The Holy Family
Apart from a few tantalizing comments in the German Ideology and his nominal condemnation of the sexual double standard, Marx endorsed a traditional vision of family life. The German philosopher he loved, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, probably bore responsibility for this.
He articulated many of the arguments that English speaking intellectuals typically refer to as Victorian, based on the prescription of entirely separate spheres for men and women. Hegel argued, for instance, that the family was a wholly ethical realm that would counter the selfishness of market society and provide a stable foundation for civil society. He described men as the active force of reason, women as the passive expression of love.8Marx's own personal life conformed neatly to this picture. By most accounts, he adored his wife Jenny, who hand-copied most of his manuscripts before they were sent to a publisher and cared for a family living hand-to-mouth. Constantly in debt, and occasionally even forced by economic circumstance to withdraw their daughters from school, the Marx family became dependent on financial assistance from Engels, who also accepted paternity of a child born to the family's loyal unmarried housekeeper, Helene Dumuth. Evidence from his daughter Eleanor's papers strongly suggests that Marx was the biological father.9
Marx and Engels did not dismiss their feminist predecessors. Both agreed with Fourier that woman's position was a measure of the general level of social development and her wretched condition under capitalism one more indicator of the need to supersede that system. In their early writings, they often used the adjective ‘‘patriarchal'' to modify the word ‘‘family''. Yet they located patriarchy in the past, describing it as an outmoded, anachronistic inequality. Where it did exist under capitalism, it lacked significant economic implications, because the working-class family unit was unified by mutual benevolence.
As Marx explained, ‘‘Individual labour powers, by their very nature, act only as instruments of the joint labour power of the family.''10Engels, far more interested than Marx in the internal dynamics of family life, blamed capitalism for its malfunctions. The Condition of the Working Class in England, a detailed descriptive study he published in 1845, dwelt at length on the perversities that resulted when high male unemployment made husbands dependent on their wives' earnings (see the epigraph to this chapter). 11 Forced to adopt feminine responsibilities, he implied, they were in effect demasculinized. While Engels condemned the pre-existing domination of husbands over wives that had simply been reversed by the new factory system, he steered clear of any discussion of contemporary women's rights.12 The weight of his argument supported the popular view that men and women should be segregated in the workplace, and that men—but not women—should earn a wage sufficient to support a family.