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The Economic and Sexual Freedom of Women
February & March, 1888
by Florence Finch Kelly
"The Economic Freedom of Women"
Article from Liberty #119 (February 25, 1888)
I cannot see that much advance toward individualism in the relations between
men and women is possible until the economic freedom of women shall have become
an established fact. Nor do I use economical freedom here in its large and true
sense, but simply with a relative manner. I use it in the sense of the same
economical plane that the other sex is on. That they should be on the same
plane, wherever or whatever it may be, seems to me a thing so desirable that it
is to be ranked alongside of free banks. Though the latter, I imagine, will be
realized many decades before the former. It is not solely for the sake of its
benefit to woman that this condition of relative economical freedom is
desirable. it will have a wholesome effect upon man as well. For man is still a
little bit tyrannical. Even the best of men and those most imbued with a desire
for justice and equity and best able to apply individualist ideas to actual
life,--even these still have something of the tyrant left in their feeling
toward and their treatment of women. They are not to blame for it, I suppose,
any more than they are for the fact that hair grows on their heads instead of
on their feet. For so many many ages man has been superior to woman, has been
accustomed to have her clinging dependently to his finger and begging to be
taken care of, that it has become a part of his nature for him not only to
feel, but also to use, his superiority. Vestiges of it still cling to him. Not
until woman becomes a self-supporting independent creature who has ceased to
beg alms of him and who can and does support herself as easily and with as much
comfort as he does, will he respect her as his equal and lose the last remnants
of that old spirit of tyranny which made him get everything under his thumb
that he could. He will become a freer being by this one step in woman's
emancipation.
For woman herself this condition would bring unnumbered goods. It is the only
escape for her from the bondage of conventional marriage, which, according to
the confessions of women themselves, is a condition which could have given
Dante points for the Inferno. Until at least relative economical freedom for
women is realized, the separate individual existence of the man and the woman
is an impossibility. But I am afraid it will not be realized for many a long
year. The author of that beautiful allegory, "Three Dreams in a Desert,"
anticipated the future. When the childless women who now sit around in boarding
houses and think they have done a lot of work if they darn their husbands'
stockings understand that their position is exactly the same as the prostitute
whom they abhor, it will do to say, and not until then, "And slowly the
creature staggered on to its knees.
"The Sexual Freedom of Women"
Article from Liberty #121 (March 31, 1888)
The subject of the liberty of woman and the state in which she now is, upon
which there have been several interesting contributions in Liberty of late, is
one of the most interesting and complicated in all the range of existing social
conditions. To say that a woman has the same right to freedom that a man has
and that she alone should decide whether or not she will enjoy that right is a
truism to the ears of all who have learned the ABC of individualism. But it is
the opening to a subject upon which there is more ignorance to the population
and more talk to the area of ignorance than upon any other subject in which men
and women interest themselves, except, perhaps, that of probation after death.
I mean the subject of sexual relations, which is very much in need of
investigation at the hands of men of science whose only aim would be to reach
the truth. However, this is not what I started out to say. I was about to say,
when the size of the subject interrupted me, that the average woman of any
grade of society who really wishes this liberty, takes it. But having done so,
she never fails to condemn, hunt down, and cast out any other woman who has
done the same thing and has been found out. The conventional code of morals on
the sexual question is in a queer state, but it has been so undermined and
hollowed out by imprisoned nature that it is already "tottering to its fall."
It seems to me that the point to be attacked is not the question of a woman's
right to sexual freedom. Her own nature can be trusted to settle that for her
in the way that will be the most conducive to her own happiness. The weak point
-- and at the same time the most important point -- in all the conventional
morality is that prostitution, which Christianity and morality have been
fighting for ages, and conventional marriage, the door to respectability, stand
upon the same principle,--a principle that is essentially evil,--namely, the
principle that a woman's sexual favor are rightfully a matter of commerce. The
only important difference between the two conditions is that prostitution gets
better pay than marriage. But the idea that a woman in entitled to support from
the man to whom she grants herself is ingrained in the minds of both men and
women.
It is this idea that must be knocked to pieces before women can be free, in any
sense of the word.
And back of this is the still greater truth that women must learn to be
self-supporting. Else, they will always be slaves.
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