Women as Sex Vendors; Or why Women are Conservative (Review)

 

 A marxists' confused attempt to argue that women are a petits-bourgeois class in society, both reactionary and privileged when compared to men.

The propertyless woman today is rarely reduced to starvation. If the price (or wages) offered for the sale of her laboring power are unsatisfactory, she may always supplement them through the barter or sale of her sex. That there are no women hoboes in the civilized world today is incontestable proof of the superiority of the economic status of woman over man.

The arguments are diverse and often contradictory, and there is absolutely no acknowledgement nor attempt to grapple with the contemporary women's movement, whose very existence rebuked most of his points. At the beginning of the book, the author mentions that there are few women revolutionists, so I suspect he was using this as an excuse not to engage with it. The Women's movement in particular the campaigns for suffrage and full civil rights were overwhelmingly reformist, but they involved a very diverse coalition of women from all backgrounds and political lineages, including revolutionaries like Sylvia Pankhurst. But even though for many political and social reforms were the end point of the movement it was an international movement that mobilised thousands of women to intervene socially and politically with an incredible diversity of tactics, from respectable petitioning to acts of terrorism, one Suffragette -Mary Leigh- threw an axe at the Prime Minister Asquith. 

 

And in response to this demand for reforms the suffrage movement was met with systematic violence, that included police beatings, arrests and torture by force-feeding hunger strikers.  

And he weakens any revolutionary purity grounds by comparing men to women and concluding that men are serious minded and talk and discuss things of importance like civil engineering. So I suspect this refusal to even acknowledge the existence of a mass and diverse movement of committed political reformers willing to make extreme sacrifices is less to do with purity and more to do with cowardice.

Also, largely ignored was the related movement by women to enter the workplace, thus giving up their beneficial sex commodity privileges in favour of the far inferior selling of labour that men must suffer through. I say largely because the author does grudgingly acknowledge women work but it's sparse and highly revealing. Apart from references to stereotypical jobs for women like stenographers there's a speculative passage on the First World War leading to massive social upheaval if it continues and forces more women into industry, and a criticism of women bringing down wages, which lays the blame not on the bosses or the weakness of the labour movement but on women themselves.

Women compete for jobs with men today, force down wages to a lower level and demand more from men before they will marry. And yet we see $25.00 a week stenographers giving up their positions to barter themselves, presumably for life, to $35.00 a week clerks or salesmen, rarely because of the mating instinct, but usually because of the personal triumph this means in the competition between members of the sex, and the social approbation which marriage brings.

Why compete for jobs and then ditch them as soon as they can attract a man with even a slightly higher salary? Selling labour power in this book is a negative, inferior way of survival in class society according to this book. This is not explained, the fact that women were increasingly pushing for access to work should be recognized as a major issue for the overall "biological and economic" argument, but instead it's just brushed aside because many of these women were still marrying. And where on earth is the evidence for why these relationships happen to come from? Either the author is thinking of one specific woman who earned $25.00 a week as a stenographer who married a clerk on $35.00 a week and told them it was for the "personal triumph this means in the competition between members of the sex, and the social approbation which marriage brings" or they're making assumptions.

Furthermore, several points can only stand up if you ignore or weren't aware of men in the sex industry. A key argument is that women are better off in the 1910s America because they can sell their sex in both marriage and prostitution, whereas men apparently could not. This is simply incorrect, men do in fact sell their sex commodities, both in sexual work and in courtship and marriage. Ultimately the approach being used in this book is the shotgun technic, the author lacks a killer argument to be the foundation, so it moves from one point to another but the relationship between them is rarely made clear and is only assumed, and  in numerous cases contradict one another.

