Women as sex vendors, or, Why women are conservative (being a view of the economic status of women).

Chicago : Charles H. Kerr & Company Co-operative, 1918. Small octavo (170 x 130 mm), publisher’s olive green papered boards with black lettering to front (boards heavily rubbed and marked; corners, edges and spine worn); half-title with early gift inscription ‘Violet Wilson from Otto Elsner’; pp. 59; front hinge cracked, occasional pencilled marginalia (presumably by Violet Wilson) and a few light handling marks, otherwise the contents are very clean.

‘We have often heard discussions of the reason we do not find women, as a sex, in the vanguard of world affairs; why the great educators, strong figures in progressive or revolutionary movements, are men rather than women; why these movements, themselves, are made up almost entirely of men rather than women. People have asked over and over again why, in the fields of the arts, the sciences, in the world of “practical affairs,” men, rather than women, generally excel. We believe the answer lies in the fact that women, as a sex, are the owners of a commodity vitally necessary to the health and well-being of man. Women occupy a more fortunate biologic, and in many countries, a more fortunate economic position, in the increasingly intensified struggle for existence. And the preferred class, the biologically and economically favored class, or sex, has rarely been efficient-to-do, has never been revolutionary to attack a social system that accords advantage to it.’ (p. 9)

Mary Edna Tobias Marcy (1877-1922) was an American socialist author, pamphleteer and poet who worked as assistant editor of the International Socialist Review, one of the most influential American socialist magazines of the early twentieth century. Women as sex vendors was co-authored with her brother, Roscoe Burdette Tobias.

Trove locates a single copy in Australian libraries (SLNSW)