Professional Documents
Culture Documents
History 2005W-10
Professor Zimmerman
February 14, 2015
During the 19th century, feminism was growing exponentially as a
movement and resulted in contentious discussions on womens rights. Mostly
everyone people had an opinion on womens rights in the 19th century, and
the evolution of feminism influenced many movements outside of its own
communism notwithstanding. The topic of womens rights influenced the
communist movement more and more as the 19th century progressed, and
this is clearly evident in the texts of its heralds: Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels. In early Marxist texts, specifically Marxs Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844 and Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848),
feminisms influence can only be found on sparse occasions. On these
occasions, they are treated as means to a political end and are not discussed
for their own sake. As time progressed, however, Marx would die and Engels
would in turn be the focus of the communist movement. Engels would prove
to have a much stronger stance on feminist matters, as shown in his The
Origin of Private Property, Family, and State (1884), and feminisms influence
on communist texts would expand in epic proportions. Albeit one could
attribute the difference in feminist language between Marx and Engels texts
to adapting to the pressure and philosophies of a exponentially-growing
feminist-movement, the differences are striking enough that they reveal a
confounding variable; the contrasting references of feminist theory between
Karl Marxs Manifesto of the Communist Party and Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, and Friedrich Engels The Origin of Family, Private
Property, and State, reveal a significant divergence in the motives of Engels
and Marx.
Notes
1. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In The
Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978),
83.