One passage assures the reader that women are as capable as men at everything, and it's the economic system we live in that is to blame. But then a few pages later it advises only hiring male stenographers because they're smarter than women in that role. Another passage claims that listening to boys is always intellectually stimulating because they talk about serious topics like civil engineering, careers and politics, whereas girls only talk about boys and dresses. Another section relies heavily on Engels' Origins of the family to make its points for it. Most of the quotes concern the decline of maternal societies with the advent of industrial capitalism, one quote even refers to this as the "historic defeat of the female sex". But after that, the book makes the argument that women as a sex are superior to men because there are laws to protect women and in capitalist society laws are only made to protect the propertied, ergo women have more economic power. So Engels is correct that maternal society has been abolished and the key feature of this society was that women occupied privileged positions of power over men, turn the page and this non-maternal society we live in has as its key feature women occupying privileged positions of power over men. Unless Engels and the other historians named in that section were being brought up simply as an appeal to authority, this actually raises many questions over the orthodox marxist approach to stages of development.

The legal framework argument would also make the outlawing of child labour prove that it is the adult population who serve at the beck and call of the youth. Indeed, quite a few of the arguments in this book could be taken and altered slightly for "Why Children are Conservative".  

The book maintains a detached tone, arguing that the conclusions of the author are the result of economic and biological analysis and the attempt to get at the root of the issue. There are a few moments where this slips, usually when the author attempts to generalize from anecdotes or make absolute statements about things that have very obvious counter examples. But when the issue of divorce comes up, this falls away completely. The entire section is just a highly emotive tirade about how the courts and public opinion always sides with the woman and never the man.

If she be discreet, she may entertain lovers galore; she may refuse to perform any of the theoretical duties of the home; she may refuse to bear children or to surrender to her husband, without censure, and often without the knowledge of the world. If she be addicted to drunkenness, people will divine that her husband must have treated her brutally; if she be seen with other men, folks suspect that he neglects her.

If her husband seeks satisfaction for his desires elsewhere, she may divorce him and secure alimony; if he deserts her the law will return him to her side, if it can find him. If he fails to bring home the wherewithall to provide for her, she may have him sent to jail. If she discovers that he is getting the affection and the sex life which she has denied him, outside of his home, and if she buys a revolver and murders him in cold blood, the jury will exonerate her.

If a wife deserts her husband and her children, the law does not make her a criminal; for wife abandonment, the husband is held criminally liable.

No matter what the offense of the woman, custom and public opinion demand that every "decent" man permit his wife to accuse him on "just grounds" and to secure the divorce and call on the law to force him to pay her alimony for the rest of their natural lives.

No matter what the provocation, legally or sentimentally, no man can be exonerated for killing a woman. No matter how little the provocation, legally or sentimentally, any woman may kill almost any man, and the jury will render a verdict of Not Guilty. She has only to say that he "deceived her."

I looked it up, and it's not true, until the 1970s the easiest way to get a divorce was to move to Nevada because its requirements were less stringent, and you only had to live in the state for six months to qualify. Failing that, another Western state would do. These `divorce mill` states as they were called wouldn't have been needed if the tirade above were true. Until no-fault divorce was made legal in the US, you had to prove one spouse was at fault, if both were found at fault the divorce request was denied. During the period that this book was written, the majority of divorces were given to the wife 

During the whole period under study the over-
whelming majority of divorces were granted to the
wife, and this majority increased slightly through-
out the period. There is a definite territorial
pattern: The proportion of decrees granted to
women in the South, particularly the South Atlantic
Division, was always lower than in other areas.
During the early years of divorce statistics the
overwhelming majority of decrees in several
southern States were granted to husbands, but
this majority disappeared about the turn of the
century. On the other extreme, wives have ob-
tained about three-fourths of all decrees in the
West and, since 1916, in the North Central Region

 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_21/sr21_024.pdf

However, this still shows the dishonesty of the author's framing, husbands could obtain divorces if they wished and could prove the fault. 

To be perfectly honest, I suspect this pamphlet was authored as an attempt to promote a conservative conception of the socialist movement. During the war, the suffrage movement was making progress and women were entering the workforce in large numbers. It was only a matter of time before the number of women agitators and revolutionists increased significantly. Of course since it can't even acknowledge the existence of these currents its ability to head this off was doomed from the beginning.