Roots of "pay equity".(Letters To The Editor)(Letter to the Editor)

Regarding Brian T. Farmer's "Politicizing the Pay Gap" article (June 28 issue), there are historical sources for this syndrome of government-imposed gender pay equity.

In the instructions found in the personal papers of Illuminist Baron Bassus, 1787, "There is no way of influencing men so powerfully as by means of the women. These should, therefore, be our chief study. We should insinuate ourselves into their good opinion, give them hints of emancipation from the tyranny of public opinion, and of standing up for themselves; it will be an immense relief to their enslaved minds to be freed from any one bond of restraint, and it will fire them the more, and cause them to work for us with zeal."

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx calls for the "abolition of the family." In Das Kapital, he writes that it is "absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final." The establishment of a socialist society is put forth as the way to return to the pristine state of the sexes. For this to be achieved, Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, proposes: "[T]he peculiar character of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the necessity of creating real social equality between them, and the way to do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into the public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition ...