With few exceptions, every man of any social class, owing to an infinity of unflattering reasons for a sex… — Anna Kuliscioff
With few exceptions, every man of any social class, owing to an infinity of unflattering reasons for a sex that passes as strong, considers the privilege of his sex as a natural phenomenon and defends it with astonishing tenacity, calling on God, the Church, science, ethics, and existing laws, which are merely the legal sanction of the prevarication of a dominant class and sex. And it is for this reason that, in spite of the intimate connections between these various problems, it seemed to me that I could isolate that of the social condition of woman from all other morbid phenomena of the social organism, mostly generated by that terrible tragedy of life, the struggle for existence.
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It is true that man's fear of competition plays a great role in this, which is dissimulated through social ethics arguments, based mostly on religious biases and habit. But by far most influential is the unconscious fear of having one day to renounce, out of love or necessity, the authority and arrogance of his sex, which has been embedded in man since prehistorical times—and I concede that abdicating power is always a difficult and painful thing.
Character never joins forces with servility. And, indeed, men and women-especially the latter-who have an independent character are often regarded as rebellious, unsettled and troubled people, a danger to society.
I have chosen the question of woman's labor because I think it is the kernel of the whole woman question, as I firmly believe in the following great and fundamental truth of modern ethics, which is valid for both man and woman: labor alone, of whatever nature, divided and remunerated with equity, is the actual source of the enhancement of the human species.
