socialism. Eventual y, she met John Collier, ‘a representative of American
Syndicalism’. She fell in love with him and agreed to live with him (he
was married to a woman in the United States). Françoise did not want a
legal marriage anyway, ‘for I acknowledged no need for ceremony, civil or
religious.’24 Unfortunately, Françoise was disil usioned with John almost
at once. According to her, John saw women only as sexual outlets. When
she became pregnant, she knew she could not rear a child with him, so she
walked out on her union after only a few months. The experience made
her more feminist than before; she asserted that men had to be friends
with women or their relationships would fail. Lafitte lived with friends and
worked as long as she could until she gave birth to her son, François, in
1913.25Lafitte’s ideas about this union were interesting. For one thing,
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she always called her relationship with Collier a marriage and used her
married name at Freewoman meetings. For another, she revolted against
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radical couples, 1850–1914
John’s sexual demands more than any other aspect of their relationship,
something to which many married women could relate. Nevertheless, she
did not refuse him access to her body until she left him. Third, Françoise
left John because she was going to have a child, rather than staying with
him because she needed support. Her decision showed the change in
feminism in this period, as she rapidly moved to a belief in free love and a
woman’s right to her own body. Lafitte had found both the advantages and
disadvantages of free unions for women, and in her opinion, the advantages
lay with freedom.26
Françoise’s experience proved, at least to her, that legal forms
guaranteed nothing about love and marriage. She legal y married Serge Cyon,
a Russian radical, before the First World War, for security and comradeship.
This relationship was no more successful than her first union. Cyon married
her to get a stepmother for his son and a housekeeper, and acted like a
patriarch. When she found his behaviour unbearable, Françoise walked
away again, even though she had a second child. She paid a price for this
decision; she was desperately poor, and her husband harassed her for years.
In fact, her legal marriage was a bigger problem than the cohabitation had
been. Because of her marriage, British law classified Françoise as Russian,
her husband’s nationality. Her status caused her endless difficulties during
both world wars and the Cold War. She eventual y entered a second free
union with Havelock Ellis, a relationship of twenty years. But official y she
remained a Russian ‘alien’. These experiences made her even less impressed
with women’s ‘advantages’ in marriage.27
Few feminists were as bold as Françoise, but many recognised the
legal and emotional difficulties for women in marriage and out, as well as
some ‘radical’ men’s reluctance to embrace true equality. What made Lafitte
unusual was her willingness to brave ostracism and poverty and leave
both men. Few women made that choice. Thus, most feminists urged that
women concentrate on marriage reforms rather than trying experiments,
and those who discussed sexuality emphasised male aggression rather
than women’s freedom. As the Owenites had discovered, sexual freedom
without economic equality was dangerous.
Socialism and ‘free love’
Ambivalence also plagued another major movement that spanned the
century, socialism. After the col apse of Owenism, the working-class
movement turned away from gender equality and instead championed
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
domesticity. As Anna Clark put it, ‘Domesticity provided a way of both
defending working-class families and appealing to women without
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living in sin
threatening men.’ In addition, economic conditions, particularly the decline
of cottage industry, made women unable to support illegitimate children.
With no hope for communal childcare or economic aid, most women did
not risk desertion and poverty.28 Thus, legal marriage was the norm.
One working-class movement that continued critiquing marriage
was the nascent Communist movement. Both Marx and Engels disdained
the ‘bourgeois’ institution, and Engels ‘accepted without reservation
Owen’s views on marriage’. Like Owen, Engels and Marx blamed religious
and indissoluble marriage for prostitution and male libertinism. Marx
insisted that communism, in destroying private property, would also
destroy the need to use wives as instruments of production and thus end
this hypocrisy.29 Nevertheless, the influence of Marxism on the English
working class was limited until the end of the nineteenth century. Most
workers preferred to join unions, and if they read the Manifesto, they
focused on its economic and political programme rather than its argument
about marriage. Thus, communist ideas about marriage had almost no
impact before the fin-de-siècle.
