with 
 as much joy as in Germany itself. When, 
 soon after the Reichstag elections, one of 
 the parliamentary representatives of the 
 Social Democratic Party of Germany visited 
 Great Britain, he was astonished to find that 
 wherever he went, even in the remotest ham-
 
 66 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 lets, he was hailed by the people with the 
 greatest enthusiasm. No great warrior and 
 conqueror of peoples ever made such a 
 triumphal tour in modern times as did that 
 simple representative of German Socialism. 
 And the secret of it was simply that the peo- 
 ple of Great Britain, without regard to party, 
 saw in the Socialist Victory a splendid pledge 
 that peace between Germany and England 
 would be maintained. 
 
 With very rare exceptions, wars have al- 
 ways been carried on in the interests of rul- 
 ing and exploiting classes. Modern wars 
 are almost invariably wars for markets, that 
 is to say, they are waged for the purpose 
 of enabling the master class in one country 
 to force its surplus commodities upon the 
 people of some other country. 1 he hope 
 for world peace is inseparable from the hope 
 of the proletariat. It is the interest of the 
 working class to wage war against w r ar. 
 Marx understood that, and in an address 
 written for the International Workingmen's 
 Association declared, " The alliance of the
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 67 
 
 working classes of all countries will ulti- 
 mately kill war." 
 
 The abolition of war! What an inspira- 
 tion to believe that this great international 
 movement will make real the sublime vision 
 of universal peace ! That the genius of 
 mankind, inspired by the Socialist ideal, will 
 forge into tools of peaceful industry the cruel 
 weapons of destruction ! That never again 
 shall vultures prey upon bloody and corpse- 
 strewn battlefields ! That instead of spend- 
 ing more than seventy per cent, of our na- 
 tional income s upon wars past and present 
 and to prepare for future wars, we shall de- 
 vote all our resources to the great w r ork of 
 making it easier for men and women to live 
 healthy, happy and beautiful lives! 
 
 XII 
 
 This, then, is the programme of 
 Socialism. That it makes a powerful 
 appeal to the mother-instinct cannot be 
 
 8 In the United States, during the thirty years, 1879- 
 1909, 71.6 per cent, of our total national income was so 
 spent!
 
 63 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 denied. It is vibrant with the love and 
 tenderness of motherhood. None need fear 
 this programme save the powers that lay 
 chains upon the bodies and souls of the 
 children of men and bind them down when 
 they would climb to the heights in answer to 
 the Challenge of the Spirit. 
 
 The message of Socialism is a message 
 of Life and Liberty and Love. It promises 
 to destroy the political, social and economic 
 disabilities imposed upon womanhood: to 
 give the mothers of the race equal freedom 
 with the fathers of the race. It pledges it- 
 self to destroy those conditions of life and 
 labor which weaken the mothers and deny 
 to their babies the right to be well born. It 
 claims for every child all the advantages of 
 healthful and beautiful environment. It 
 would destroy the dread fear of want which 
 drives the mother from the service of her 
 child into the service of a great factory. It 
 would bestow upon every child, as its right- 
 ful heritage, opportunity to develop all its 
 powers. It would apply the principles of
 
 THE ANGEL'S GIFTS 69 
 
 the family to the state. It would abolish 
 the body and soul debasing labor of children 
 and give to the little ones their Kingdom 
 of Laughter and Dreams. It would end the 
 waste of human lives by poverty, and make 
 true wealth possible for all and illth for none. 
 It would put an end to war the war of 
 classes as well as the war of nations and 
 organize and direct the genius and power of 
 the race, now so largely given to destruction, 
 to the enrichment of life for all and the real- 
 ization of Human Brotherhood. 
 
 Socialism comes to the mother as an Angel 
 of Light and Life, bearing the torch of a 
 great hope. " I am Life Abundant," cries 
 the Angel, " and I bring you as gifts the 
 Freedom and Opportunity and Joy and Peace 
 for which you have prayed. See, my Sister, 
 Mother of Men, all these are yours if you 
 will put forth your hand and receive them." 
 
 And the mother yearns to take the Angel's 
 gifts, but does not. Fear holds her back. 
 She is the Sltrce of the Fear.
 
 II 
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 
 
 IT is not difficult to understand why so 
 many thoughtful mothers oppose Social- 
 ism and remain aloof from the Socialist 
 movement, despite the powerful appeal to 
 their hearts of its promise of political, social 
 and economic equality for men and women 
 and equality of opportunity for all children. 
 To the attainment of these ideal conditions 
 they would gladly devote their lives could 
 they but feel certain that, in the effort to at- 
 tain them, Socialism would not create new 
 evils or destroy some good of priceless value 
 already attained. 
 
 Probably the vast majority of those 
 women who oppose Socialism do so because 
 they have been taught to believe that it would 
 abolish monogamic marriage and utterly de- 
 stroy the institution of private family life 
 which rests upon that form of marriage. 
 The defenders of the existing social order 
 70
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 71 
 
 have charged the Socialist movement with 
 the advocacy of " Free Love " with so much 
 persistency that we cannot wonder that so 
 many women dread it as an unspeakably evil 
 thing. They believe, with ample warrant, 
 that the private family based upon the per- 
 manent and voluntary union of one man to 
 one woman is an essential condition of true 
 civilization. They believe, with ample war- 
 rant, that whatever menaces such family life, 
 menaces all civilization and progress. Not 
 until their fears are dispelled will they em- 
 brace the Angel of Socialism and accept the 
 gifts she proffers. 
 
 Women are not opposed to anything 
 which can rightly be called " Free Love." 
 They are not afraid of the freedom of love. 
 They know that perfect love can only exist 
 where there is perfect freedom. Every nor- 
 mal woman believes that unfettered love is 
 the noblest sanction of human marriage and 
 parenthood; that the baser considerations of 
 wealth, title, social position, and the like, 
 ought not to enter into the sacred relations
 
 72 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 of marriage and motherhood and father- 
 hood. Every woman of normal mind and 
 heart believes that a woman should no more 
 be driven into marriage and motherhood for 
 the sake of securing the assurance of food, 
 clothing and shelter than she should be 
 ravished by bestial brutes. And every 
 woman of normal mind and heart believes 
 that loveless marriage, whether for the ad- 
 vantages of social position, or for mere main- 
 tenance, is a degradation of womanhood, 
 a form of prostitution in reality. No church 
 ceremonial and no altar can sanctify such 
 marriages. That men and women should be 
 free from economic bondage free to 
 marry only in response to the promptings of 
 pure affection, no woman will question. But 
 that is not the freedom that is referred to 
 when Socialists are charged with being Free 
 Lovers. 
 
 What is meant by the charge is that Social- 
 ism seeks to destroy monogamic marriage, 
 and to substitute for it some other form of 
 sex relationship. Xo matter how these sub-
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 73 
 
 stitutes for the present marriage system differ 
 in character from one another, they are all 
 grouped together by the enemies of Social- 
 ism under the misleading generic title of 
 " Free Love." The fact that some of the 
 substitutes would greatly lessen social author- 
 ity and responsibility, and to a corresponding 
 degree free the individual from existing re- 
 straints of law or custom, while others would 
 greatly increase social responsibility and 
 authority, and lessen personal choice, is 
 ignored : they are all covered by the single 
 term of popular opprobrium, " Free Love." 
 
 II 
 
 It will help us greatly in our consideration 
 of this subject to get this fact very clearly 
 fixed in our minds. Plato, the great Greek 
 philosopher, wrote a book describing the 
 ideal social state as he conceived it. He 
 first of all considered all the problems arising 
 in the relations of imperfect humanity, and 
 then, just as an inventor tries to invent a 
 better mechanism than one which has been
 
 74 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 found to be unsuitable, he tried to invent 
 better-working social relations. These he 
 described in his Utopia, The Republic. 
 This is now universally regarded as one of 
 the great masterpieces of the world's litera- 
 ture. As such, we enjoy it, while rejecting 
 much of its philosophy and most of its de- 
 vices. Its philosophy and its devices reflect 
 the limitations of the age in which Plato 
 lived. 
 
 Among the problems which Plato sought 
 to solve were the problems of marriage and 
 parenthood. He saw that the most funda- 
 mental of social relations were far from 
 uniformly successful. There were many un- 
 happy and unfortunate marriages then as 
 now. Because women were regarded as 
 chattels in his day, Plato, who had reached 
 the conclusion that communism was the only 
 remedy for the evils arising out of property 
 relations, naturally concluded that for the 
 evils connected with the human chattel, 
 woman, the same remedy was needed. 
 Therefore, he advocated the common owner-
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 75 
 
 ship of women as well as of all other forms 
 of property. The state was to own and con- 
 trol all forms of property, including women. 
 Through its officials, the state would, in 
 Plato's scheme, regulate procreation and the 
 sexual relations generally. Anticipating our 
 modern Eugenists of the extreme school, 
 Plato provided for the state regulation of 
 the mating and breeding of the human 
 species. Only those men and women who 
 possessed certain physical, mental and moral 
 qualities were to be permitted to breed, and 
 there was to be no permanent union of a 
 particular man with a particular woman. As 
 soon as babies were born they were to be 
 taken from their mothers and placed in 
 communal institutions, in which all mothers 
 would nurse all babies except their own with- 
 out discrimination or favor. The most 
 elaborate precautions were provided against 
 any mother being able to recognize her own 
 child. Of course, it is evident that in all 
 this Plato had only one purpose, namely, 
 to insure the confining of procreation to the
 
 76 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 best developed men and women; that the un- 
 fit were prevented from perpetuating their 
 kind. He aimed thus to produce what the 
 modern Eugenists call the Super Race. 
 
 Now, it is quite obvious that it is a mis- 
 nomer to call Pluto's scheme by the high- 
 sounding term, Free Love. In the first 
 place, the romantic element, the mutual love 
 of the man for the woman and the woman for 
 the man, hardly enters into it at all. In the 
 second place, there is no freedom for the 
 individual in the scheme. It is a very 
 elaborate scheme of state regulated stirpi- 
 culture, which in practice would reduce 
 human beings to the level of the animals in 
 the stud farm. It is a scheme of compulsory 
 mating, not of Free Love. 
 
 Socialism is not even remotely connected 
 with either Plato's philosophy or his scheme. 
 These reflect the limitations of Athenian 
 civilization three centuries before Christ, 
 while Socialism, whether considered as a 
 philosophy or as a movement, is of modern
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR V 7 
 
 origin. Yet it is by no means uncommon to 
 find critics of Socialism harking back to 
 Plato's Republic and making their criti- 
 cisms of it part of their indictment of Social- 
 ism. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The polar opposite of Plato's ideal of 
 sex relationship is the ideal of modern An- 
 archism, to which the term " Free Love " 
 may be properly applied. The Anarchist 
 regards society as being merely an aggrega- 
 tion of individuals, and believes that the ag- 
 gregation of individuals can have no right 
 greater than the single individual can have. 
 The essence of liberty, as the Anarchist sees 
 it, is the right of the individual to determine 
 for himself what is right and what is not 
 right. Just as no individual can, without 
 tyranny, control the actions of another indi- 
 vidual, society as a whole cannot rightly 
 control the actions of any individual. Philo- 
 sophically and practically, Anarchism is based 
 upon the supremacy of the individual. It 
 denies the doctrine of social supremacy and
 
 78 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 responsibility upon which all laws and govern- 
 ments and institutions for regulating human 
 conduct rest. 
 
 Anarchism is, therefore, opposed to the 
 legal forms of marriage, regarding them as 
 invasions by society of the liberty of the 
 individual. It opposes every interference 
 by the state in what it believes to be a matter 
 for the individuals immediately concerned to 
 regulate according to their own desires. An- 
 archism teaches that the only sanction neces- 
 sary for the union of a man and woman in 
 marriage is the desire for such union by the 
 man and the woman; that the duration of the 
 union must depend solely upon their will 
 and pleasure; that any legal tie which binds 
 men and women to one another against their 
 will, when they have ceased to love one an- 
 other and to regard such union as indispen- 
 sable to their happiness, is wrong. The An- 
 archist believes that love should be the only 
 bond uniting men and women in marriage, 
 and that every form of restraint or com- 
 pulsion is wrong. If a man and a woman
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 79 
 
 outgrow their love for each other, they should 
 be free to dissolve their union without con- 
 sulting anybody or asking the permission of 
 anybody. And if they desire to enter into 
 new unions, they should be free to do so. 
 That is Free Love, using that term in its 
 true sense, and that is the Anarchist ideal. 
 
 We may not believe in that theory of mar- 
 riage. Most of us do not. We may be- 
 lieve that in practice it would be certain to 
 work infinite hardship and suffering, and that 
 it would be a retrogressive step and not a 
 step forward. Perhaps most of us do be- 
 lieve that. Such opinions, however, ought 
 not to blind us to the fact that it is perfectly 
 possible for one to hold the Anarchist view 
 of marriage, and to apply it in actual life, 
 and, at the same time, to believe in and 
 practice the strictest monogamy. Dangerous 
 as the Anarchist philosophy m-ay be, it is not 
 incompatible with a high standard of 
 personal conduct. Free Love, as the An- 
 archist conceives it, may lead to promis- 
 cuity of sexual relations, and many of us
 
 8o SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 believe that in practice it would certainly do 
 so, but the two things are not synonymous. 
 
 On the other hand, legal marriage does 
 not insure perfect obedience to the mono- 
 gamic code. There is no particular virtue in 
 the legal form itself. What counts is the 
 recognition of social authority and respon- 
 sibility symbolized by the legal form. 
 Monogamy is perfectly or imperfectly at- 
 tained in proportion to the degree to which 
 recognition of that social authority and 
 responsibility, supplemented by personal 
 loyalty and affection, is effective. That per- 
 fect loyalty and chastity are not made certain 
 by legal forms is all too unhappily evident 
 to all of us. But most of us believe that, 
 despite all its shortcomings, despite the 
 alarming number of failures and divorces, 
 legal marriage does make for greater sta- 
 bility of family life than would otherwise 
 be possible, and that the stability of fam- 
 ily life is a necessary condition of true 
 civilization. What we hope for, there- 
 fore, is not the abolition of legal marriage,
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 81 
 
 the denial of social authority and respon- 
 sibility, but the improvement of marriage, 
 the maintenance, and, if necessary, the 
 further development, of social authority 
 over and responsibility for marriage. Pos 
 sibly it will be found that the improvement 
 of marriage, its greater permanence, and its 
 greater efficiency as a promoter of monog- 
 amy, will result from a general social and 
 economic readjustment, rather than from al- 
 terations in the laws affecting marriage 
 specially designed to that end. 
 
 IV 
 
 Between the sex servitude advocated 
 by Plato and the denial of social authority 
 in the Anarchist ideal, both comprehended 
 in the general unthinking denunciation of 
 " Free Love," we shall find many very dif- 
 ferent forms of family life and sex relation- 
 ship, to every one of which the same 
 term has been uncritically applied. They 
 have all been as uncritically denounced as 
 " Socialistic," their shortcomings have been
 
 82 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 charged against the Socialists, notwithstand- 
 ing the fact that they were generally of reli- 
 gious origin and significance, and rarely as- 
 sociated with movements remotely or closely 
 connected with Socialism. 
 
