Today

Reading of He Zhen [何震] (1884-1920), a Chinese Diaspora anarcho-feminist who settled in Tokyo to establish the Women's Rights Recovery Association [女子妇权会]. Her writings were influential, reaching political cells far stranded in exile, such as the Xin Shiji [新世紀], published in Paris by other Chinese anarchists. A well-educated girl quite out of the traditional canon of Chinese women upbringing, He Zhen wrote of many contemporary subjects: free love, the limitations of representative democracy and the continuity between slavery and capitalism, most felt at China at the time. The profit mechanism of a brothel and a factory were one and the same. Thus she wrote:

What the capitalists have done to women is tantamount to first stealing clothing and food from then so as to force them to take the one-way trip into the factories to labor. Some say that a woman is free to enter que factory just as she is free to resign from the factory; hence factory work is different from being sold into servitude.

But how is it different when, aside from working, there is no way for the woman to survive? This is no less than forcing innumerable women to sell their bodies in reality if not in name. The capitalists use other's people labor power to accumulate wealth for themselves. What does this exhibit other than a perspective on laborers as more worthless than used-up goods? In ancient times, people treated women as playthings; today, people treat women as instruments. Seeing women as playthings degrades women's bodies; yet seeing women as instruments not only degrades a woman's body but also exhausts her labor power. The crime of the capitalists can be said to reach up to high heavens.