Take, again, the emancipation of women.
Plato, Mary Wolstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill produced admirable
arguments, but influenced only a few impotent idealists. The war came,
leading to the employment of women in industry on a large scale, and
instantly the arguments in favour of votes for women were seen to be
irresistible. More than that, traditional sexual morality collapsed,
because its whole basis was the economic dependence of women upon
their fathers and husbands. Changes in such a matter as sexual
morality bring with them profound alterations in the thoughts and
feelings of ordinary men and women; they modify law, literature, art,
and all kinds of institutions that seem remote from economics.
Such facts as these justify Marxians in speaking, as they do, of
"bourgeois ideology," meaning that kind of morality which has been
imposed upon the world by the possessors of capital. Contentment with
one's lot may be taken as typical of the virtues preached by the rich
to the poor. They honestly believe it is a virtue--at any rate they
did formerly. The more religious among the poor also believed it,
partly from the influence of authority, partly from an impulse to
submission, what MacDougall calls "negative self-feeling," which is
commoner than some people think. Similarly men preached the virtue of
female chastity, and women usually accepted their teaching; both
really believed the doctrine, but its persistence was only possible
through the economic power of men.
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