the New York Labor News Company

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

Bebel's work, "Die Frau und der Socialismus," rendered in this English
version with the title "Woman under Socialism," is the best-aimed shot
at the existing social system, both strategically and tactically
considered. It is wise tactics and strategy to attack an enemy on his
weakest side. The Woman Question is the weakest link in the capitalist
mail.

The workingman, we know, is a defenceless being; but it takes much
sharpening of the intellect to appreciate the fact that "he cannot speak
for himself." His sex is popularly coupled with the sense of strength.
The illusion conceals his feebleness, and deprives him of help, often of
sympathy. It is thus even with regard to the child. Proverbially weak
and needing support, the child, nevertheless, is not everywhere a victim
in the existing social order. Only in remote sense does the child of the
ruling class suffer. The invocation of the "Rights of the Child" leaves
substantially untouched the children of the rich. It is otherwise with
woman. The shot that rips up the wrongs done to her touches a nerve that
aches from end to end in the capitalist world. There is no woman,
whatever her station, but in one way or other is a sufferer, a victim in
modern society. While upon the woman of the working class the cross of
capitalist society rests heaviest in all ways, not one of her sisters in
all the upper ranks but bears some share of the burden, or, to be
plainer, of the smudge,--and what is more to the point, they are aware
of it. Accordingly, the invocation of the "Rights of Woman" not only
rouses the spirit of the heaviest sufferers under capitalist society,
and thereby adds swing to the blows of the male militants in their
efforts to overthrow the existing order, it also lames the adversary by
raising sympathizers in his own camp, and inciting sedition among his
own retinue. Bebel's exhaustive work, here put in English garb, does
this double work unerringly.

I might stop here. The ethic formula commands self-effacement to a
translator. More so than well-brought-up children, who should be "seen
and not heard," a translator should, where at all possible, be neither
seen nor heard. That, however, is not always possible. In a work of this
nature, which, to the extent of this one, projects itself into
hypotheses of the future, and even whose premises necessarily branch off
into fields that are not essentially ba