ystem that accords
advantage to it.

As a sex, women have rarely been rebels or revolutionists. We do not see
how they can ever be as long as there exists any system of exploitation
to revolt against. Revolt comes from the submerged, never from the group
occupying a favored place. Today the revolutionist is he who has nothing
to sell but his labor power.

The skilled trade union group is least revolutionary among the workers.
The best paid unions are not the most militant in acts calculated to
improve the conditions of even their own group, and are least aggressive
in conduct for improving the conditions of the whole working class. So
long as they occupy a more favorable position in the industrial world,
the trade unions will have something to conserve. They become
conservative.

We see the small, struggling farmers, who have probably very little to
lose in this world save their debts and their mortgages, counting
themselves in a class of possible property owners and small exploiters,
and generally throwing their support into movements promising petty
reforms, when nothing but the abolition, or downfall of the system of
private ownership in the means of production and distribution, can
possibly help them.

The petty shop-keepers rail more against the "outrageously" high wages
and the short hours of the skilled workers than against the large
business organizations, like the packing interests, or the great
monopolies, that hold them constantly on the edge of failure.
Desperately and consistently, as they behold their competitors forced
out in the irresistible march of centralization, they cling to their
sinking ships, their small deceits and petty ideology in the hope of one
day winning out against the terrific odds opposed to them, and landing
high and dry in the capitalist class.

No shoe dealer in the darkest side street of the smallest village but
hopes some day to leave his dingy shop behind and to climb into the
class economically above him. He counts himself a man of business, and
thinks and acts and goes down to failure, individualistically. He hates
and fears his competitors, ascribes most of his wrongs to them or to the
highly paid skilled workers, and apes and envies the men whom he sees
rising to wealth in the economic conflict.

As a sex, women occupy a position similar to the petty shop-keeper,
because they possess a commodity to sell or to barter. Men, as a sex,
are buyers of, or barterers for, this