Marxist Feminism - Engels and Feminism

Engels and Feminism

Marxist feminism's foundation is laid by Friedrich Engels in his analysis of gender oppression in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). He argues that a woman's subordination is not a result of her biological disposition but of social relations, and that men's efforts to achieve their demands for control of women's labor and sexual faculties have gradually solidified and become institutionalized in the nuclear family. Through a Marxist historical perspective, Engels analyzes the widespread social phenomena associated with female sexual morality, such as fixation on virginity and sexual purity, incrimination and violent punishment of women who commit adultery, and demands that women be submissive to their husbands. Ultimately, Engels traces these phenomena to the recent development of exclusive male control of private property and the attendant desire to ensure that their inheritance is passed only to their own offspring: chastity and fidelity are rewarded, says Engels, because they guarantee exclusive access to the sexual and reproductive faculty of women possessed by men from the property-owning class.

As such, gender oppression is class oppression and the relationship between man and woman in society is similar to the relations between proletariat and bourgeoise. On this account women's subordination resembles class oppression, maintained (like racism) because it serves the interests of capital and the ruling class; men exploit the dominant social position afforded to them by existing conditions to reinforce that position and to maintain the conditions underlying it.