Woman Under Socialism

In 1879, Bebel published Die Frau und der Sozialismus [Women under Socialism]. The book's publication defied Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law, which had been passed the previous year. It was officially banned in a decree issued on March 24, 1879. Circulated through the SPD's underground network of agents, clubs, and publishers, and then revised and expanded in the course of numerous new editions, it became socialism's most widely-read book up to the turn of the century. In it, Bebel argues that working-class women were discriminated against in two ways: as workers and as women. Like all members of the proletariat, women were economically dependent upon the capitalist class, but they were doubly disadvantaged in that they were also dependent upon men of their own class. Bebel insists that the liberation of women is possible only through resolution of the "social question."

About the Author

August Bebel (1840-1913), the son of a low-ranking Prussian officer and a wood-turner by trade, became the most iconic Social Democrat in Imperial Germany. In 1866, together with Wilhelm Liebknecht, he founded the Saxon People's Party, as well as what later became known as the Eisenach wing of Social Democracy, which united with the Lassallean wing at the Gotha party congress of 1875. Bebel was chairman of the renamed Social Democratic Party (SPD) [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands] (1892-1913) and by far its most important parliamentary spokesman and strategist. He was first elected to the Reichstag of the North German Confederation in February 1867 by a Saxon constituency, and he served in that house, with short interruptions (including a jail term for treason in 1872-1875), until his death in 1913. He was also a member of the lower house of Saxony's state parliament from 1881 to 1891.

Dettagli