10.6092/issn.2611-2752/15010
On 31 August 1886 Eleanor Marx left Liverpool for Chicago for a trip that would be the perfect occasion to sharpen her feminist thought. Inquiring the American workers movement and women condition, Eleanor found the problem of the day. “How should woman organize?” became the crucial question of her socialist activism among women but also among men. The United States were the ground of an essential transformation of socialist politics, where sex, class and race were already political weapons the workers movement had to learn to use for their own freedom.
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Not just a Woman. The Agitation Tour in the US and the Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx
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Not just a Woman. The Agitation Tour in the US and the Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx
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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/15010                                                           ISSN 2611-2752




        Not just a Woman. The Agitation Tour in the US and the
                           Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx

                                                 Roberta Ferrari

                   Submitted: June 7, 2022 – Accepted: July 4, 2022 – Published: September 12, 2022



                                                      Abstract

       On 31 August 1886 Eleanor Marx left Liverpool for Chicago for a trip that would be the perfect
       occasion to sharpen her feminist thought. Inquiring the American workers movement and women
       condition, Eleanor found the problem of the day. “How should woman organize?” became the
       crucial question of her socialist activism among women but also among men. The United States
       were the ground of an essential transformation of socialist politics, where sex, class and race were
       already political weapons the workers movement had to learn to use for their own freedom.
       Keywords: Eleanor Marx; American Workers Movement; Socialism; Feminism; Organization.




Roberta Ferrari: University of Bologna (Italy)
 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7825-2561
 roberta.ferrari6@unibo.it
Roberta Ferrari holds a PhD in History of Political Thought and is a teaching tutor at the Department of Political
and Social Sciences, University of Bologna. Her main research interests concern late Victorian and early 20th
century England, Ireland and European Socialism, the birth of the welfare state and planning in the 1930s in
Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States. He also works on feminist and Marxist theory.



Copyright © 2022 Roberta Ferrari                                                                                     49
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
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The Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx                                                                 USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




            The life of woman does not coincide with that of man. Their lives do not intersect; in
                            many cases do not even touch. Hence the life of the race is stunted.1

     1877 has been defined as the year of the American workers’ insurrection.2 Almost ten years later,
the agitation was still not over. Unprecedented forms of organization involving women arose in 1886,
transforming workers’ organizations from the inside.3 When the national strike for the eight-hour
working day was called on May 1st of that year, Eleanor Marx had already been following the events of
the American working class for some time, immersed in her many literary and political commitments
in London. The bomb that exploded on May 4, during what became known as the Haymarket Riot,
had turned Chicago upside down at a time when the trade union struggle had become increasingly
political and expansive.4
     Eleanor’s trip to the United States was motivated from the very beginning by a keen interest in
American working class movement. Women were in conditions of exploitation that, in her opinion,
were even worse than those in England and yet were struggling to emerge, inside and outside the fac-
tories. It seemed to her increasingly urgent and necessary to direct workers’ struggle towards the or-
ganization of socialism. For this reason, Eleanor’s political activism and discourse on women became
radicalized during her stay in the United States. The problems posed by women in union organizing
and the issues related to marriage and divorce prompted Eleanor, in her texts following the American
tour, to articulate the “woman question” more and more as a “feminist question:”5 that is, not only a
matter of equal opportunity among men and women, but of social revolution, and of transforming
sexual and class relations together.
     Of course, Eleanor’s political background influenced strongly her reading of American reality. Be-
fore her American tour, started in 1886, Eleanor had been an agitator, a scholar, and a theatre enthu-
siast. In 1884 she joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) led by Henry Hyndman and was
elected a member of its executive, and there she met her future partner, Edward Aveling. After only
one year, her relationship with Hyndman became very conflictual, mainly due to his nationalist ten-
dencies. Eleanor and some other members left SDF to establish the Socialist League, which included
prominent characters such as William Morris, Ernest Belfort Bax, Sam Mainwaring, and Tom Mann,
the latter two being official representatives of the working class. Until 1884, however, her studies had
focused mainly on her father’s work, reconstructing his political oeuvre and pursuing the heart of
Marxian discourse in her activism. That year she had the opportunity to know Clementina Black
and enter the Women’s Trade Union League.6 However, as one can see from reading The Factory Hell
(1885), a specific analysis of women’s condition was still absent in her reflection. Her critique of suffrag-
ism and bourgeois feminism, which she shared with Clara Zetkin, primarily noted the class division
among women, but that was the outcome of considerations she made after the International Socialist
Congress in Paris, which she helped organize, and the US tour.
     In the Woman Question (1886), in particular, she wrote that the fight for the vote was a limited goal
if it was only a right for the rich, and it could not include the large-scale social revolution needed to
bring about a different future society. This analysis finds stronger confirmation after her US trip:

