The uneducated believe -- and the ill-intentioned say -- that anarchism is at war with everything that is good, beautiful, with art, the sciences, and above all, with the household.

In fact, we have had the chance to hear from many working women’s lips the following: “Oh, how nice this anarchism idea of yours is! You want all of us…wives, daughters, mothers and sisters, to become mistresses, vile toys of the unhinged passions of men!”

It is to those who say and believe this that we now speak. Let us see.

We anarchist women believe that in the present society nobody is more disgraced in their condition than the unfortunate woman. As soon as puberty hits, we are the target of lustful and cynically sensual gazes of the strong sex. Be him from the exploiting or exploited class. Later, now “women,” we fall victim too many times to deceit in the muck of impurities, or in the scorn and contempt of society, which sees in our demise no love, no ideals, nothing but faultiness.

If we are able to achieve what many conceive of as their bliss, that is marriage, then our station is worse, a thousand times worse. Unemployment for the husband, scarcity of wages, illnesses, etc, make what in other circumstances would be the height of bliss into a grave condition and terrible burden for the “husbands.” Truly there is nothing as beautiful, as poetic, as tender, agreeable and nice as a child. A child! There is the height of bliss for a marriage! But woe to the poor, oh the place where misery looms and where a little life that requires our care, our caresses and attentiveness. Oh that home, won’t it be the site of one thousand fights and countless quarrels! Do you know why? That new life requires a thousand forms of care that inhibit the young mother from helping her partner with the expenses of the home, and which in part increase considerably as the income diminishes, such that what would be considered the desire and bliss of the home comes to be felt as a burden, an impediment, and the root of quarrels and miseries that one should make all effort to avoid, masturbation within marriage, sexual frauds and aberrations, with all its retinue of disgusting diseases. Therefrom the thousand and one disgusting and repugnant practices that turn the bridal chamber into a heap of disgusting obscenities, therefrom the weariness, boredom, illnesses, and that much maligned “offense” against “honor.” Adultery!

With the cause suppressed, so dies the effect. With misery suppressed, so go so many repugnancies, and the home, far from being what it is today, would be a paradise of enjoyments and delights.

How many testimonies have we received from our friends, scapegoats of such acts! “So what?” would respond the partner when confronted with his actions: did you not know how many costs a child generates? Midwife, physician, medications, diet, care, and then breastfeeding. What would you expect of me, when we barely have enough to live now that both of us work, if the expenses increased and our income decreased, what would I do then? Forget children, to hell with them!

Dear comrades: is this love, home, tenderness? It is gross to think that a woman would have to go through all this, and yet it is so true!

And now, when we proclaim free love, the free union of the sexes, we firmly believe that along with this those repugnancies disappear. Freely joined and with nothing to fear, well then we’d have sustenance assured for those beings, being fruits of love, being products of those who melded two beings into one upon the wings of their love, such that naturally both would be gleeful and free; equal partners in their respective actions, they would have nothing to fear from one another.

We have also been told that if love and partnership were free, as we wish, men would constantly replace their woman and women their men, that without anything to fear from society nor law they would not be faithful to one another, while today because of the legal punishments for adultery or for fear of social stigmatization, partners support one another’s faults and peculiarities.

Nothing, dear women comrades, is as uncertain as this. What each sex seeks is not the satisfaction of a more or less carnal appetite, no, what is sought is happiness, bliss, peace and honesty, and all relatively educated people seek reproduction and the realization of their aspirations, of their dream; if today society is so materialistic, so clinically individualistic, that is because, given that capital is the means through which pleasures and needs are bought or obtained, all people throw their efforts into securing it.

