The Response to Bebel
In the 1880s, both the ‘‘woman question'' and the ‘‘population question'' were hotly debated by German Social Democrats. August Bebel's Women and Socialism (1879) enjoyed international acclaim, but was greeted unenthusiastically by Marx and Engels.
Shortly after Marx died, Engels took time off from the task of editing the final volumes of Capital to write a response to Bebel. His manuscript was based on the findings of the American anthropologist Lewis Morgan and on Marx's notes on the subject. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State applied the theory of historical materialism to explain the coevolution of class relations and family types. Engels described the overthrow of an original matriarchy, based on ‘‘mother right'' as the result of the emergence of forms of property that men wanted to control and pass on to their heirs in the male line. Men's desire to ensure paternity led them to establish control over women's sexuality in the form of strict female monogamy; their monopoly over economic activities outside the home enhanced their power over the emergent state.The Origin persuasively argued that gender inequality was rooted in the process of social evolution, not in biological differences between men and women. But the argument lacked much contemporary relevance. Engels carefully absolved the proletarian family of any potential for internal conflict. Both husband and wife were propertyless, dependent on wage employment, and therefore equals. The transition to socialism, and the concomitant increase in women's participation in social labor, would guarantee their complete liberation, because domestic labor and child rearing could easily be industrialized. Whatever domestic cares remained, women would naturally and lovingly assume.
Consolidating the reputation of a tradition unsympathetic, though not overtly hostile, to feminist concerns, The Origin became known as the classic Marxian account of women's oppression.
Only a few Marxists dissented from the view that gender inequality could not affect capitalism's laws of motion. The Hegelian assumption of family unity, echoing James Mill's famous explanation of why women had the need to vote, helped make Marxism more politically palatable to working-class men than earlier feminist socialisms had been. As one of his contemporaries put it, Marx ‘‘represented the manhood of socialist thought.''13Some historians argue that he remained largely unaware of issues that were only later labeled feminist.14 But as noted in the previous chapter, Marx recommended expulsion of a faction of the International Working
Men's Association in the United States, headed by Victoria Woodhull, on the grounds that they put the rights of women above those of workers. In a letter to a friend in the late 1860s, Marx spoke derisively of female suffrage, explaining that ‘‘German women should have begun by driving their men to self-emancipation'' rather than ‘‘seeking emancipation for themselves directly.''15 Marxist theory rode a wave of larger efforts to define the interests of the proletariat as the interests of proletarian men.16