Comrade and Equal.
A Socialist Argument for Women’s Equality
[Socialism]. Debs, Eugene V. et al. Woman—Comrade and Equal. Chicago: National Office of the Socialist Party, n.d.
9 x 12” leaflet, folded to make four pages; all sides covered.
Printed and sold for $1.50 as part of a collaboration between the socialist publication The Progressive Woman (“a Socialist magazine devoted to the social, industrial, and political emancipation of women”) and the Women’s National Committee of the Socialist Party, which, according to a note at the top, “adopted” the leaflet and oversaw its distribution. In addition to Deb’s article (excerpted from Debs: His Life, Writings, and Speeches), a poem about Mary Wollstonecraft (from “Tongues of Toil” by William Francis Barnard) and an excerpt from August Bebel’s book Woman and Socialism are also included.
In “Woman—Comrade and Equal,” Debs attacks the current status of women in society, writing that “woman is made the slave of a slave, and is reckoned fit only for companionship in lust. The hands and breasts that nursed all men to life are scorned as the forgetful brute proclaims his superior strength…Man has not reached his best. He will never reach his best until he walks the upward way side by side with woman.” In a socialist society, men and women are equals and women can achieve “the dignity of ideal womanhood.”
Barnard’s two-stanza poem, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” pays tribute to her myriad accomplishments, and reads in part:
Among those lives abject, one, brave, arose,
And cried, “Behold! This shall not always be:
Woman arise; only the bold are free!”
Nor insults, heavier bonds, nor bitter blows
Availed to still her, where midst daunted foes
She stood with voice that called futurity.
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