On the other hand, we, the “scourge” of society (as they refer to us), living as we do subject from a young age to laboring in the way it is today practiced, not only degrading and sacrificial, but also mind-numbing, naturally lack the education that the bourgeoisie, in their desire to monopolize it all, have also hoarded, and as a result we are unfamiliar with those thousand enjoyments this education provides: such as painting, music, poetry, sculpture, etc. and this being so, it is doubtless that in every action of our miserable lives, we are much more materialistic than we should be, and should we had been educated as the bourgeoisie are, we’d be much better than they. Art elevates feeling, and not possessing it, not even in its smallest expression, it is a matter of course we’d be unable to raise ourselves to it.

With education not being free and being unable to buy enough time for it, how are we women going to educate ourselves? Who could deny that from our earliest age the workshops swallow and mutilates us? That is not where we could educate ourselves, very much to the contrary, there one finds everything, everything, but that…and a hundred and one times have we witnessed the victims of bourgeois lust quickly descend in horrible tumbles and fall discarded into the abyss of vice, that swallowed them more hungrily and insatiably every time, covering them with muck and tears, and these barely-adults hastening their own downfall in order to free themselves from the catcalling and mockery of their own butchers!

All this is natural in this society, given the degree of ignorance in which we find ourselves. Take a hungry person and offer them a piece of bread, as black as it might be, and at the same time a gusle, a painting, or a poem, even if it be an immortal creation of Shakespeare’s or Lord Byron’s, what would they grab first? The bread! Not the book or the gusle; it’s clear, the spirit needs matter to manifest itself, and the needs of the latter are more important and rewarding than those of the former.

Without a doubt in a society in which its populace was educated to a more or less perfect degree the people could freely couple and live without fear of this making them more unhappy than if they had gotten the blessing of some third party for their choice.

The law, society, in its desire to control everything, obligates us to come together to pay them blind obeisance in this act [matrimony]. We women do not need such blessings or ceremonies, and this is as if we brought together two stray dogs and we told them that we were joining them together – “I allow you to be happy,” in that case they would behave as if we had told them the opposite.

The bourgeoisie must upon death bequeath to their children the fruits of their thievery, in due time when they go to this or that place, were they not to marry this way, the law would not recognize their inheriting children. This is a matter of business, and for them that comes first.

But in a society where such business doesn’t exist, such foolishness is unnecessary. Marriage, as it’s called today -- or better said – the blessing ceremony, means nothing more than society’s conformity with such acts. If another society accepted by custom the free union of the sexes it’s clear that it would agree with free unions and it would be a done deal. Many women and many men would not stop uniting freely if they were unafraid of others’ criticisms, for only this holds them back. Thus, let us let people do as they please and let us do as we please so long as we don’t harm anyone.

With respect to the fear of punishment inhibiting matrimonial infidelity, we don’t feel that this sophism is even worth arguing against. Everyone acknowledges that this “transgression” can take place nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand without the authorities, the law, etc., finding out. Moreover, we believe that the person who remains faithful to a commitment she undertook deceived under fear, or under some other form of obligation, is in a sense already “unfaithful,” besides, it would be better if she were, that is, if she left, given that if she desires a different man or woman, it’s clearly because she doesn’t want the person to whom society forces her to share her food and shelter, which, if it is not prostitution, is very, very close. For, to do so it is necessary that she fake love for whom she only hates, that she deceives and becomes a hypocrite, that she gives herself over, in the end, to that which she detests. This being so, it’s natural that it would not take long for disagreements, unpleasantness, and a thousand other things that embitter the life of both partners.

If they were free in their actions, this would not happen, and, on the contrary, if they had the level of culture that our future society will boast.

In the next issue I’ll speak about divorce as it is practiced today, warning our women comrades and men comrades that this being a communist-anarchist newspaper, it is at the disposal of everyone, and it asks of everyone what they can and want to help with, be that intellectually or materially, and the more efforts that might be undertaken on its behalf, the more issues we shall be able to publish.

Being women, we undoubtedly are not as known amongst our men comrades as we wish; and so with this in mind, we ask: from each according to their strengths. Long live anarchism! Long live the social revolution! Long live free enterprise! Long live free love!