Women, Resistance and Revolution (11 page)

It is not surprising that the attention of Marx and Engels was directed towards historical change in the nature of the family. In the mid-Victorian era dramatic changes were evident in relations between the sexes, and between parents and children; just as now it is apparent that social changes in production have immediate effects on the family. At one side there was the idealization of the bourgeois family. The formidable family groups which confront us in the mid-century portraits and late-century photographs are immediate symbols of Victorianism. Increasingly, from the mid-nineteenth century the family becomes the last refuge of all those human qualities unable to survive in the outside world of capitalism. Home Sweet Home and the roses round the door are the abode of true feeling. The Angel in the House guards the sanctity like one of the old household gods. Froude in
The Nemesis of Faith
in 1849 described how, when men return home, they lay aside ‘our mask and drop our tools’. They are no longer forced to act out the characters forced on them by their work. ‘We fall again into our most human relations.’ Home shields the man from the destructive effects of struggle and
competition. It is the only place left in which he can simply be ‘himself’. This concept of the bourgeois family did not just confine the woman physically to the home. It created a role for her in which she existed only to bolster up the man. Ruskin described this in
Sesame and the Lilies
: ‘Her great function is Praise.’ She does nothing on her own initiative. But because the man must inevitably be wounded, subdued, harshened ‘in his rough work in the open world’, he protects woman from contact with his harsh world. In exchange she creates home as a haven of peace for him. Such an ideal of the family of course never questioned the continuance of the competitive society outside. On the contrary, it made man’s inhumanity to man more bearable by allowing him to be human at home, though at the expense of the humanity of the woman. The womblike crinoline cushions his aching spirit. Fleur de Marie was the lie to all this, and it is this conception of the ‘family’ that Marx and Engels ridiculed in the
Communist Manifesto.

At the opposite extreme there was the effect of the break-up of traditional agricultural communities and the move to the industrial town on the working-class family. Amidst all the horrors of overcrowding, appalling sanitation, low pay, exhaustion, little food, and the escape of drink, violence, and brutalized sex, most working men enjoyed no haven and most working women enjoyed little protection and had little time for praise. As for parental affection, workers were bound to see their children as ‘hands’. Children went out to work early. They often left their parents to fare as well as they could as soon as they could earn enough to live independently. They could be the main breadwinners because their parents would be refused employment. There are frequent references to couples setting up at fourteen and to young teenagers living and stealing in gangs. It was often these aspects of urbanization which shocked middle-class observers more than the conditions at work. Complaints about the break-up of the family combine with strictures on the insolence, immorality, and love of tawdry finery and independence of factory girls. Their ignorance of domestic wifely matters is contrasted with an ideal of agricultural housekeeping. But also within the emerging labour movement, men who protested against the evils of the factory system believed these evils to be magnified in relation to women. This was partly based on a knowledgeable sympathy for women’s physical weakness and the fact of reproduction, partly on a conception
of womanliness which saw her place as in the home, and also on the strong feeling that women should not take away work from the men. When they worked, it only intensified competition for jobs. These attitudes appear in the comments of a local chartist, P. J. Richardson, when he found women carrying heavy wet calicoes. He tells them:

This is the work of men … and you ought not to perform it; your places are in your homes; your labours are your domestic duties; your interests are in the welfare of your families and not in slaving for the accumulation of wealth of others, whose slaves you seem willing to be; for shame on you! Go seek husbands, those of you who have them not, and make them toil for you; and those of you who have husbands and families, go home and minister to their domestic comforts.
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Richardson is far from supporting the subordination of women. But he appeals to a traditional conception of a proper sphere for women. He believed factory work and heavy work subordinated them and that the vote and equal rights were essential if women were to end this degradation. There was quite a strong vein of retrospection in popular radicalism and chartism. Marx and Engels created a very different way of seeing woman’s role in the family and at work. In
The Condition of the Working Class
in 1844 Engels writes about the pregnancies of factory women, the return to work after a few days, leaving the baby and rushing home in the dinner hour. Nursing mothers themselves speak of their difficulties and describe the pain in their breasts. The effects of the factory system on such apparently intimate matters as menstruation and sexual intercourse are patiently documented. Certainly in Engels’s description of the effect of nineteenth-century capitalism on the working-class family, an idealization of home still combines with a popular memory of the pre-factory situation. This is not surprising because the sources he used, middle-class commentators and working-class witnesses, contained both attitudes. He echoes middle-class observers in his criticism of the moral consequences of large numbers of men and women working together in close proximity: a view he was to reverse later. But in his own observations he makes it clear that he does not think some return to a lost state is the answer. Nor does he believe that change in the family can somehow be abstracted from general changes in society. The neglect of children when the woman works, the upside-downness of poor Jack who can’t get work, unsexed and degraded,
mending his wife’s stockings while she is the wage-earner, indicate that ‘both sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning.’
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The binding tie of the family before its physical break-up through factory work was still based on property, on who contributed most. The change the factories have produced is to turn the economic control of the family topsy-turvy. Personal relations are reversed while the other social conditions remain unchanged. There is no basis for an alternative idea of dignity. Jack is simply deprived of his manhood. Engels concluded that this partial change only degraded both sexes. In this sense he saw capitalism destroying the working-class family. Admittedly the witness was obviously one of Jack’s mates and we don’t know what his wife thought about it.

