Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Engels’s Origin of the Family has been studied and written about since the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet ‘The Woman Question’, written from its explicitly socialist point of view, contains, unlike Engels’s work, a clear programme for the emancipation of women and men. The few interpretations of the essay to date have suggested that Eleanor and Edward argue that the overthrow by the proletariat of the capitalist system of production will lead to the end of women’s oppression. In other words, equality of women and men will follow after the revolution that will bring about a classless society. However, this argument appears nowhere in the essay. In fact, Eleanor and Edward advance the diametrical – or rather, dialectical – opposite. Eleanor and Edward’s landmark essay makes it absolutely clear that the struggle for women’s emancipation and the equality of the sexes is a prerequisite for any effective form of progressive social revolution.

  Engels hints that feminism was probably a necessary a priori to socialist revolution but he didn’t quite get there in proposing a practical programme. His economic and political support of all the women around him was unstinting, but he would have been the first to admit that his vision was restricted by his position of entitlement in the world as a man.

  Anticipating the usual weariness and hostility with which calls for feminist transformation are traditionally greeted by patriarchal society, Eleanor and Edward begin by saying that to treat the position of women at the present time in detail, ‘is to repeat a thousand-times-told-tale’.32 The story of women’s oppression, and the correlative effect it has on oppressing men’s capacities, is no more respected if told by men than by women. The new English translation of Bebel’s latest work, they point out, was met in certain quarters with ‘a vituperative reception’.33 ‘The thousand-times-told same old story is that “women are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men.” ’34 This applies to women across all classes. The notion that women’s lives are defined by their ‘natural calling’ is convention and ideology:

  There is no more a ‘natural calling’ of woman than there is a ‘natural’ law of capitalistic production, or a ‘natural’ limit to the amount of the labourer’s product that goes to him for means of subsistence. That in the first case, woman’s ‘calling’ is supposed to be only the tending of children, the maintenance of household conditions and a general obedience to her lord; that, in the second, the production of surplus value is a necessary preliminary in the production of capital; that, in the third, the amount the labourer receives for his means of subsistence is so much as will keep him only just above starvation point: these are not natural laws in the same sense as are the laws of motion. They are only certain temporary conventions of society, like the convention that French is the language of ­diplomacy.35

  Positioning itself in relation to current campaigns, ‘The Woman Question’ states its critical allegiance to revisionist forms of women’s suffrage within existing capitalist and colonial societies. It warns that the sectors of the women’s suffrage movement who work for class-restricted reform will fail. Eleanor and Edward honour the ‘excellent and hard-working folk who agitate for that perfectly just aim, woman suffrage’:

  for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, a monstrosity begotten of male cowardice and brutality; for the higher education of women; for the opening to them of universities, the learned professions, and all callings, from that of teacher to that of bagman.

  In all this work – good as far as it goes – they identify three notable characteristics. First, those concerned in the women’s suffrage movement ‘are of the well-to-do classes, as a rule. With the single and only partial exception of the Contagious Diseases agitation, scarcely any of the women taking a prominent part in these various movements belong to the working class.’36 Second, ideas of advancing women through suffrage and human rights are based either on property, or on sentimental or professional questions: ‘Not one of them gets down through these to the bedrock of the economic basis, not only of each of these three, but of society itself.’37 Exclusively suffrage-based women’s advocates, Eleanor and Edward argue, show demonstrable ignorance of both economics and the proper study of the evolution of society. ‘Even the orthodox political economy, which is, as we think, misleading in its statements and inaccurate in its conclusions, does not appear to have been mastered generally.’38

  The third problem Marx-Aveling identify with women’s suffrage is that its limited aims confine it to working within existing society. It fails to encompass the broad-scale social revolution required to achieve a democratic civil society. There is no vision of a future, different society:

  We will support all women, not only those having property, enabled to vote; the Contagious Diseases Act repealed; every calling thrown open to both sexes. The actual position of women in respect to men would not be very vitally touched . . . For not one of these things, save indirectly the Contagious Diseases Act, touches them in their sex relations . . . Without larger social change women will never be free.39

  Demanding the vote for only middle-class, educated, moneyed women and not for the majority of their working-class sisters and disenfranchised working men perpetuated existing undemocracy. Eleanor, like Clara Zetkin, could see clearly the political appeal of the women’s campaign for the bourgeois vote in England, the USA, France, Germany and Russia. Both realised that the Second International needed to take account of the fact that the demand for women’s rights articulated by middle-class women was being heard first, above those of working women. The Second International needed to raise the voice of a transnational feminist movement. Just as there could not be socialism in one country, there could not be feminism in one country.