 We have, for example, opposition to mar- 
 riage on the part of certain sects of religious 
 celibates, like the Shakers. Because the 
 Shakers practiced communism among them- 
 selves, the unfair and the uncritical have 
 taken the accusations made against the 
 Shakers and woven them into their indict- 
 ment of Socialism. The Shakers were ac- 
 cused of being Free Lovers, of attempting 
 to destroy the home, therefore the charge is 
 made against the Socialists! Curiously 
 enough, however, the intensely religious char- 
 acteristics of Shakerism are ignored, and the 
 Socialists are denounced as Atheists. 
 
 The truth is, of course, that no sort of re- 
 lation exists between the teachings and prac- 
 tices of Ann Lee and her followers and the 
 teachings and practices of modern Socialism. 
 The communism of the Shakers, like their
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 83 
 
 contempt for marriage and their glorifica- 
 tion of celibacy and their practice of confes- 
 sion, was exclusively a religious practice, the 
 result of their special interpretation of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures. It seems absurd to ap- 
 ply the term Free Love to their peculiar view 
 of sexual relations. They regarded mar- 
 riage as at best an evil, viewed with con- 
 tempt the " generative order " to which it 
 pertained and extolled absolute celibacy as 
 the highest virtue. Their four cardinal prin- 
 ciples, Virginal Purity, Christian Com- 
 munism, Confession of Sin and Separation 
 from the World, as well as most of their 
 theological beliefs concerning the Duality of 
 the Godhead, the Millennium, the Second 
 Coming of Christ, and similar matters, were 
 quite commonly held by many Christian 
 sects in mediaeval times. Shakerism and all 
 similar movements are properly connected, 
 not with Socialism, but with the development 
 of Christianity. 
 
 We find the term Free Love applied with 
 more reason to the various forms of group
 
 84 SOCIALISM AND M O T H E R H O D 
 
 marriage and sex communism which have 
 been advocated and practiced by various 
 sects, ancient and modern. From 1847 until 
 1879 the followers of John Humphrey 
 Noyes, the Perfectionists of Oneida, ad- 
 vocated and practiced sex communism 
 through what they termed " complex mar- 
 riage." All the men of the community were 
 jointly married to all the women of the com- 
 munity, so that every man was husband to 
 every woman and every woman wife to every 
 man. 
 
 Like Shakerism, Perfectionism was es- 
 sentially of Christian origin and in nowise 
 connected with Socialism as that term is prop- 
 erly understood. Noyes derived his ideas 
 of communism in goods and communism in 
 sex relations from the New Testament, from 
 the story of the day of Pentecost. Salva- 
 tion from sin through the grace of Christ, 
 the duality of God's nature, the possibility 
 of attaining perfect holiness were funda- 
 mental to his teaching. In every respect, 
 Perfectionism was a modern revival of a very
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 85 
 
 ancient form of religious sectarianism which 
 flourished in the first few centuries of Chris- 
 tendom, and again in mediaeval times, as wit- 
 ness the Apostolicans, the Adamites, and 
 similar mediaeval sects. 
 
 Yet another form of sex relationship and 
 family life claims our attention as being op- 
 posed to monogamy and the form of family 
 life based upon it polygamy. Whether 
 we limit ourselves to Mormonism in our ex- 
 amination of polygamy, or go back to the 
 time of the Anabaptists, we shall find that, 
 leaving primitive and uncivilized peoples out 
 of account, polygamy almost invariably ap- 
 pears as a principle of religious sectarianism, 
 with religious sanctions. Nowhere does it 
 appear connected, however remotely, with 
 the development of modern Socialism, the 
 movement of the working class to eman- 
 cipate itself from economic exploitation and 
 tyranny. 
 
 To sum up this phase of our discussion: 
 there can be no wisdom or justice in the in- 
 discriminate lumping together under the
 
 86 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 term Free Love forms of sex relationship so 
 different as the state regulated stirpiculture 
 of Plato, the celibacy of Ann Lee and her 
 disciples, the group marriage of the Perfec- 
 tionists, and the polygamy of Jan of Leyden 
 and Brigham Young. Nor can there be any 
 wisdom or justice in charging to the account 
 of the Socialist our criticisms of any of these, 
 not one of which was connected in any degree 
 whatsoever with the Socialist movement, and 
 all of which, with the exception of Plato's 
 scheme, were of religious origin offshoots 
 of Christianity. 
 
 v 
 
 Although it is somewhat of a digression, 
 it is worthy of notice that the sex relation- 
 ships advocated and practiced by many of the 
 religious sects combined with their romantic 
 religious mysticism much of the harsher 
 pagan utilitarianism of Plato. Xot infre- 
 quently, we find theories of eugenics and stir- 
 piculture advocated, and, to a limited extent, 
 practiced. 
 
 Take the Shakers, for example: Elder
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 87 
 
 Eades, one of their ablest publicists and 
 leaders, likened the " state of mankind " to 
 a house, consisting of basement, ground floor 
 and upper story. Those living on the " up- 
 per floor " are the true Christians, for they, 
 like Christ, are celibates. They have ad- 
 vanced beyond the world of the flesh with 
 all its lusts and affections. Their concern is 
 with the " soul-world " only. Risen above the 
 " generative order," they despise marriage 
 and procreation and dwell in celibacy, man's 
 highest state. Those dwelling on the 
 " ground floor " are inferior mortals who 
 still live in the " generative stage." Their 
 concern is with the physical life, with the 
 body and the mind. For them marriage and 
 procreation are permissible. Their inter- 
 mediate state is well enough in its secular 
 way, but they cannot be Christians on the 
 " ground floor," because Christ did not 
 dwell there. They are ruled by the flesh and 
 its lusts, the love of individuals one for an- 
 other, and by the idolatries of parentage. 
 Those who dwell in the " basement " are still
 
 88 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 inferior. They are the weak of body, mind 
 and morals. For all such, procreation is 
 wrong and should be prevented. 
 
 Another of the Shaker leaders, Elder 
 Prescott, while holding to the ideal of celi- 
 bacy, vigorously advocated scientific regula- 
 tion of procreation among those on the 
 " ground floor " and the prevention of pro- 
 creation by the dwellers in the " basement." 
 From Plato to the most radical Eugenist of 
 today, the argument has never been more 
 baldly stated: 
 
 " What is the reason man does not know 
 how to improve his own race, as well as he 
 knows how to improve the ox, the sheep, the 
 horse, and the feathered tribes? He does 
 know how it is by observing the same law, 
 walking by the same rule, and minding the 
 same things. At our state and county fairs 
 we see that the lower order of animals has 
 been carried to a high degree of perfection 
 by stirpiculture or scientific propagation; and 
 it is by the same means that the human race 
 can be improved physically, i. e., by scientific
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 89 
 
 selection and combination in obedience to 
 certain given laws of reproduction. As 
 things are, multitudes of persons of both 
 sexes are no more suitable to reproduce hu- 
 man beings in the image of God than 
 the roach-backed, crooked-legged, spindle- 
 shanked, slab-sided, Indian ponies are suit- 
 able for generating the best types of the 
 noble horse ! " 1 
 
 Precisely the same views were held by 
 John Humphrey Noyes and his followers, 
 the Perfectionists, and to some extent prac- 
 ticed within their institution of " complex 
 marriage." 2 It is a strange mixture of reli- 
 gious mysticism and secular utilitarianism 
 which one finds in these religious communi- 
 ties ! 
 
