THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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the great model of every mortal woman, the symbol of every Dionysian woman.’ And the myth, or rather the archaic utopia of woman as a ruler announces itself in
Bachofen as follows: ‘The relationship by means of which humanity first grows up to civilized behaviour, which serves as the starting point of the development of every
virtue and the cultivation of every nobler side of existence, is the magic of motherhood which acts in the midst of a life full of violence as the divine principle of love, of
agreement, of peace’ (Preface to ‘Matriliny’). Sex of a quite unfinished kind, one which sought to be recollected in non­capitalist terms and further determined in social
utopian terms, was thus on the move in the women's movement throughout, it was not confined to old maids and masculine women. It was full of unobjectified
expectation, no longer and not yet announced in previous objectivities. Woman, after such a long period of minority, had the fine presumption to want to introduce a
past and never realized island of the great mother into the patriarchy.
The movement is at once outmoded, replaced and postponed, all with good reason. It is outmoded because it has pushed open bourgeois doors that were already
open, and behind which there then proved to be nothing. The sexless worker bee is not the goal for which we started out, we cannot get any further now in bourgeois
terms. It is irrelevant whether woman has the same value as man if both are employees of a firm which does not value them at all, but squeezes them dry. The
movement is replaced because a struggle against the sexual barrier becomes pathetic without a struggle against the class barrier. The female worker does not feel
discriminated against by the men of her class, any more than the young worker feels discriminated against by adults as such; thus an important element of the proletarian
youth movement recurs in the proletarian women's movement. The semi­colonial status of women in general cannot be specially lamented by those who, like the
working man, are themselves, if not even more so, kept as coolies. The female worker measures herself jointly with poor male workers against rich men and women,
and the old social democracy already supported the programmatic statement: ‘The question of women's rights coincides with the question of workers' rights.’ The
Soviet Union faces no question of women's rights any more, because it has solved the question of workers' rights; where master and servant cease, the lower stratum:
woman also disappears. A third problem, though, a separate problem of content, continues to be sex, which determines woman far more extensively, but also far more
indecisively than man (Gottfried Keller spoke of the ‘unfathomable half­measure of woman’). This means