        We will support all women, not only those having property, enabled to vote; the Conta-
        gious Diseases Act repealed; every calling thrown open to both sexes. The actual position
        of women in respect to men would not be very vitally touched […] For not one of these



1.   Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, “Woman Question,” Westminster Review, 125(1886): 5.

2.   Jeremy Brecher, Strike! History of Mass Revolts in America in the Last Century (Boston: South End Press, 1999), 55; Jack Ross,
     The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Press, 2015) in particular 3–79, 16.

3.   Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983).

4.   Brecher, Strike!, 46ff.

5.   The phrase is borrowed from Heidi I. Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More
     Progressive Union,” Capital & Class, 3(1979): 2.

6.   On the WTUL, see Philip Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From the First Trade Unions to the Present (New
     York: Free Press, 1982), 120–32.



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The Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx                                                                   USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




         things, save indirectly the Contagious Diseases Act, touches them in their sex relations.
         […] Without larger social change women will never be free.7

    Factory Hell, written the year before the trip to the States, as well as the review of Bebel’s Woman in
the Past, Present and Future8 and The Working Class Movement in England, written in 1884, named women
as a harassed part of the working class, described their additional exploitation, but within a discourse
about workers, “men and women.” In all the following writings,9 the social condition of women, their
relationship with men and their access to the working-class organization and the family institutions
are more widely reconsidered.
    Rachel Holmes has written that “Eleanor’s experience of America broadened, educated and con-
firmed her critical assessment of the political possibilities of an integrated socialist and feminist pro-
gram for revolution. […] the first statements of socialist feminism in Western thought, and the first
on both sides of the Atlantic.”10 Certainly the United States, even more than England, had shown
Eleanor that the women’s question had to go beyond the claim for women’s rights. The point to her
was women’s participation in the socialist struggle. The risk was not only that the exclusion of women
would become an obstacle for the socialist cause, but above all that by excluding working class women,
feminism would become an enemy of the workers’ cause.
    On August 31, 1886, she left Liverpool for Chicago with her partner Edward Aveling and her friend
Wilhelm Liebknecht, despite the fact that the Socialist American Labor Party had officially invited only
the latter two.11 This showed not only that she carried with her a cumbersome family name, but also
that evident misogyny was not foreign to the socialist environment. We can therefore imagine that
it was no coincidence that Eleanor’s first lecture on September 14 in Bridgeport, Connecticut focused
on women’s conditions and the urgency of women’s union organizing for the success of socialism.
    In this sense, her socialism is her father’s legacy that she carried on with dedication: just like for
Karl Marx “feminine ferment,” i.e., any public expression of women’s insubordination was essential to
create the conditions for revolution.12 For Eleanor, however, the organization of women, within the
framework of the labor movement, was needed to break the noxious connection between capitalism
and “the positions of the two sexes to-day.”13 Indeed, throughout her political, literary and personal
engagement, the condition and struggle of women have been central. Reading her speeches, to which
we will return in a moment, we can see a reversal of the traditional socialist perspective: social change
would not bring freedom to women, but women, by claiming their freedom, that is by organizing
themselves, would bring about a social change: “women and the immediate producers, must under-
stand that their emancipation will come from themselves.”14 A few years after the American tour, she
therefore stressed the importance of a common and shared organization of working women and men:

         1. Wherever women organize, their position improves—that is, wages go up, hours are
         reduced, working conditions are improved. 2. It works to the advantage of the men at
         least as much as of the women when the latter organize, and their wages are regarded as
         real workers’ wages and not as little supplements to the general household fund. Except
         in quite special trades, it is essential, in the case of unskilled workers especially, that men


7.    Aveling and Marx Aveling, “Woman Question,” 14.

8.    Eleanor Marx Aveling, “Review of Bebel’s ‘Woman in the Past, Present and Future’,” Supplement to The Commonweal, 1(1885):
      63–4.

9.    I refer in particular to The Woman Question and The American Working Class Movement, written with Edward Aveling, but also
      to the articles written with Clara Zetkin for the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung in 1892 to which we return later.

10. Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx. A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 292.

11.   Ibid.

12. Eleonora Cappuccilli and Roberta Ferrari,” The Feminine Ferment Marx and the Critique of Patriarchy,” in Global Marx
    History and Critique of the Social Movement in the World Market, eds. Matteo Battistini, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Maurizio Ricciardi,
    (Boston: BRILL, 2022), 58–73.

13. Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, “Shelley and Socialism,” To-Day (April 1888): 103–116.

14. Aveling and Marx Aveling, “Woman Question,” 3.



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The Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx                                                                 USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




         and women be members of one and the same trade-union, just as they are members of
         one and the same workers’ party.15

    The problem and contradiction at the heart of all Eleanor’s work and life was the question of
how a specific women’s struggle could be waged within the framework of a necessary and inescapable
common working-class and socialist struggle. Looking at the social and political status of women,
the different ways in which they were exploited and subordinated in the workplace, the subjugation
imposed by marriage, and the instrumentalization of the woman’s body and motherhood, Eleanor
showed how women’s economic dependence not only exacerbated that of all wage laborers but had
in addition a traditional and moral root. The position of the working woman was the lever of her own
exploitation, and not just her own: what she represented at the social and family level determined her
economic value, the importance of her work, and her possibility of action and organization. Eleanor
provided a picture of a society in which the role of women did not represent a merely cultural issue,
nor only an inescapable “economic fact” of the capitalist system: the woman, as we will see, is also an
expropriated subject, who lives the melancholic negation of her desire and ideals. In this respect, she
pioneered a working-class feminism that aimed to liberate women not only from capitalist oppression
but also from the causes and consequences of that oppression. Holmes also wrote that “Eleanor Marx
radicalized ’the woman question’ by bringing modern feminism to Britain in 1886. She created the
political philosophy of socialist feminism.”16
    The American tour is the moment of greatest development of her discourse. The tour begins with
her rally on the “woman question” and ends with her speech on the question of women’s organization
on December 23, 1886, both of which were later included in The Working-Class Movement in America
published in the Westminster Review and co-signed with Edward Aveling.



1 How Should Women Organize
Eleanor was fiercely critical of British bourgeois feminism, led by “refined suffragettes of the type
of Mrs. Fawcett” (“the reactionary bourgeois advocate of women’s rights—of the rights of property-
owning women—who has never worked a day in her life”).17 Women like her were convinced that
“the poor should stay in their place,”18 since while they fought for the vote for women, they did not
care about how many of them could exercise it: “Has not the star of the women’s rights movement,
Mrs. Fawcett, declared herself expressly in opposition to any legal reduction of working hours for
female workers?”19 At the same time, she considered American feminism “ready to engage in the
more far-reaching struggle for the emancipation of the workers as well as that for their own sex,”
capable of a “wider view of the contest for liberty.”20 This judgment underlines her radical ideas on
society, even though in the short time she spent in the United States she did not come into contact
with those American feminists engaged on various social and political fronts, such as Jane Addams
and Elisabeth Cady Stanton. Similarly, she did not appear to have contacted socially or politically
engaged feminists in Britain.21 This fact can be explained not only by her firm commitment to her
father’s cause, but also by the critical approach she had towards a feminism that did not consider class

15. Eleanor Marx, “How Should we Organize?,” Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, February 5, 1892, 4.

16. Holmes, Eleanor Marx. A Life, 32.

17.   Eleanor Marx, “A Women’s Trade Union,” Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, May 20, 1892. About Millicent Fawcett and Sophia A. Van
      Wingerden, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); Anna Rossi-Doria, La libertà
      delle donne (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990); Elda Guerra, Storia e cultura politica delle donne (Bologna: Archetipolibri,
      2008).

18. Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx. II. The Years of Engagement (1884–1898), (Torino: Einaudi, 1980), 473.

19. Eleanor Marx, “Women’s Trade Unions in England,” Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, (1892), 2.

20. Eleanor Marx Aveling and Edward Aveling, The Working-Class Movement in America (London: Swan Sonnenscheib & Co,
    1891), 58.

