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questioning of the essential allocation of social roles along sexual lines.
This reflected the deep acceptance of bourgeois ideas by Social Democracy on many social and cultural questions, a general failure to confront and fight the hold of bourgeois ideology inside the working class, and a deep hostility to the developing petty bourgeois feminist movement. This latter question was one on which the party's right and left wing was in accord - there could be no dealings with 'bourgeois feminism'.
On the part of the left this attitude, if in many respects incorrect, was nonetheless principled. But from the standpoint of the right it was sheer hypocrisy. For the right was, in general, in favour of Social Democracy establishing political ties with social layers outside the working class. One of the most formative debates in the history of the party was that over the 'agrarian question" in the mid-"90s. Here the right was the champion of the idea that Social Democracy should defend the interests of the peasantry (as one leading right spokesperson, Quack, argued, Democracy had to be the advocate of general enlightened policies'). The left took a narrow and essentially "workerist" position of wanting to have nothing to do with the peasantry (a position which, it should be noted, Engels disagreed with quite strenuously). However this stand was tied up with the right's electoralism: it was an issue which would allow them to strengthen their electoral influence in predominantly agrarian areas like Bavaria. On the question of women's oppression their view was very different; here a 'general enlightened policy' would have meant confrontation with the absolutist state and the ONE YEAR Please send me the next four issues of Socialist Woman. I enclose cheque/PO for £...
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