In
Capital
, along with many specific observations on the working conditions of sewing girls, silk workers, bleachers, straw-plaiters, and other women, and on the effects of machinery on the various trades, Marx takes up this theme of the dissolution of the family again. He connects this to the factory system and the physical separation of home and work. The family ceases to be a unit of production and becomes only a unit of consumption. ‘Modern industry, in overturning the economical foundation on which was based the traditional family and the family labour corresponding to it, had also loosened all traditional family ties.’
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With this separation of function and loosening of ties gradually came the replacement of the individual family by the state in several spheres of authority. This served further to break down the individual inviolability of the family. The legislative acceptance of government responsibility for the hours women and children worked, and the 1870 act for education, implied that the father’s authority could be superseded. They also implied that women and children had rights which could not be included in the rights of the father. In the case of working-class women this recognition was only possible after the full horrors of factory work and life in the new towns had been exposed. Indeed, one of the arguments used by people who wanted to oppose the movement to ban women working in the mines was that they had always worked there, long before the factories. There were too some women who feared that protective legislation would mean they couldn’t get any employment. It was a painful contradiction that Marx grasped very well. Marx supported protective
legislation as a limitation on the capitalist’s right to exploit the worker. But he never accepted the view of many English radicals, and the followers of the French socialist Proudhon, that it was unnatural for women to work. Quite the opposite, he saw the process he identified as the dissolution of the family under capitalism as being a necessary precondition for new forms of relationship between men and women, parents and children. In 1866 he brought a resolution in favour of child labour, as well as women working, before the International, with the proviso of protective legislation, because he believed work should not be separate from education and was beneficial to the human personality. In
Capital
he wrote that ‘however terrible and disgusting’ this was in its immediate effect, ultimately, ‘by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production outside the domestic sphere to women, young persons, and to children of both sexes, it creates a new economical foundation for a higher form of family and of relations between the sexes.’
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It was all very well to argue in this way if you believed capitalism’s knell had already sounded. But subsequently Marxists have found this statement somewhat problematical. From the later Engels onwards it has been argued that women must be involved in production as a precondition for emancipation. But this has been seen rather as the only way in which they could exercise control as workers, rather than a basis for a new family and changed relations between the sexes. There has been an understandable nervousness about child labour as a precondition for emancipation.

The comment which comes later in the passage makes it clear that Marx has already jumped mentally into the communist future. ‘Moreover it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily under suitable conditions become a source of human development.’
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A hundred years later this is less obvious. First of all it means sharing a philosophic commitment to activity, association and work as a means of developing human consciousness. Second, whether this is anyway synonymous with the inclusion of individuals of both sexes and all ages in production is open to speculation. Third, the only sense in which we can interpret the phrase ‘suitable conditions’ is to imagine work in which there is no element of compulsion. Production would have to be inseparable from play. It is almost impossible for us to visualize such a condition.

Generally both Marx and Engels were very guarded about making pronouncements about the future, because they were all too aware of the dangers of rigid utopian schemata. However, there are scattered about their works various observations about the nature of communist sexual relations. They both wrote romantic love poetry as young men. Engels translated Shelley whom he greatly admired and Marx sent Jenny three volumes of love lyrics. They lived very differently from each other in later life, Marx respectably settled with Jenny, but having an illegitimate son Frederick; Engels in free union with Mary Burns and then with her sister after she died, both women Irish proletarians and fiercely republican. But philosophically their attitude to love was consistent with their central commitment to human growth and development. They believed that individual sex love would reach a much fuller expression in communist society because the old pressures of economic necessity present in capitalism and the alienation of all social relations would disappear. They were opposed equally to the idealization and the cult of women, as natural emotional feeling, and the vulgar mechanical materialism which reduced all human sexual relations to a simply physical response. Marx in
The Holy Family
saw love as essential to the fulfilment of all human beings. He says it was the experience which ‘first really teaches man to believe in the objective world outside himself’.
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He equated the intellectual tendency to dismiss love as suspicion of ‘everything living, everything which is immediate, every sensuous experience, any and every real experience the “whence” and “whither” of which are not known beforehand’.

Capitalism was held guilty not only of the exploitation of labour power. It had appropriated sense-experience. This was all too evident in the ideology of the bourgeoisie as much as in how they lived. In
The Origin of the Family
Engels pointed out much later that it was most ironical that the right to marry whom you pleased was enjoyed by the oppressed class, the proletariat, rather than the oppressors. The latter were encumbered by the responsibility of their property. Believing like Shelley and the early radicals that love between the sexes was a social affair, and did not escape the influence of social institutions, Engels argued that monogamy created the preconditions for women’s liberation historically. The love marriage was as much a right of woman as a right of man in bourgeois theory. But in practice the rights of lovers were subordinated to the rights of
property. Similarly the young Marx in the 1840s also believed that possessive love indicated the desire for a slave as partner rather than another human being. ‘The jealous person is above all a private property owner.’
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But they did not argue from this that sex relations would become a more public affair. Communism was the means of enabling every individual to enjoy a far richer personal life than was possible under capitalism because the old economic subordination will no longer exist. ‘It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene.’
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