 VI 
 
 It is important to remember that the 
 cry of Free Love, now raised against the 
 Socialist movement, to prejudice the minds of 
 
 1 Quoted by HIVDS, American Communities (Edition of 
 1908) pp. 56-57. 
 
 - See e.p., Scientific Propagation, by J. II. NoYES 
 (pamphlet) .
 
 90 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 the people against it, has been raised against 
 many other popular movements. There is 
 hardly a great popular movement in history, 
 whether religious or secular, against which 
 the charge of seeking to abolish marriage 
 and family relations has not been brought by 
 its enemies. The noblest men and women in 
 all ages have been subjected to this partic- 
 ularly vicious attack. The charge has been 
 made against the Catholic Church by fanat- 
 ical Protestants and against Protestantism by 
 fanatical Catholics. It was made against the 
 Quakers, and against the Abolitionists. 
 The pioneers of the Woman Suffrage move- 
 ment were bitterly assailed as advocates of 
 Free Love. The same charge was made 
 against the Chartists in England in the early 
 part of the nineteenth century. It was 
 hurled at the followers of Fremont, the 
 founders of the present Republican Party, 
 during Fremont's campaign in i856. 3 
 
 The charge was never directed with 
 
 3 Cf. Applied Socialism, by JOHN SPARGO, Chapter IX, 
 for a more detailed account of this.
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 91 
 
 greater energy and bitterness against any hu- 
 man being than against the greatest and 
 noblest American of all Abraham Lin- 
 coln. Incredible as it may seem to us today, 
 Lincoln had to bear the insulting charge of 
 advocating Free Love ! Yes, Lincoln, 
 
 " A man that matched the mountains, and compelled 
 The stars to look our way and honor us " 
 
 bore that with many another indignity. No 
 sooner had he been nominated by the Re- 
 publican Party, in 1860, than the attack be- 
 gan. There was, for example, the cartoon, 
 familiar in every household, entitled " The 
 Republican Party Going to the Right 
 House," showing Lincoln riding into a 
 lunatic asylum, astride a rail carried by 
 Horace Greeley. Behind Lincoln march his 
 followers, a motley crew of " long haired 
 men and short haired women," each pro- 
 claiming his or her special fad or folly. 
 There is the woman who follows Lincoln be- 
 cause she feels " a passional attraction " 
 every time she sees " his lovely face."
 
 92 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 There is the man who cries out, " I represent 
 the Free Love element, and expect to have 
 free license to carry out its principles." 
 Close by is the man a familiar friend 
 who announces, " I want religion abolished, 
 and the book of Mormon made the standard 
 of morality." Behind him come the negro 
 who wants it understood that the white 
 man has no rights which the negro is bound 
 to respect; the loafer who wants " every- 
 body to have a share of everybody else's 
 property," and so on. As a fitting climax to 
 the whole outrageous assault, Lincoln is rep- 
 resented as addressing these followers and 
 saying: " Xow, my friends, I'm almost in 
 and the Millennium is going to begin, so ask 
 what you will and it shall be granted ! " 
 
 When we resurrect this infamous car- 
 toon from oblivion, now that Lincoln's fame 
 is the most resplendent in our national his- 
 tory, and his name the best beloved, we 
 realize that the charge of promoting Free 
 Love is a poisoned arrow rarely absent from 
 the quiver of the cowardly and unscrupulous
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 93 
 
 defenders of Privilege and foes of Prog- 
 ress. Today the charge is made against the 
 Socialist movement made by dignitaries of 
 the Christian Church, by eminent political 
 leaders and publicists with as little truth 
 and justice as against Abraham Lincoln, the 
 Liberator. 
 
 VII 
 
 Putting aside, as wholly irrelevant to an 
 intelligent and candid discussion of Social- 
 ism, all such schemes as those of Plato 
 and Campanella, of Adamites, Apostol- 
 icans, Shakers, Perfectionists and Mormons, 
 let us see what evidence there is to support 
 the charge that Socialism is antagonistic to 
 monogamic marriage and family life. 
 
 At the very outset of our investigation 
 we encounter, in the writings of individual 
 Socialists, some very outspoken criticisms of 
 marriage and the family as they exist today, 
 together with prophecies that in the Socialist 
 society of the future little or no social author- 
 ity or control over the union of the sexes will 
 exist. In some cases, it must be admitted,
 
 94 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 the authors of these criticisms have been 
 prominently identified with the Socialist 
 movement. The opponents of Socialism 
 have carefully winnowed the vast literature 
 of Socialism and gathered together a sheaf 
 of such criticisms and prophecies, which they 
 have published broadcast to bolster the 
 charge of Free Love. Let us, then, pay 
 them due attention. 
 
 For the sake of convenience we will take 
 the most outspoken of these criticisms and 
 prophecies and divide them into two groups 
 those which come from individual Social- 
 ists, of no particular standing in the Social- 
 ist movement, however eminent they may 
 otherwise be, and those which come from 
 representative Socialists of acknowledged 
 eminence in the Socialist movement itself. 
 
 To the first of these groups belongs, very 
 definitely, the prophecy of that splendid but 
 ill-starred genius whose melancholy ruin 
 ranks among the most tragic episodes of liter- 
 ary history Oscar Wilde. Though he 
 was never identified with the Socialist move-
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 95 
 
 ment perhaps because he was too aggres- 
 sively individualistic -- Wilde, for a brief 
 space of time, called himself a Socialist. He 
 wrote, it will be remembered, The Soul of 
 Alan Under Socialism, in w y hich his Utopian 
 conception of Socialism is set forth In noble 
 and beautiful prose. In it we find the sweep- 
 ing declaration, quite unqualified, that " So- 
 cialism annihilates family life." For this as- 
 sertion there is offered no shred of authority, 
 no evidence, no reasoned argument to show 
 that the annihilation of family life must re- 
 sult from the social readjustments upon which 
 Socialists are determined and agreed. What 
 we have is the bare assertion of Oscar Wilde. 
 Immediately, a number of questions crowd 
 the brain how authoritative an exponent 
 of Socialism is Oscar Wilde? Is his So- 
 cialism representative, typical of the Social- 
 ism which is inspiring millions? How 
 much does he know of his subject? We seek 
 an answer to our questions in his essay, com- 
 paring his utterances, and the spirit of them, 
 with those of the recognized leaders of So-
 
 96 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 cialist thought. And soon we discover that he 
 is not a Socialist at all, if we are to judge So- 
 cialism by Marx and Lassalle and Liebknecht 
 and Kautsky and Bebel and Vandervelde and 
 Jaures and Hyndman and Hillquit; or by the 
 platforms of the Socialist parties of the 
 world. He is rather, like Prince Kropotkin, 
 an Anarchist-Communist. Years later, in 
 his De Profundls, written while in prison, 
 Wilde wrote of Kropotkin that his was one 
 of the two most perfect lives he had come 
 across " a man with a soul of that beauti- 
 ful white Christ which seems coming out of 
 Russia." It was the praise of the master 
 by his disciple. 
 
 The evidences that he was an Anarchist- 
 Communist, rather than a Socialist, are 
 numerous. Thus, in his essay he insists over 
 and over again that there shall be no govern- 
 ment in his ideal society: " What is needed 
 is Individualism. If the Socialism is to be 
 Authoritarian; if there are Governments 
 armed with economic power as they are now 
 with political power; if, in a word, we are
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 97 
 
 to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last 
 state of man will be worse than the first." 
 Again: " It is clear, then, that no Authori- 
 tarian Socialism will do. . . . Every man 
 must be left quite free to choose his o\vn 
 work. No form of compulsion must be exer- 
 cised over him. . . . And by work I simply 
 mean activity of any kind." And again: 
 " But I confess that many of the Socialistic 
 views that I have come across seem to me 
 to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not 
 of actual compulsion. Of course, authority 
 and compulsion are out of the question. All 
 association must be quite voluntary. It is 
 only in voluntary associations that man is 
 fine." 
 
