FROM THE LIBRARY OF EUGENE V. DEBS'S RUNNING MATE
BEBEL, August, and Daniel DE LEON, translator.
Woman under socialism. Translated from the original German of the 33rd edition.
New York, Labor News Press, 1904.
8vo, pp. vi, [2], 379, [1 (blank)]; with a frontispiece portrait; tissue guard wrinkled, faded red crayon traces to title-page, a few marks; otherwise a very good copy in the publisher’s green printed cloth, spine gilt; rubbed at head and foot; ownership stamp of Seymour Stedman’s library; one or two marginal marks in red crayon.
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Woman under socialism. Translated from the original German of the 33rd edition.
First edition in English, first printing, of Bebel’s Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1884), the initial cause of a bitter rift between its translator, Daniel de Leon, and James Connolly of the Socialist Labor Party, who thought it would scare off female recruits.
Bebel’s work contained a radical denunciation of marriage and traditional gender roles, which De Leon (1852–1914) – leader of the Socialist Labor Party – reinforces in his introduction, calling for wage slavery and, more importantly, sex slavery, to be eradicated (referring to women who are resistant to such change as ‘hostile sisters’). Rejecting the self-effacement typical of many translators, who should ‘be neither seen nor heard’, De Leon considers himself ‘duty bound to modify the ethic formula to the extent of marking [his] exception, lest the general accord, implied in the act of translating, be construed into specific approval of objected to passages and views’, inserting much of his own commentary on Bebel’s work in the form of footnotes (p. iv).
The Scottish-born Irish socialist James Connolly (later executed following the Easter Rising of 1916) vehemently disagreed with Bebel’s condemnation of monogamy and with De Leon’s preface, calling Die Frau und der Sozialismus ‘an attempt to seduce the proletariat from the firm ground of political and economic science on to the questionable ground of physiology and sex … I question if you can find in the whole world one woman who was led to Socialism by it, but you can find hundreds who were repelled from studying Socialism by judicious extracts from its pages’.
Provenance: with the stamp of Seymour Stedman (1855–1926), who was a founding member of the Socialist Party of America in 1901, and in 1920 was the vice-presidential candidate on a ticket with Eugene V. Debs, co-founder of the International Workers of the World (IWW) and five-time presidential candidate.