21. The published biographies and works on Eleanor Marx do not report on consolidated relationships with women’s associa-
    tions in the UK and England, even if she had several occasions to discuss with prominent activists, such as Beatrice Potter
    Webb, suffragists, and women trade unionists. On the American debate, see Il sentimento delle libertà. La Dichiarazione di



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The Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx                                                                        USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




difference as politically crucial. Eleanor’s socialist commitment was also a strict discriminating point
in her conception of women and feminism, even more so given that Millicent Fawcett, whom she
identified as the star of the women’s movement, did not represent all British suffragism. Eleanor’s
feminism therefore was a part of her socialist politics, as demonstrated by her collaboration with
the German socialist Clara Zetkin, with whom, in 1896, she brought women onto the agenda of the
international socialist movement at the first congress of the Second International in London.22
    In her perspective, even American feminism was unable to recognize the different conditions of
women and to see that women workers posed the more general problem of social change: “The woman
question is one of the organization of society as a whole. American woman-suffragists are like the
English in the fact that they are, as a rule, well to do. And they are like them in that they make no
suggestion for change that is outside the limits of the society of today.”23 For her, it was not a matter
of denying the political and social difference that runs and is reproduced on the line of sex. As the
quote in the exergue makes clear, Eleanor was all too aware of this. It was a question, however, of
starting from the women workers, because their condition showed in the most evident way how the
relationship between the sexes concealed an essential lever of exploitation and at the same time a weak
point of the workers’ organization.
    During their tour through 35 American cities and towns from New York to Kansas City, Eleanor
and Aveling interviewed American working men and women with the precise and determined aim
of understanding the workers’ context and problems. Also, their goal was the dissemination of a so-
cialism that, in their opinion, American workers had never heard of in that form, cleared up from
prejudices and misunderstandings. Up to that moment, socialism in the US had been, from what they
could witness, an exported socialism, dominated by the German model with no particular attention
to the American reality, and cleverly denigrated by the local press:24 as long as this situation remained
so, “the movement in America will not be American. Socialism, to be effective there, must be of native
growth, even if the seeds are brought from other countries.”25 It was also necessary to consider that
“in America there seems to be no social and intellectual middle class.” This statement should be read
together with the following explanation of American capitalism, which concerns not only the eco-
nomic and sociological character of the middle class, but its political intermediation between capital
and labor:

        There are in America far more trenchant distinctions between the capitalist and laboring
        class than in the older lands. This distinction is not, as in the latter, bridged over and
        refined down by many examples of intermediate classes. […] The capitalist system came
        here as a ready-made article.26

    What was missing in this description was the complex social stratification that in Europe allowed
for a mediation between social classes, which here instead found themselves facing each other.27
    The problem with this interpretation is twofold: first, from their report, all we know is that they
met “Knights of Labor, Central Labor Union men, and members of other working-class organizations,”


    Seneca Falls e il dibattito sui diritti delle donne negli Stati Uniti di metà Ottocento, ed. Raffaella Baritono (Torino: La Rosa, 2002).
    This lack of knowledge of US women’s activism explains the discrepancies between her polemical analysis of the concrete
    articulations of sex and class. Indeed, there was a tradition dating back to the early 19th century that saw the formation of
    working women organizations, strikes and struggles that also conquered the support or at least the solidarity of suffragists
    America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present, eds. Linda Gordon and Rosalyn Baxandall (New York
    and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 152–189.

22. Holmes, Eleanor Marx. A Life, 11, 273—274.

23. Marx Aveling and Aveling, The Working-Class Movement in America, 58.

24. For a broader overview of the topic see John H.M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, Failure of a Dream? Essays in the
    History of American Socialism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

25. Marx Aveling and Aveling, The Working-Class Movement in America, 44.

26. Ibid, 4.

27. See in this regard Matteo Battistini, Middle Class: An Intellectual History through Social Sciences. An American Fetish from its
    Origins to Globalization (Boston: BRILL, 2022).



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The Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx                                                                      USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




and we do not have more specific information about the other organizations they had the possibility
to meet. Second, Marx and Aveling’s considerations concerned a specific period of the socialist move-
ment in the Gilded Age, when the SLP was facing an important crisis and became very insular in its
organization.28 Also, they did not consider the role that immigrant communities played in spreading
socialism in U.S.29 In short, here we see the limitations of Marx and Aveling knowledge and under-
standing of the history and transformations of the socialist movement in U.S.
    Nevertheless, they could recognize the characteristics of the American system of exploitation, the
truck order or scrip system, the sweating system,30 the unparalleled intensification of work that an-
ticipated Taylorism. Eleanor was able to identify their maximum expression in the condition of
women workers. Observing how essential women’s wage labor was for the American capitalist, Eleanor
showed its non-accessory political significance and the contradictory nature of a system founded on
the family but unable to guarantee its reproduction.