Stil , Engels lived in two free unions during the mid-Victorian
years, both with Irish mill workers. As discussed in Chapter 7, Engels’s
relationships caused uneasiness. Interestingly, the reactions to Engels’s
cohabitation with working women echoed the concerns of other reformers
in this period. As Terrell Carver points out, the Marxes may have feared
that Engels’s ‘free love’ would damage socialism. Furthermore, Engels had
to follow many hypocritical practices, especial y when he was with Mary
Burns. He was a Manchester businessman during those years, so he hid her
in a suburb – the typical middle-class man’s dodge. They took the name Mr
and Mrs Frederick Boardman, and Mary’s sister kept house for them to add
another layer of respectability. Engels had to be able to carry out his social
obligations, but the hypocrisy was unfortunate.30
Engels’s relationships with the Burns sisters also foreshadowed one of
the central problems for socialism in dealing with women. Engels’s ties to
Mary and Lizzie further sensitised him to workers’ struggles, but did not
give him much insight into gender. Engels, throughout his life, remained a
typical Victorian man, regarding women as primarily domestic.31 Though
Communists believed that women should enter the public sphere, they did
not expect men to take a greater part of the domestic labour. Instead, like
/>
the Owenites, Engels trusted communal arrangements and technology to
lift the domestic load from women. Moreover, because Socialists regarded
capitalism as the problem, they underestimated patriarchy. For a number
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
of reasons, then, Socialism had limited influence between 1850 and 1880.32
In short, the working class muted its challenge to marriage in mid-century,
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radical couples, 1850–1914
much like the middle classes.
Socialism took on a renewed life in the fin-de-siècle, buttressed by a
number of middle-class converts and new associations. The leader of the
Marxists in the 1880s and early 1890s was Engels, since Marx died in 1883.
Engels set out the basic Marxist position to marriage and the family in The
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State in 1884; this book and
August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism were the key documents of socialist
thought on women’s issues, since socialist publications disseminated their
basic tenets widely.33 According to Engels, marriage arrangements followed
the economic system; in other words, the capitalist system required
monogamy. The key moment was the establishment of property, since men
wanted their property to pass down to their own blood and so insisted on
female monogamy. Under communism, such property in women would
no longer exist. The community would support women during pregnancy
and child-rearing, freeing them from maintenance by individual men.
Couples, then, would form unions as they saw fit with no interference from
the state.34
Interestingly, Engels’s critique of marriage was similar to those
from earlier in the century. His main objections were married women’s
disabilities and its indissolubility. Also like previous writers, Engels did
not have solutions to all problems; his vision of the communist family
was vague, saying simply that the new generation ‘will make their own
practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each
individual – and that will be the end of it.’35 Engels’s position had other
weaknesses, as scholars have pointed out. Men’s domination of women
was more than economic; it was physical, mental, and emotional, a fact
he never acknowledged. He also ignored the question of what to do if the
relationship failed, even though he believed men to be less faithful than
women.36 Unsurprisingly, then, most socialist organisations, following
Engels and Bebel, did not deal successful y with these questions.
The difficulties and omissions of the Socialist theory of marriage
came to the fore in the most prominent socialist free union in the late
nineteenth century, that of Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling. Eleanor was
Karl’s youngest daughter, a translator and typist who served the Socialist
movement in a variety of capacities. Aveling was a scientist, secularist,
and socialist. He had married Isabel Frank in 1872, but the marriage soon
failed. Marx and Aveling met in 1883 and decided to live together in 1884.37
They cohabited for fourteen years, openly eschewing marriage. Indeed, in
a publication in 1886, they critiqued marriage as ‘worse than prostitution.’