  Critically, women ‘must understand that their emancipation will come from themselves’.40 Women will find allies amongst the better sorts of men, just as workers find allies amongst philosophers, artists and poets, ‘but the one has nothing to hope from man as a whole, and the other has nothing to hope from the middle class as a whole’.41 In this regard, ‘The Woman Question’ respects and honours the valuable civil rights won recently in England, ‘due to the action of women themselves’.42

  By comparison, the situation of women in Germany was far worse: women were legal minors with regard to men, legally physically punished, and disallowed from owning either earnings or property; men decided when babies were weaned, and women were prohibited from entering into contracts or joining political organisations. The essay also makes further fascinating comparisons with the status of women in France and Russia:

  It is unnecessary for us to point out how much better, within the last few years, these things have been managed in England . . . But it is necessary to remind them that with all these added civil rights English women, married and unmarried alike, are morally dependent on man, and are badly treated by him.43

  Eleanor and Edward argue that emancipation from sexual oppression cannot be brought about only by legislation and through political organisation. From the socialist point of view, feminism has to begin in the family, home and community. Crucially, modern society needs to talk openly about sex:

  Our children are constantly silenced when they ask about the begetting and the birth of offspring. The question is as natural as one about the beats of the heart or the movements of respiration . . . As our boys and girls grow up, the whole subject of sex relations is made a mystery and a shame. This is the reason why an undue and unhealthy curiosity is begotten to them. The mind becomes excessively concentrated upon them, remains long unsatisfied, or incompletely satisfied – passes into a morbid condition. To us, it seems that the reproductive organs ought to be discussed as frankly, as freely, between parents and children as the digestive. The objection to this is but a form of the vulgar prejudice against the teaching of physiology.44

  Marx-Aveling, in 1886, are here firmly in the terrain of the psychological and physiological construction of human sexuality. Eleanor has brought Freu
d and the fledgling discipline of psychoanalysis into discussion with a materialist analysis.

  From the outset, the essay is clear that it is impossible to understand inequality between men and women without seeing the economics that underpin it: ‘those who attack the present treatment of women without seeking for the cause of this in the economics of our latter-day society are like doctors who treat a local affection without inquiring into the general bodily health.’45 But at no point do Eleanor and Edward argue that sexual oppression can be resolved merely with an economic answer: ‘The woman question is one of the organisation of society as a whole.’46 For every aspect of the question they raise, they explore answers from a range of perspectives – economic, psychological, emotional and scientific. For example, they state ‘that the conditions of divorce should be the same for the two sexes’,47 and demonstrate the economic inequalities that determine the impact of divorce on men and women: different relations to property, the means of livelihood, responsibility for childcare. But reform of these factors alone, Eleanor and Edward argue, would not eradicate women’s oppression; the whole of social attitudes to sex, desire and sexuality also have to be taken into account. Women need the same opportunities accorded to men to become ‘sound in mind and body’.48 This is far from a reductive economistic approach to understanding the proposition of socialist feminism.

  Though thoroughly analytical, ‘The Woman Question’ is not a didactic or propagandist tract. Tussy was the child of a collective age and the child of Marx. The polyphony of voices in ‘The Woman Question’ makes it a rich and pleasing read. Ibsen’s Nora Helmer, Olive Schreiner’s Lyndall Gordon, Shakespeare’s Rosalind, Miranda and Helena are all conjured to address the subject. Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor and Helen Taylor, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Demosthenes, Francis Bacon, Kant, Coleridge, Tennyson and Shelley all make contributions to the argument.

  When Eleanor and Edward hold up for scrutiny the marriage contract as an institution, they avoid dry economistic analysis. Instead, they call on modern theatre. ‘As Ibsen makes Helmer say to Nora, “Home life ceases to be free and beautiful directly its foundations are borrowing and debts.” ’49 When writing with great probity and sensitivity about sex, chastity, reproduction and the hypocrisy that bedevils how society deals with the ‘sex instinct’, they give voice to Olive Schreiner’s searing condemnation of systemic sexual inequality:

  With the false shame and false secrecy, against which we protest, goes the unhealthy separation of the sexes that begins as children quit the nursery, and only ends when the dead men and women are laid in the common ground. In The Story of an African Farm the girl Lyndall cries out, ‘We were equals once, when we lay new-born babies on our nurses’ knees. We shall be equals again when they tie up our jaws for the last sleep.’50

  Eleanor understood profoundly that the woman question, and the relations between men and women, began in the family. Men and women were made, not born. How children were brought up and treated was as determining to sexual inequality and the oppression of women as the generation of surplus value at any social cost was to capitalism. And the two were linked directly: ‘Our marriages, like our morals, are based upon commercialism.’51 Socialist feminism, like historical materialism, was for Tussy a family affair.

  At the beginning of 1886, when Tussy scrupulously tidied up her accounts before her birthday, she found a small surplus from the Christmas Tree Fund. Donations of toys continued to arrive at the Socialist League offices in the months after the festival. Poor people made toys and games and delivered their donations on foot to Farringdon; rich people had deliveries sent from William Hamley’s toy store at 200 Regent Street. To deal with both the surplus and the toys, Tussy proposed that ‘we could give the little ones an outing’.52 May Morris and women members of the SL offered to help organise a children’s summer beanfeast.

