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Bond Woman

Bondwomen, 1911, The Freewoman (number one, volume one)

Content

• Bondwomen versus Freewomen
  • Freewoman: has own spirit, independent
  • Bondwomen: merely “complement” someone else
    • Everyone SHOULD have contempt for such beings: men aren’t wrong when they ask why they should give rights to be people who act like servants and nothing else
    • “Women’s very virtues are those of a subordinate class. Women are long-suffering, adaptable, dutiful, faithful, and with an unlimited capacity for sacrifice”
  • “How women have fallen into this position is a moot point.”
    • Why? B/c she’s totally cruel: “Those who are “down” are inferior.” No matter how it happened, if they’ve lost, they’re inferior.
• “It would be nearer the truth to say that if she is an individual, she is free, and will act like those who are free.”
  • “freedom is born in the individual soul, and that no outer force can either give it or take it away; that only Freewomen can be free” (Stirner resonance)
  • She must value her own soul (Nietzsche resonance)
  • Notes the silliness of “asking for” freedom
• Relation to Modernity
  • “At the present time, when man’s adventurousness and experimental mind has made much of her ‘usefulness’ useless, woman finds herself cut off from her importantly useful sphere, equipped with the mind of a servant, and the reputation of one.”
  • Modern woman has two choices: affirm position as protected female or become a master herself
• Work
  • Liking that you don’t have to work is “unspiritedness”
  • Work is to be cherished: “For this protected position women give up all first-hand power. Really, the power to work and to think. All the power to achieve is merely derivative.”
    • We need not “soporific” of protection, but the motivation of achievement: ribbons, badges, salaries, honor
  • Women must work and earn money
  • Can’t count domestic work as work b/c some of us temperamentally don’t like it and b/c some of us would rather have OTHER careers than that
    • Domestic work is maligned, she notes, but not because it’s unpaid: “The well-intentioned people, now utterly bewildered, are pretending that housework has fallen into disrepute because it is unpaid work, forgetting that the best of the worker’s work is always unpaid.”
      • She gets into specifics about why the woman shouldn’t be the paid housekeeper of the husband: but mostly b/c you don’t get the freedom to sell your labor and then take it out of the market (it’s not free labor)
  • Her ideals she realizes will be hard: it’ll be very difficult to work for yourself and keep up the kids, but that’s what she wants
• What’s Wrong with Suffragism
  • “The cult of the Suffragist takes its stand upon the weakness and dejectedness of the conditions of women. The cult of the Suffragist would say, “Are women not weak? Are women not crushed down? Are women not in need of protection? Therefore, give them the means wherewith they may be protected”
  • The correct spirit will come out when it’s there; it can’t be cultivated
• Independence, strength, responsibility
• Woman is a “human poultice” for man, which is a great way to express Ruskin’s view of women’s work
• Kids: woman are the natural guardians of children and should be able to provide for them and protect them by herself, not needing a man