The influence of Marxist ideas on the theories of women’s oppression is absolutely logical. Because the work, brought to fruition by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, provides a practical explanation for the process the how women became oppressed, and thus indicates at first steps that have to be taken for this oppression to be combated and removed.

Although Engels authored the most significant work on the as he himself states: “The following chapters constitute in a sense the fulfillment of a bequest. It was no less a person than Karl Marx who had planned to present the results of Morgan’s researches in connection with the conclusions arrived at by his own- within certain limits I might say our own whole materialist investigation of history and thus to make clear their significance.”¹

This dedication by Engels also makes clear that Marx and himself did not produce their work in isolation. Other important writings on the question of women, and the historical development of women’s position, were being published at the time. The work of Bachofen, who studied the myths and legends indicating that at a previous stage of society descent and heredity had passed through the female line brought to light useful information. However, as an historical materialist Marx used the work of Bachofen in a quite contrary way – rather than attributing the position of women in society to their position in these various myths, he considered these myths as reflecting the actual position of women at the time.

More important was the work of the ethnologist Lewis Morgan. He conducted a study of the family systems in different tribes of American Indians and tried to define the historical process through which the development of kinship systems had passed. His researches were widely used in Engels Origins. The year before the publication of Origins, the German Marxist August Bebel published Woman Under Socialism. This drew heavily on the ideas developed by Marx and Engels to give an account of the roots of women’s oppression, the forms that it has taken over the centuries, the historically progressive role of the integration of women into production, and the need for the socialist revolution to clear the way for women’s liberation.

Marx’s contribution to a historical materialist analysis of women’s subordination within the family provides today the basis for the Marxist movement to elaborate a theory of women’s oppression. It also provides a framework for political struggle against that oppression. For the importance of Marx’s work is not only at the theoretical level. From the first concise statement of a revolutionary programme, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the Marxist movement, led by Marx, has taken a clear stand against the subordination of women. The statement within the Communist Manifesto is indeed vague, “the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production”.² But Marx rightly sees the subordinate status, the oppression of women, as stemming from the relations within the family, and that this has to be done away with. In future debates of the First International, Marx was to develop his programmatic positions in relation to the backward notions that still existed among this first generation of communists, and the demands that were being raised by women themselves in the latter half of the nineteenth century; the relation of women to productive labour and the right to vote.

These two points of debate arose at each of the congresses of the First International. The First International was an extremely heterogenous organisation, formed at a time when the development of workers’ organisation in the European countries was extremely uneven. In Germany there already existed the League of German Workers, but in Britain at that time only one trades council had as yet been formed. The impetus for the formation of the International came from France, where trade unions had only just been legalised in 1864.

Thus given this uneven experience of workers’ organisation, which obviously also meant political unevenness, it is not surprising that many ‘traditional’ notions of the women’s position were present within the International. The early utopian socialists had addressed themselves to the question of women’s emancipation as an ideal that could be achieved through effort of will. The movement for women’s suffrage was still only in its early stages. Thus it reflects the already advanced understanding of this ‘International Workingmen’s Association’, as it was officially entitled, that a British woman trade union organiser was elected to the general council.

Within the First International there existed a current led by the French socialist Proudhon which aimed for a society based on social co-operation based on the natural division of labour within the family. Thus for them the object of the work of communists was to improve conditions within the family to restore women to their honourable status, and that men should earn enough to keep their women in this situation. This type of approach was also supported by the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle who were opposed to the integration of women into the productive forces on the grounds that this would break up the working-class family. At the time the process of industrialisation was indeed beginning to change and destroy the family as it had existed. At the 1875 congress which formed the German Social Democratic Party this current was to oppose the inclusion of the demand for equal rights for women into the party’s platform.

The first congress of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1866 saw a fundamental debate on the attitude to women. The document put forward by the Marxist wing on work amongst women was rejected, and a wide-ranging debate took place between the Marxists on the one hand and the supporters of Proudhon and Lassalle who argued that the aim of the work of communists should be to restore the honourable place of women in the family; that women in the labour market were in competition with men for work, thus denying men the ability to earn enough to keep their wives and families. In addition this current did not support the right of women to vote, putting forward the formula ‘universal manhood suffrage which was ambiguous as to whether or not women were included in the term ‘manhood’.