 These are the ideas of an Anarchist-Com- 
 munist, not of a Socialist as that term is 
 properly used. When we read in Wilde's 
 essay that " Socialism annihilates family life. 
 . . . With the abolition of private property, 
 marriage in its present form must disap- 
 pear," we know that Wilde was really think- 
 ing of Anarchist Communism and not of
 
 98 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 Socialism as we understand it. And even 
 were that not the case, even if Wilde had 
 been the most orthodox of Marx's disciples, 
 it would still be sufficient to remind our 
 critics that Wilde embarked upon the dan- 
 gerous ocean of prophecy upon his own re- 
 sponsibility; that for the personal views of 
 Wilde the Socialist movement cannot be held 
 responsible. 
 
 To the same group we must assign the 
 declaration of a very different writer, Pro- 
 fessor Karl Pearson, author of The Ethic 
 of Free Thought. Although a professed So- 
 cialist, and a learned and brilliant writer 
 upon certain biological subjects, Professor 
 Pearson has never been actively identified 
 with the Socialist movement, nor can he be 
 justly called a representative Socialist writer. 
 Professor Pearson speculates upon the prob- 
 able influence of the political and economic 
 emancipation of women upon marriage. He 
 reaches a conclusion that appears to involve 
 serious difficulty: " For the non-childbear- 
 ing woman the sex relationship, both as to
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 99 
 
 form and substance, ought to be a pure ques- 
 tion of taste, in which neither the society nor 
 the state would have any need to interfere, a 
 free sexual union, a relation solely of mutual 
 sympathy and affection, its form and direc- 
 tion varying according to the wants and feel- 
 ings of the individuals." 4 So far, we have 
 the Anarchist ideal, entire freedom from so- 
 cial authority and control. But it will be 
 observed that Professor Pearson confines this 
 freedom from social interference to the child- 
 less unions. But what of those unions which 
 result in children? 
 
 When Professor Pearson reaches this 
 question he abandons his Anarchistic ideal of 
 pure voluntarism, and turns to a form of 
 state supervision which is essentially despotic. 
 The state now must interfere, for the state 
 is to regulate the number of births. He 
 harks back to the teachings of Aristotle and 
 Plato: the state is to regulate procreation. 
 '' If the state is to guarantee wages, it is 
 
 4 KARL PEARSON, The Ethic of Free Thought, quoted 
 by BARKER, British Socialism, p. 339.
 
 ioo SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 bound in self-protection to provide that no 
 person shall be born without its consent. 
 The state is to sanction the number of births; 
 all others are immoral, because anti-social. 
 . . . An unsanctioned birth would receive no 
 recognition from the state, and in times of 
 over-population it might be necessary to 
 punish, positively or negatively, both father 
 and mother." 5 Surely, here we turn away 
 from Free Love to state despotism of the 
 worst type ! 
 
 On the one hand Professor Pearson's ideal 
 is purely Anarchistic, utterly repudiating so- 
 cial authority and responsibility in the regu- 
 lation of marriage. On the other hand it 
 becomes frightfully bureaucratic, utterly de- 
 nying personal freedom and placing human 
 mothers on a level with brood mares. It is 
 inconceivable that the citizens of a free 
 democracy would tolerate the bureaucratic 
 regulation of procreation. Such a scheme 
 would require the power of a dominant ruling 
 class to impose it upon a subject class in some 
 
 5 PEARSON, op. at., quoted by BARKER, op. at., p. 347.
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 
 
 such fashion as the Jesuits imposed the stirpi- 
 cultural regulations of Campanella's Utopian 
 scheme upon the natives of Paraguay. Prob- 
 ably nine hundred and ninety-nine Socialists 
 out of every thousand would repudiate Pro- 
 fessor Pearson's scheme. It is of interest 
 and value only as the result of one man's 
 rather reckless speculation and hazy think- 
 ing. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Of all the statements upon the subject by 
 individual writers who cannot be said to be 
 representative Socialists, used by the anti- 
 Socialists in their propaganda, the statements 
 by Oscar Wilde and Professor Pearson are 
 the most sweeping. They are certainly the 
 most important by virtue of the eminence of 
 their authors in certain fields of intellectual 
 labor. Let us turn now to those writers 
 whose prominence in the Socialist move- 
 ment itself lends to their utterances special 
 force: 
 
 The foremost Socialist of our generation 
 was the late August Bebel, the veteran leader
 
 io2 SOCIALISM AN 7 D MOTHERHOOD 
 
 of the German Social Democracy. No one 
 will deny that he personified the Socialist 
 movement as fully as any one human being 
 could do. It is impossible to plead that he 
 was not a representative Socialist. His long 
 acknowledged eminence in the international 
 Socialist movement lends great weight to his 
 every utterance. It is not surprising, there- 
 fore, that the enemies of Socialism have 
 seized upon certain passages in his writings 
 which vigorously assail the present marriage 
 system. 
 
 In his famous book, Woman and Social- 
 ism, Bebel attacks legal marriage as a form of 
 slavery and sex subjection, and argues that it 
 must disappear with the elevation of women 
 to a plane of political, economic and cultural 
 equality with men. In its place, he predicts, 
 there will be simply a voluntary union of in- 
 dividuals, a union depending solely upon af- 
 fection, with which society has nothing what- 
 ever to do, and which the individuals can 
 terminate at will. There can be no mistak- 
 ing the meaning of the following paragraph,
 
 T PI E M O T H E R ' S F E A R 103 
 
 in which Bebel sets forth his idea of the re- 
 lation of the sexes in the future: 
 
 " In the choice of love woman is free just 
 as man is free. She woos and is wooed and 
 has no other inducement to bind herself than 
 her own free will. The contract between the 
 two lovers is of a private nature as in primi- 
 tive times. The gratification of the sexual 
 impulse is as strictly the personal affair of 
 the individual as the gratification of every 
 other natural instinct. No one has to give 
 an account of him or herself, and no third 
 person has the slightest right of interven- 
 tion." 
 
 It is impossible to read Bebel's work with 
 candor and intelligence without reaching the 
 conclusion that the ideal it preaches is Free 
 Love. This is not the same thing as sexual 
 promiscuity, nor is it incompatible with strict 
 monogamy. What is meant is that the force 
 of love alone ought to bind man and wife 
 together, without any external compulsions, 
 either of government, economic dependence 
 or social customs; that every marriage which
 
 104 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 depends upon any or all of these external 
 compulsions, which love alone is not strong 
 enough to perpetuate, ought to be dissolved 
 in the interests of morality and happiness. 
 
 This is the personal opinion of August 
 Bebel, for which he alone is to be held re- 
 sponsible. It is probable that not one per 
 cent, of the Socialists of America, or of the 
 world for that matter, agree with it. The 
 Socialist movement is no more to be charged 
 with responsibility for Bebel's idea of the 
 probable future development of marriage 
 and family life, than for the views on vege- 
 tarianism, agriculture and the fertilization of 
 soils contained in the same volume. It is no 
 more to be charged with responsibility for 
 Bebel's views on any of these subjects than 
 for the views which the present writer has 
 freely expressed upon the laws of popula- 
 tion and the relation of advancing civiliza- 
 tion to such phenomena as the decline of 
 fecundity and maternal capacity, 6 for ex- 
 
 6 See, e. g., The Common Sense of the Milk Question, 
 by JOHN SPARGO.
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 105 
 
 ample. Bebel himself, with his usual can- 
 dor, has warned us of this, but it suits the 
 critics of Socialism to ignore the warning. 7 
 It would be utterly disingenuous to dis- 
 miss the subject with this observation, and to 
 ignore the fact that other Socialists of 
 acknowledged standing have expressed views 
 quite similar to those of the great German 
 
 7 "... This complete solution of the Women's Ques- 
 tion is as unattainable as the solution of the Labor Ques- 
 tion under the existing social and political institutions. 
 
