Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
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indisputable that the capitalist factory places these categories
of the working population in particularly hard conditions,
and that for them it is particularly necessary to regulate and
shorten the working day, to guarantee hygienic conditions
of labour, etc.; but endeavours completely to ban the work
of women and juveniles in industry, or to maintain the
patriarchal manner of life that ruled out such work, would be
reactionary and utopian. By destroying the patriarchal
isolation of these categories of the population who formerly
never emerged from the narrow circle of domestic, family
relationships, by drawing them into direct participation in
social production, large-scale machine industry stimulates
their development and increases their independence, in
other words, creates conditions of life that are incomparably
superior to the patriarchal immobility of pre-capitalist
relations.*
* “The poor woman-weaver follows her father and husband to
the factory and works alongside of them and independently of them.
She is as much a breadwinner as the man is.” “In the factory ... the
woman is quite an independent producer, apart from her husband.”
Literacy spreads among the women factory workers with remarkable
rapidity. (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 113, 118, 112 and
elsewhere.) Mr. Kharizomenov is perfectly right in drawing the following
conclusion: industry destroys “the economic dependence of the
woman on the family ... and on the husband.... At the factory, the
woman is the equal of the man; this is the equality of the proletarian....
The capitalisation of industry is an important factor in woman’s
struggle for her independence in the family.” “Industry creates a new
position for the woman in which she is completely independent of
her family and husband.” (Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1883, No. 12, pp.
582, 596.) In the Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia (Vol. VII,
Pt. II, Moscow, 1882, pp. 152, 138-139), the investigators compare
the position of women engaged in making stockings by hand and by
machine. The daily earnings of hand workers are about 8 kopeks,
and of machine workers, 14 to 30 kopeks. The working woman’s conditions
under machine production are described as follows: “... Before
us is a free young woman, hampered by no obstacles, emancipated
from the family and from all that constitutes the peasant woman’s
conditions of life, a young woman who at any moment may leave one
place for another, one employer for another, and may at any moment
find herself without a job ... without a crust of bread.... Under hand
production, the knitter’s earnings are very meagre, insufficient to
cover the cost of her food, earnings only acceptable if she, as a member
of an allotment-holding and farming family, enjoys in part the product
of that land; under machine production the working woman, in