1. The ‘Woman Question’: Recognition of Women’s Dual Burden¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 1: The ‘Woman Question’: Recognition of Women’s Dual Burden¶
This chapter establishes the Marxist analysis of women’s oppression as fundamentally rooted in the material conditions of capitalism, not in biology or human nature. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) dominated pre-1914 socialist thought, and its leading theorists—Engels, Bebel, and Clara Zetkin—provided the framework later adopted by the Bolsheviks. Marx and Engels, as early as The German Ideology (1846), argued that the family corresponds to the mode of production and that women’s subordination stems from their role within the nuclear family; liberation therefore requires the communalisation of domestic labour and the abolition of the family as currently constituted. The Communist Manifesto declared that the bourgeois family would vanish with capital, while Marx, in Capital Volume 1, argued that modern industry, by drawing women into production outside the home, creates the economic foundation for a higher form of family and relations between the sexes. Bebel’s Women and Socialism (1879) explicitly described women’s dual burden—their exploitation as workers and their domestic subordination—and argued that full independence required both economic independence and social revolution. Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) provided the materialist explanation: women’s subordination is rooted in the emergence of private property, and equality demands women’s productive employment outside the home and the transformation of housework into a public social service.
Marxists consistently distinguished themselves from bourgeois feminists. At the 1896 SPD Congress, Zetkin’s landmark report argued that the ‘woman question’ differed by class: bourgeois women fought men for property rights, while proletarian women’s interests united with working-class men. The Congress adopted an eight-point programme including equal political rights, equal pay, paid maternity leave, and abolition of the servants system. Zetkin rejected collaboration with bourgeois feminists, declaring herself their ‘adversary’, though local joint actions occurred. However, Zetkin took a reactionary position on abortion and birth control, denouncing them as Malthusian; Lenin, by contrast, demanded the annulment of all laws against abortion and contraception as elementary democratic rights. The chapter also addresses the SPD’s campaign against Germany’s Paragraph 175, which criminalised male same-sex acts, noting that the party defended bourgeois democratic rights rather than addressing the matter materialistically. Two common misrepresentations of Marx and Engels are corrected: the claim that Marx suggested smearing Johann von Schweitzer with homophobic jokes is baseless, and Engels’ use of Knabenliebe in The Origin of the Family was mistranslated as “sodomy” in Alick West’s 1940 edition, a mistranslation used to falsely claim Engels was anti-gay.
The chapter concludes by tracing the political fractures within the SPD. Luxemburg and Zetkin opposed revisionists Bernstein and Kautsky, breaking with Kautsky after he justified the Kaiser’s colonial ambitions in Morocco in 1911. After the outbreak of the inter-imperialist war in 1914, the SPD voted unanimously for war credits. Lenin called for a complete break with social chauvinists and a new communist international; Luxemburg and Zetkin hesitated. At the March 1915 Berne anti-war women’s conference, Zetkin opposed the Bolsheviks’ demand for a complete break with pro-war socialists, and the Bolsheviks were defeated 21-5. Zetkin was arrested on return and forced to resign as editor of Equality. By January 1917, expelled oppositionists formed the centrist USPD, whose members later formed the core of the German Communist Party.