  The picnic party took place in June, the same week that Eleanor wrote the introduction to her completed translation of Madame Bovary. Vizetelly published the book just as Eleanor and Edward set sail for New York. Already going ahead to the next thing, she wasn’t in England to see the reviews.

  16

  Lady Liberty

  Eleanor and Edward steamed out of Liverpool bound for the New World on the City of Chicago, an Inman liner, on Tuesday 31 August 1886. The Socialistic Labor Party (SLP) of America had invited them to give a four-month speaking tour of fifteen states. Eleanor came up with the idea of a lecture tour in 1880, and suggested it to Library – Wilhelm Liebknecht – and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), of which he was one of the founders.

  There were close kinship ties with European emigrants to America in the developing international socialist movement. Exiles from the 1848 uprisings, the Paris Commune and the ongoing Irish revolution congregated in republican America. Overall, socialist organisation in America remained too narrowly German in membership, leadership, language and influence. It needed to internationalise, and this was one of the primary objectives of the lecture tour. Library’s English was not fluent, so he would speak in German. Multilingual Eleanor and well-spoken Edward could bring together different organisations and put socialist ideas to English speakers in America for the first time in their own tongue.

  Fundraising was another motivation for the trip. Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation had led to persecution and privation for social democracy organisations in Germany and had a domino effect on the rest of Europe. The movement needed money and, as Tussy pointed out to Library, Charles Stewart Parnell had made ‘thousands and thousands’1 for the Irish cause in America.

  In 1886 the American SLP made a formal invitation to Liebknecht and Aveling, subsuming the invitation to his wife within his. Never mind the fact that the tour was her idea in the first place. What brought the speaking tour into its right moment was the so-called year of ‘great upheaval’ of American labour. On 1 May 1886 there was a nationwide strike for the eight-hour day called by the Knights of Labor, the largest American union of unskilled workers. The Socialistic Labor Party, however, was hampered by the same teething troubles experienced in England as a consequence of the ideological rifts between socialists and anarchists. As in Europe, American socialists believed in pro-state solutions to social revolution based on social democracy, universal suffrage and respect for the rule of law; anarchists were anti-statist and disregarded the authority of the rule of law.

  Johann Most, declared leader of an anarchist faction which broke away from the SLP, had led his wing into the heart of the campaign for the eight-hour day in Chicago. A bomb exploded in the city on 4 May 1886, killing and wounding several policemen. The bomb was attributed to Most’s anarchists and employers used the violence as an opportunity to launch a forceful strategy of state-backed retaliation against the striking workers.

  Industrial action firmly quashed as a consequence, American workers turned their interest away from anti-statist anarchism to organised political struggle to pursue electoral means of representation. They regrouped into the independent United Labor Party, which included socialists and unionists. Their first initiative was to put up Henry George as socialist candidate for the upcoming New York mayoral election in the autumn of 1886. In this context the Socialistic Labor Party, predominantly German in origin and language, agreed it was a good idea to invite Liebknecht and the Marx-Avelings on a countrywide consciousness-raising lecture tour as part of the national campaign to strengthen the collectivism of the labour movement in America and bring together a united democratic front of socialist organisations.

  The Avelings had a double-berth cabin, costing £24 return. Liebknecht, more flush, travelled on the Servia, a Cunarder. ‘The Cunard is the dearest line of all and no better than many others, and is dear because “swells” go by it,’ Tussy wrote to Library. ‘On the Cunard in order to be together . . . we shd. have to pay £18 each,’ plus, she noted, a deposit of £5 to secure the booking.2 Although it was taken as a given by the SLP that Eleanor would speak
alongside the men, their expenses were covered entirely and hers were not – it being assumed her husband would pay for his wife. She explained this gendered economy to Laura: ‘You know I am bound to “keep myself” as the Party only pays for Edward.’3 Both of them took on journalism to subsidise the trip and gave up their tenancy at their first shared home at 55 Great Russell Street as they could not afford to cover the rent whilst they were away.

  SS City of Chicago, built at Glasgow by Charles Connell & Co. in 1883, weighed 5,202 tons, was 430 feet long with a beam of 45 feet, and boasted a modern three-cylinder compound steam engine that guaranteed passengers a ten-day crossing from Liverpool to New York. Tussy, on her first transatlantic voyage, was fascinated by life at sea.

  A woman on her way to be reunited with her husband died unexpectedly on board and her body was committed to the ocean. Eleanor saw her burial ‘in the early morning, at daybreak – the simplest, and most impressive funeral I have ever witnessed’.4 She was unimpressed by the wealthy passengers, who ‘could laughingly look at the poor emigrants lying on the deck in their wretched clothes . . . without the least sign of sympathy’.5 Edward disparaged the travelling American. ‘He is too palpably the creator of commerce, she is too palpably its creature. It’s all business and success, business and success.’6 Spotting whales and porpoises caused much excitement but otherwise the voyage was an opportunity for a welcome change after an extraordinarily busy and productive year.