The ‘Marxist’ wing was firmly in favour of political rights for women. But on the question of women’s integration into the labour force it was more ambiguous. Marx himself was very aware of the degrading and miserable conditions for women at work at that time. The first volume of Capital contains many references to the condition of women workers, and the effect of industrialisation, involving both women and children in the workforce on the family. At the 1875 Gotha Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association the Marxists August Bebel and Karl Liebknicht were to argue in favour of women’s integration into the labour force but not in ‘morally or physically damaging work’. But the Marxists did come out in favour of women’s right to work, considering it a necessary part of women’s emancipation. This conclusion was most fully drawn by Engels in Origins:

‘Today in the great majority of cases, the man has to be the earner, the bread-winner of the family, at least among the propertied classes, and this gives him a dominating position which requires no special legal privileges … And, similarly, the peculiar character of man’s domination over women in the modern family, and the necessity as well as the manner, of establishing real social equality between the two, will be brought out into full relief only when both are completely equal before the law. It will then become evident that the first premise for the emancipation of women is the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry; and that this again demands that the quality possessed by the individual family of being the economic unity of society be abolished.’³

The debate continued within the First International, surfacing again at the following year’s congress, where a debate took place on the role of women and men in society, where speakers were attacked for sermonising and patronising remarks. Finally at the Gotha Congress in 1975 the Lassalleans were defeated on the woman question.

It was at this conference that the Lassalleans and the Bebel/Liebknicht wing united to form the German Social Democratic Party, that was to build the biggest, most influential and politically advanced working women’s organisation, under the leadership of Clara Zetkin, in the early twentieth century.

Thus, not only has the women’s movement used Marxism as a point of reference because of the theoretical contribution it has made to understanding the nature of women’s oppression, but also because the revolutionary socialist movement has been distinguished from its earliest days for its commitment to women’s emancipation, however much its ideas seem underdeveloped from our standpoint. There is no denying that much of the polemic against the family in the Communist Manifesto is on moral grounds, against the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie who accuse communists of wanting to introduce a ‘community of women’ while they are ‘not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives’.⁴

Thus, in some ways the criticism that Marx (and Engels) made of the earlier utopian socialists like Robert Owen could be applied also to their own work, particularly at this early stage. But between 1848 when the Communist Manifesto was published, and 1884 when The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was published, the analysis of the family deepen- ed, and the repressive effect of the sexual division of labour within the family was recognised more fully. Not only was it institutionalised hypocrisy that had pushed women out of public life into domestic enslavement: ‘In the old communistic household, which embraced numerous couples and their children, the administration of the household, entrusted to women, was just as much a public, a socially necessary industry as the providing of food by the men. This situation changed with the patriarchal family… It became a private service. The wife became the first domestic servant, pushed out of participation in social production.⁵ However, as Engels goes on to explain that modern industry has once again given women the opportunity to participate in social production, but only at the cost of not fulfilling her family responsibilities, we come up against one of the theoretical weaknesses of Marx and Engels.

This relates to their understanding of the nature of the sexual division of labour. In The German Ideology Marx discusses the development of the division of labour in human society. He explains how with the increase in productive capacity a restrictive division of labour developed among humans; and how under socialism this division of labour will be broken down. and we will also be able to carry out various activities, physical or mental, according to our own choice, without having to specialise in one or the other.

But, the first division of labour which Marx describes as being ‘between man and woman for child breeding’ is also ‘the natural division of labour within the family’.⁶ In all the discussion which ensues Marx offers no understanding that ‘natural as the sexual division of labour may be, it is just as restricting as being forced to specialise in any other field of activity. And that the solution is not simply to raise the status of housework to a public function, and to collectivise it among women, but also to state that women too should have the choice as to what pursuits they are going to follow.

It is true today that the advance in technology, particularly with regard to women’s control of their fertility, y opens new possibilities for the right of women to control their own lives, that could not have been easily foreseen by Marx. Nor should we forget that the first wave of the women’s movement, which was still only beginning to emerge at the time that Marx was writing did not have the same understanding of women’s oppression as we have today. To Marx’s credit we can point out, despite his weaknesses, that it is on the basis of his theoretical and programmatic work that revolutionary Marxists today are in the forefront of the fight for women’s liberation.

Footnotes

1. Preface to first edition 1884, Marx and Engels Selected Works. Lawrence & Wishart, London, p 449. ↩︎
2. The Communist Manifesto, Pathfinder Press, New York, p 31. ↩︎
3. Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Marx and 4 Engels Selected Work, Lawrence & Wishart. ↩︎
4. Ibid, p 31. ↩︎
5. Ibid, p 501. ↩︎
6. The German Ideology, Moscow, p 42-3. ↩︎