 " My fellow Socialists will agree with the last prop- 
 osition, but I am not at present in a position to affirm 
 that they will agree to the manner in which I foresee its 
 realization. I must therefore, request readers, and 
 especially opponents, to regard the following statements 
 as the expression of my personal opinions, and to direct 
 any attacks they think fit to make against me alone. . . . 
 Indeed / lia-ce every reason to believe that my explicit 
 request icv'// be disregarded by a certain number of them. 
 They must be left to the promptings of their own hearts." 
 Thus Bebel wrote in the Preface to If o man and Social- 
 ism. How accurately he judged the honesty of his 
 opponents may be judged by the fact that an examina- 
 tion of over six hundred books, pamphlets and magazine 
 articles in which his words are quoted to prove that 
 Socialists advocate Free Love, shows that not in a single 
 instance is there any intimation of the important fact that 
 Bebel specifically states that he is unable to claim that 
 his fellow Socialists accept his views! J. S.
 
 io6 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 Socialist. We may cite the eminent collabo- 
 rators, William Morris and Ernest Belfort 
 Bax as typical of those of a not inconsider- 
 able body of Socialist writers who adhere 
 more or less closely to Bebel. Morris, in 
 his Utopian romance, News from Nowhere, 
 pictures complete voluntarism in the union 
 of the sexes, everybody " free to come and 
 go as he or she pleases." 8 In Socialism: 
 Its Growth and Outcome, Morris and Bax 
 argue that marriage as it now exists is a 
 property relation merely, and that the aboli- 
 tion of the economic dependence of women 
 would necessarily lead to the abolition of the 
 marriage system resting upon it: 
 
 " The present marriage system was based 
 on the general supposition of the economic 
 dependence of the woman on the man, and 
 the consequent necessity for his making pro- 
 vision for her which she can legally enforce. 
 This basis would disappear with the advent 
 of social economic freedom, and no binding 
 
 s News from Nowhere, Tenth Edition, p. 90.
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 107 
 
 contract would be necessary between the par- 
 ties as regards livelihood. . . . Thus a new 
 development of the family would take place, 
 on the basis, not of a predetermined life-long 
 business arrangement to be formally and nom- 
 inally held to, irrespective of circumstances, 
 but on mutual inclination and affection, an as- 
 sociation terminable at the will of either 
 party. There would be no vestige of repro- 
 bation weighing on the dissolution of one tie 
 and the forming of another." !) 
 
 Bax has vigorously championed the same 
 view in numerous essays. A typical state- 
 ment of his position is the following: 
 
 " Socialism will strike at the root at once 
 of compulsory monogamy and of prostitu- 
 tion by inaugurating an era of marriage 
 based on free choice and intention, and char- 
 acterized by the absence of external coercion. 
 For where the wish for the maintenance of 
 the marriage relation remains, there external 
 coercion is unnecessary; where it is neces- 
 
 9 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, Second Edition, 
 London, 1896, p. 299.
 
 io8 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 sary, because the wish has disappeared, there 
 it is undesirable." 10 
 
 It is no more than just to point out in this 
 connection the fact that upon all matters con- 
 cerning the relation of Socialism to women 
 Bax holds a peculiar position in the move- 
 ment. His anti-feminist views have been al- 
 most universally condemned and ridiculed. 
 He is a notorious opponent of the demand 
 for equal suffrage regardless of sex which 
 holds a conspicuous place in the programme 
 of every Socialist party in the world. He 
 argues that women are organically inferior 
 to men, and ought, for that reason, to be ex- 
 cluded from the right to vote, just as children 
 and aliens belonging to an essentially lower 
 race are excluded! He adopts all the argu- 
 ments of the conventional anti-suffragists, in- 
 cluding the fear that women, if granted the 
 ballot, will establish a sex tyranny and sub- 
 ject men to their rule! n All this is not an 
 
 10 BAX, Outlooks from the Ne<w Standpoint, pp. 159- 
 160. 
 
 11 See, e. g., in his Essays in Socialism, the following 
 essays: "A Bundle of Fallacies;" "The 'Monstrous
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 109 
 
 argument against his views concerning the 
 probable nature of sex relationships under 
 Socialism, but it is an argument against an 
 uncritical acceptance of them as typical of 
 the views generally held by Socialists. 
 
 IX 
 
 We cannot deny that some Socialists have 
 preached Free Love as the ideal form of sex 
 relationship. But we can and must deny that 
 the realization of the Socialist programme 
 necessarily leads to that ideal. We can and 
 must deny that the Socialist movement ac- 
 cepts it. We can and must affirm that Free 
 Love is based upon the Anarchist philosophy 
 of the independence of the individual and 
 the supremacy of the individual will; that it 
 involves a complete denial of the Socialist 
 philosophy of the interdependence of all in- 
 dividuals and the consequent supremacy of 
 society. The non-interference of society and 
 the unrestricted freedom of individual action 
 
 Regiment ' of Womanhood ; " " Some Current Fallacies 
 on the Woman Question;" "Female Suffrage and Its 
 Implications."
 
 i io S O C I A L I S M AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 in matters of such social consequence as mar- 
 riage and childbearing are the postulates of 
 crude individualism, no matter how eminent 
 the Socialist who embraces them may be. 
 
 There is nothing in the philosophy or pro- 
 gramme of Socialism which is incompatible 
 with the maintenance of the private family 
 based upon monogamic marriage. Probably 
 ninety-nine per cent, of the Socialists in the 
 world believe that Socialism would result in 
 a much greater degree of monogamy than 
 now obtains, and, as a result, in a greater de- 
 gree of stability and permanence in marriage. 
 They believe that the economic readjustment 
 essential to the realization of the Socialist 
 programme would have the effect of making 
 mutual affection the only reason for con- 
 tracting marriage, thus doing away with love- 
 less marriages for mercenary reasons, which 
 so often prove failures and end in divorce. 
 They believe, too, that when women are eco- 
 nomically equal with men, and politically 
 equal with them, they will insist upon a single 
 standard of morals for both sexes upon
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 
 
 men being as strictly monogamous as they re- 
 quire women to be. 
 
 Lamartine, in his rhetorical History of the 
 Revolution of 1848, repeats the ancient apho- 
 rism that " Communism of goods leads, as a 
 necessary consequence, to communism of 
 wives, children and parents," and many a 
 foolish criticism of Socialism has been based 
 upon it. But in truth the criticism is wholly 
 irrelevant. Modern Socialism does not aim 
 at " communism of goods." It may be freely 
 conceded that, in olden times, when produc- 
 tion by hand labor obtained, it was practi- 
 cally impossible successfully to combine com- 
 munism in the distribution of goods with the 
 maintenance of separate family life. There 
 was always the danger of hoarding by the 
 separate families to the prejudice of the 
 community. There was also the very real 
 danger of overpopulation. Aristotle recog- 
 nized this more than two thousand years ago. 
 
 But modern Socialism is not seeking to 
 bring about communism in goods. It is not 
 aiming at the abolition of private property.
 
 ii2 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 What it is aiming at is the collective owner- 
 ship of those means of production which are 
 now used by the few to exploit the many. 
 Under capitalism, we have cooperative pro- 
 duction by masses of workers, using privately 
 owned machinery and tools, with the result 
 that the owners of the machinery and tools, 
 without laboring as producers, can and do 
 receive more of the products than the pro- 
 ducers. Socialism would simply shift the 
 ownership of machinery and tools to the com- 
 munity, deny the non-producers' right to ex- 
 ploit the producers, and combine collective 
 ownership of the means of production with 
 private ownership of the goods produced, the 
 workers receiving according to their labor. 
 
 Acceptance of this programme does not 
 imply the acceptance of any particular theory 
 or forecast of the future development of 
 marriage and family life. That this is the 
 case is easily shown : consider the Socialist 
 principle of collective ownership and control 
 coupled with private enjoyment of the 
 utilities derived therefrom as illustrated by
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 113 
 
 our streets and highways. Does the collec- 
 tive ownership of streets and highways im- 
 peril marriage and the family? Would these 
 institutions be safer if streets and highways 
 were owned by private individuals or by cor- 
 porations? If not, is there any good rea- 
 son for believing that the extension of the 
 same principle to the ownership of street 
 railways and highways of steel rails \vould 
 imperil the family and the home? Is there 
 any reason to suppose that family life is less 
 safe where public ownership of railways pre- 
 vails, as in Australia, for example? Sup- 
 pose we applied the principle of collective 
 ownership to telephones and telegraphs, to 
 the supply of electric light and power, to the 
 express service, to the water supply and the 
 ice supply, is there any good reason for be- 
 lieving that the result would be Free Love 
 and the destruction of private family life? 
 I las that been the result where these things 
 have been tried? 
 
 Carry the principle farther, apply it to 
 the industrial activities of the nation: sup-
 
 ii4 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 pose that, as a result of the revolt of the 
 people against the exactions of the Meat 
 Trust, the business of raising, killing, packing 
 and selling meat were taken over by the 
 people, through the government. Would 
 the fact that we bought our meat from a state 
 or municipal shop, as we now buy stamps 
 from the post office, knowing that we were 
 not being exploited by a parasitic corpora- 
 tion, weaken the bonds uniting husbands and 
 wives, lessen our love for our children, or 
 otherwise imperil family life? Would such 
 evils result from the collective ownership of 
 the coal mines, the substitution of organized 
 society as a whole for the Steel Trust, or the 
 Oil Trust? 
 
 But there are other forms of collective 
 ownership than ownership by the govern- 
 ment. The cooperation of workers in vol- 
 untary copartnership, cooperatively owning 
 their tools and sharing their products, may 
 well become a very important part of the 
 economic organization of the Socialist com- 
 monwealth. Let us suppose, then, that the
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR n 5 
 
 workers in a given industry, say tailoring, de- 
 velop cooperative enterprise to such an ex- 
 tent that whoever buys a suit of clothes will 
 know that the tailors who made the clothes 
 got the full value of their labor, that no part 
 of the price of the clothes represents surplus 
 value in the shape of rent, interest or profit. 
 Will that fact be likely to make husbands and 
 wives forsake each other and seek new matri- 
 monial alliances, or to make parents love their 
 children less, or in any other way imperil the 
 peace and harmony of family life? 
 
 An honest answer to these questions will 
 prove the reductio ad absurdum of the criti- 
 cism we are considering. It is not without 
 significance that among all the thousands of 
 anti-Socialists writers who have made the 
 criticism, not one seems to have made any at- 
 tempt to demonstrate in what manner the ac- 
 complishment of the Socialist programme 
 would tend to w r eaken or destroy the family. 
 The nearest they ever come to that issue is 
 to declare that the private family could not 
 exist if private property were abolished and
 
 1 16 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 communism completely established. Since 
 Socialists do not aim at the abolition of pri- 
 vate property and do not seek to bring about 
 communism, the declaration has no bearing 
 upon the subject. 
 
 Too much stress cannot be laid upon the 
 fact that it is no part of the aim of modern 
 Socialism to bring about a particular form of 
 marriage or family organization. Its one 
 aim is the reorganization of our political and 
 economic life to the end that there shall be 
 no exploitation of workers by idlers through 
 the channels of rent, interest and profit, and 
 no class warfare as a necessary outcome of 
 such exploitation, the exploited and the ex- 
 ploiters struggling for the advancement of 
 their specific economic interests. In a word, 
 the aim of Socialism is the attainment of 
 complete political and industrial democracy. 
 Individual Socialists may join to the most 
 honest and loyal service to that aim equally 
 honest and loyal service to other ends to 
 vegetarianism, anti-vivisection, religion or 
 anti-religion, proof of the existence of Intel-
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 117 
 
 ligent beings on Mars, demonstration of the 
 Baconian authorship of the plays attributed 
 to Shakespeare, and so on but these accre- 
 tions are no concern of the Socialist move- 
 ment. 
 
 x 
 
 Of course, the reorganization of society 
 upon Socialist lines must of necessity affect 
 the family. It is impossible to imagine such 
 a fundamental change being accomplished 
 without influencing one of the fundamental in- 
 stitutions of society. Every great compre- 
 hensive change in the economic structure of 
 society heretofore has had a marked influence 
 upon family life, and we cannot in reason ex- 
 pect that so comprehensive a change as So- 
 cialism will prove an exception to the general 
 law of social development. It is this fact 
 which causes so many Socialists and others to 
 attempt to forecast in detail the exact nature 
 of the developments of marriage and family 
 life which Socialism will bring about. 
 
 Xow, only the foolishly narrow-minded 
 would condemn or attempt to discourage hon-
 
 n8 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 est and serious thought upon a matter of such 
 vital importance to the life of the race, for 
 such thinking is a necessary condition of prog- 
 ress. But the Socialist movement is not 
 committed to any of the conclusions reached 
 by these individual speculations. There is 
 no Socialist theory of marriage. 
 
 We believe that the reorganization of so- 
 ciety upon the basis of collective ownership 
 and democratic control of the economic forces 
 will put an end to those evils which now men- 
 ace the integrity and stability of family life. 
 We believe that marriage for economic rea- 
 sons will disappear with the abolition of eco- 
 nomic classes and economic exploitation. 
 We believe that the greater part of prostitu- 
 tion with its attendant evils will disappear. 
 We believe the elevation of family life will 
 result. We do not believe that anything 
 but good can result from these changes. 
 Whatever developments in family organiza- 
 tion take place in the Socialist society of the 
 future will be in response to the collective 
 will of men and women free from political
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 119 
 
 or economic tyranny. Why need we fear 
 that a society in which women are politically 
 and economically free and equal with men will 
 tend to lessen monogamy? Ought we not 
 rather to believe and hope that by increasing 
 the power of women, whose monogamous in- 
 stincts have been much more highly devel- 
 oped than the monogamous instincts of men, 
 monogamy will be greatly strengthened? 
 
 In truth, there is no need to fear Free 
 Love or polygamy or group marriage, or poly- 
 andry. The whole trend of social and eco- 
 nomic evolution is away from these and to- 
 ward a more perfect monogamy. Anton 
 Menger is undoubtedly right when he says 
 that the defects of Free Love are so numer- 
 ous and so serious that, even if all the polit- 
 ical and religious forces which now buttress 
 monogamic marriage were to be swept away, 
 " the masses of the people would themselves 
 refuse to permit it." 12 And Frederick 
 Engels is right when he bases his hope for 
 the attainment of a more perfect monogamy 
 
 12 ANTON MENGER, Neue Staatslehre, p. 132.
 
 i2o SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 upon the economic emancipation of women: 
 " Remove the economic considerations that 
 now force women to submit to the customary' 
 disloyalty of men, and you will place women 
 on an equal footing with men. All present 
 experiences prove that this will tend much 
 more strongly to make men truly monoga- 
 mous, than to make women polyandrous." 13 
 The realization of true monogamy will be 
 made possible by the elevation of woman to 
 the plane of economic and political equality 
 with man. To that end the Socialist move- 
 ment is striving. 
 
 The Socialist ideal is not compatible with 
 the destruction of social authority and re- 
 sponsibility comprehended by the term Free 
 Love. Nor is it compatible with the denial 
 of personal freedom essential to all schemes 
 for compulsory mating and applying the 
 methods of animal breeding to human beings. 
 The fundamental democracy of Socialism is 
 as inimical to the one as to the other. The 
 
 13 FREDERICK EKGEI.S, Tlie Origin of the Family, Pri- 
 vate Property and the State, Chapter III.
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 
 
 race cannot be elevated by the degradation 
 of individuals, whether in the direction of 
 the harem or the stud-farm. 
 
 The Socialist ideal involves a deeper sense 
 of social interdependence and responsibility, 
 combined with a larger personal freedom, 
 than has ever yet existed. All the observable 
 tendencies of social evolution point to the 
 further development of social sanctions for 
 marriage and parentage, rather than to their 
 progressive abandonment. There are abun- 
 dant signs of an increasing recognition of the 
 need for well-considered collective action aim- 
 ing at encouragement of marriage and pro- 
 creation by the fit and worthy and the dis- 
 couragement of marriage and procreation 
 by the unfit and unworthy. There is r.n 
 increasing demand for education for par- 
 enthood, both for fathers and mothers. 
 Especially is the education necessary for 
 mothers: too long we have permitted women 
 to enter the maternal wilderness blindfolded. 
 Education for motherhood will mean that 
 maternal functions will be chosen deliber-
 
 122 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 ately and intelligently, with a full sense of 
 all their attendant perils and responsibilities. 
 
 There is a demand, too, for the adoption 
 of a sane and humane policy of permanently 
 segregating the victims of mental defects and 
 diseases believed to be transmissible. These 
 provide an enormous proportion of the re- 
 cruits to the ranks of the degenerate classes 
 the habitual drunkards, the prostitutes, the 
 purveyors of venereal contagion, the criminal 
 and vicious classes in general. It is probable 
 that, long before the Socialist goal is attained, 
 measures will be taken to segregate per- 
 manently all known victims of mental or 
 physical evils known to be incurable and trans- 
 missible, and to prevent them from burden- 
 ing society with their undesirable offspring. 
 
 There is little reason to doubt that such 
 social safeguards as these will be considerably 
 developed in the Socialist society of the fu- 
 ture. Side by side with that increase of 
 social responsibility will be developed a larger 
 freedom of personal choice and action than 
 has ever existed, as a result of the breaking
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 
 
 down of economic compulsions. Men and 
 women will be free to marry for love and love 
 only. Probably, too, divorce will be made 
 more easy and the cessation of love be freely 
 recognized as a sufficient reason for the dis- 
 solution of marriage ties, especially where 
 there are no children concerned. 
 
 So much we may say with assurance con- 
 cerning the future of marriage and the 
 family. But when we try to go beyond these 
 limits, to forecast the future and picture it 
 in detail as we picture the present, we enter 
 that realm which is ruled by no law other 
 than the dreamer fashions for his own dream. 
 If an individual Socialist seeks to forecast 
 that future and tells of elaborate systems of 
 endowed or salaried motherhood, we may 
 listen with what degree of interest and faith 
 we will : his vision is his alone, and is in no- 
 wise a part of the Socialist programme. 
 
 XI 
 
 The thoughtful mother will not fear Social- 
 ism when it is presented to her properly de-
 
 124 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 limited. She will separate the chaff from the 
 wheat; the non-essential Utopian vision of the 
 individual from the great essential collec- 
 tive purpose. She will not be afraid that the 
 elevation of her sisters to a plane of political 
 and economic equality with men w r ill demor- 
 alize them and cause them to use their power 
 to destroy monogamy and the private family. 
 She will not be afraid that the abolition of 
 class exploitation, which gives rise to poverty, 
 vice, crime, disease and war, will harm a 
 single human being. She will not be afraid 
 of applying to society as a whole the principle 
 of equal opportunity which is the ruling prin- 
 ciple of family life. 
 
 On the contrary, she will welcome So- 
 cialism as a parched flower welcomes the 
 gentle summer rain. She will hail it with 
 joy and gladness, firm in the faith that it will 
 emancipate womanhood from the thralldom 
 of the centuries, glorify motherhood, protect 
 the home and insure to childhood its precious 
 heritage of opportunity.
 
 THE MOTHER'S FEAR 125 
 
 A^o longer the Slave of Fear, she will laugh 
 Superstition to scorn and with joy take the 
 gifts of the Angel.
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 SOCIALISM is most fittingly symbolized 
 by the twofold character of the Spirit 
 of Motherhood. 
 
 Defending her child against attack, the hu- 
 man mother matches the reckless ferocity of 
 the tigress defending her cubs. The two 
 mothers are sisters in their savage passion. 
 
 But toward her child what beautiful tender- 
 ness that same human mother displays ! The 
 gentle kiss of the dewdrop upon the cheek 
 of the rose is not more tender. 
 
 So, toward the enemies of childhood the 
 Spirit of Socialism turns with savage menace 
 and defiance, and cries aloud to the Masters 
 of Bread to the Lords of Privilege and 
 Power to all the Despoilers of Little Chil- 
 dren: 
 
 ' You shall not: steal the bloom of health 
 
 from the checks of the children! You shall 
 
 not darken the light of their eyes! You 
 
 shall not banish the laughter from their lips! 
 
 126
 
 EPILOGUE 127 
 
 You shall not silence the songs of their 
 hearts! These things you shall not do, for, 
 by The Eternal! I, the Spirit of Social- 
 ism, have sworn that I will not falter, nor 
 pause, nor rest, nor make truce, until I have 
 destroyed your cruel power and broken down 
 the last barrier which stands between a hu- 
 man child and its right to all the glory and 
 beauty and joy of the world." 
 
 Then, like a young and beautiful mother, 
 beckoning her child and watching over it as 
 it comes with eager, faltering footsteps, the 
 Spirit of Socialism stands at the gateway of 
 the Garden of Life, bidding the children 
 enter, saying tenderly: 
 
 " Come, little ones, here is the Garden of 
 Life. Enter and pluck for yourselves the 
 flowers of Eife and Love and Joy and 
 Beauty! They are yours! They were 
 planted for you! They have been tended 
 and nurtured for you through all the ages 
 of human sacrifice and labor. Plere, in the 
 midst of the Garden, are the King's Treas- 
 uries of Art and Science and Philosophy and
 
 128 SOCIALISM AND MOTHERHOOD 
 
 Power. Come! Enter! I will unlock them 
 for you, for they are all yours. Wander 
 where you will and take freely what you will, 
 for these things are your Heritage. And 
 when you are tired when through the even- 
 ing shadows you must -pass out of the Gar- 
 den of Life to your Rest and your Dreams 
 you shall leave more than you gathered, even 
 though you know it not. And then, when 
 your footsteps are no longer heard in the Gar- 
 den, and your voices are no longer mingled 
 with the whisperings of the /lowers, other 
 children coining after you shall find that in 
 your footprints flowers of unfading beauty 
 bloom. They shall find the Garden of Life 
 lovelier because you lingered and played in 
 it; the King's Treasuries richer because you 
 took from them to satisfy your needs and 
 added to them new treasures of your own. 
 For thus, my little one's, the Glory of the 
 Ages is kept unfailing and undimmed. 
 Thus has your Heritage been kept, and thus 
 shall it be maintained for all children, For- 
 ever and Forever! "
 
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