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
All the same, they did not favour easy divorce, since this disadvantaged
women. Their ideal, which could only happen under socialism, was ‘true’
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living in sin
monogamy: ‘the complete harmonious, lasting blending of two human
lives.’38The Marx/Aveling relationship unfortunately never approached this
ideal. Aveling had few scruples about money or women. Olive Schreiner,
Eleanor’s friend, believed that Marx was unhappy almost from the
beginning, and some of Marx’s letters bear this out.39 Despite her quick
disil usionment with her partner, Eleanor always insisted that she was
married. She took Edward’s name, put up with his infidelities and neglect,
nursed him in his illnesses, and left him all her money. The freedom of
this union, then, was only for Aveling, just the situation most feminists
feared. Though historians have been baffled at Marx’s loyalty, Aveling was
sexual y attractive to her, and he also worked by her side in the socialist
cause. Stil , one cannot help thinking that the gender differences were key.
Marx regarded herself as married, no matter what the state of their union;
indeed, she felt bound by their union precisely because it was based on love
alone. Aveling, on the other hand, always considered himself free whatever
the circumstances. He married Isabel but lived with Eleanor for fourteen
years. After his wife’s death in 1892, he continued to live with Eleanor, but
secretly married Eva Freye, an actress, in 1897. He was simply indifferent to
the legal status of his relationships; like the bourgeois men he criticised in
1886, he did as he pleased, married or not.40
Eleanor was financial y independent, particularly after 1895, when she
received part of Engels’s estate, and she had no children. Thus, she could have
walked away from Aveling, yet she did not do so. Ruth Brandon argues that
Eleanor had to believe in both Aveling and the Socialist movement to prove
‘that her life was not a failure.’ After Edward’s betrayal, she could no longer
remain deluded. When she learned about his second marriage is unclear; it
may have been in late 1897 or immediately before her death in March 1898.
At any rate, when she could no longer cope, Eleanor committed suicide,
leaving Edward all of her money. Since he died only four months later,
Eleanor’s money went to Eva, her rival, within six months of her death.41
The tragedy of Eleanor Marx showed the limitations of the socialist
position on marriage and free unions. Marx, after al , had not stayed with
Aveling due to economic weakness or children. She did so because she was
too emotional y tied to do otherwise. Free unions did not undo the power
relations between a couple, and most socialists and feminists underestimated
the difficulties of untangling emotional commitments as opposed to legal
ones. Not all men were like Aveling, but Engels had admitted in his work
on the family that ‘sex feeling’ often changed, particularly in men. When it
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
did so, the spurned partner had to find a way to accept desertion, never an
easy proposition. And because she regarded their relationship as a ‘truer’
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radical couples, 1850–1914
marriage than most legal unions, Eleanor, like Wol stonecraft, was doubly
reluctant to admit to failure.42
Socialist unions were also complicated by the fact that not all
Socialist groups accepted them. Eleanor and Edward belonged to the
Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Socialist League, neither of
which condemned them, though the SDF was unenthusiastic.43 Other
organisations were openly hostile. This was quite a reverse of the position of
Owen in the 1840s, and showed how much socialism had institutionalised
by the end of the century. Socialist leaders feared the ‘sex question’ would
leave them open to the kinds of accusations Owen had faced, siphoning
off support. In addition, many regarded such questions as distractions,
taking energy from the fight against capitalism. This was related to the socialist
assumption that feminism was a luxury of bored bourgeois women. Socialists
assumed that promoting female equality – in marriage or anywhere else –
would alienate working-class men, while promotion of free love would do
so with working-class women (who feared desertion). The issue simply was
not a winner, electoral y or otherwise, and as more poor men got the vote,
these considerations mattered. As Karen Hunt put it, even the more flexible
SDF regarded the issue as ‘political y embarrassing.’44
Couples who cohabited, then, faced grave problems, especial y
in groups that had electoral ambitions. Tom Mann was secretary of the
Independent Labour Party (ILP) in the 1890s. He had married Ellen
Edwards in 1879 and they had four daughters, but he fell in love with Elsie
Harker, an opera singer and Labour activist, in the late 1890s. Mann and
Harker began their union in Brighton in 1898, and this decision coincided
with Mann’s ousting from the ILP, due to rumours about his drinking and
womanising. Though these scandals were untrue, Mann could not refute
them because of his union with Harker. Thus, he and Elsie lived in Australia
Living in Sin Page 41