        Everywhere in America today […] we found women forced to work for wages because
        the husband’s were insufficient for even bare subsistence, besides having to tend their
        children, and go the usual dreary round of endless household drudgery. […] we may fairly
        say we have never in the English Manchester seen women so worn out and degraded, such
        famine in their cheeks, such need and oppression, starving in their eyes, as in the women
        we saw trudging to their work in the New Hampshire Manchester. What must the children
        born of such women be?31

    Eleanor’s argument was that women should not organize separately, because their organization
can and should benefit the whole labor movement. However, whether they were surplus women32 or
married women, she recognized that within the labor movement, their struggle was isolated, when not
marginalized or denied altogether. Eleanor noted that many women worked to survive or to make an
essential contribution to a meager family income. The social delegitimization of the working woman
therefore also passed through that contradiction. Women’s work, in fact, was not “real” work for the
society of the time, neither for the capitalist, nor the trade unionist, nor the worker, nor, last but not
least, for her husband: it was the necessary evil in a transitory phase of a woman’s life, waiting for
marriage to save her. More and more often, however, this waiting became a chronic precariousness
and, married or not, women continued to work:33 “It must be understood that they are not abandoned
women, but are really working women.”34 The family was not therefore the only destiny of proletarian
women, but rather a place where that division and isolation were reaffirmed. Working women were
not a residual condition affecting only those who had contravened their presumed destiny of marriage,
but a condition entirely internal to that of the working class.
    In the 1880s and 1890s, in fact, 85% of women workers were unmarried, very young and employed
on temporary contracts in unskilled jobs and in sectors hard to organize by trade unions. One-third
of them were “domestic servants” and a quarter were workers in the textile industry. The rest were
divided and scattered among various industrial, shoe, tobacco, and service departments of various
kinds. Half of the female working class were migrants,35 an aspect Eleanor always held in high regard,

28. Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill, NC:
    University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007);
    John Nichols, The ‘S’ Word: a Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism (London and New York: Verso 2011); Mark A.
    Lause, The Long Road to Harpers Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left (London: Pluto Press, 2018). See also Arnaldo Testi,
    L’età progressista negli Stati Uniti (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984).

29. Paul Buhle, History of Marxism in the US (London-New York: Verso, 1987). See also the recently published E. Marx, ¡Siempre
    adelante! Escritos y cartas, 1866-1897 (Banda propia, 2022).

30. Laura Hapke, Sweatshop: The History of An American Idea (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

31. Marx Aveling and Aveling, The Working-Class Movement in America, 21.

32. See in this regard Roberta Ferrari, Beatrice Potter e il capitalismo senza civiltà. Una donna tra scienza, politica e amministrazione
    (Roma: Viella, 2017).

33. Alice Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History (Chicago, IL: Illinois Press, 2007), 98–115.

34. Marx Aveling and Aveling, The Working-Class Movement in America.

35. Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History, 22.



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The Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx                                                             USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




both in her discourse on women’s organization and as part of her internationalist vision of socialism,
and because of her passionate affection for the Irish cause.36
   In order to report and criticize the widespread belief that, as temporary or complementary,
women’s work was not as “real” as men’s—a belief that motivated the implicit answer to the question
“Why don’t women organize?”—the historian Alice Kessler-Harris rightly turned the question around,
“where are the organized women workers?”37 The enormous difficulties and barriers posed by unions
and the male working class against women’s organizing are not an issue addressed in detail by Eleanor
who, while acknowledging this reality, posed an even more crucial question for the women of her
time: “How should we organize?”

       The women unionists often have no voice in the administration of their union. […] For example, in
       Lancashire and Yorkshire, where the women almost without exception belong to unions,
       pay regular dues and of course also draw benefits from them, they have absolutely no part in
       the leadership of these organizations, no voice in the administration of their own funds, and
       up to now have never become delegates to their own unions’ congresses. Representation
       and administration lie wholly in the hands of the men workers.38

    Eleanor thus recognized male dominance in unions as a problem for the entire labor movement.
The American female workforce was seen as a reserve army,39 when in fact as she noted, in addition
to breadwinner wives, many breadwinners were young single women, that is in every possible sense
“real workers,” supporting widowed mothers and younger sisters.
    During this period, however, there had certainly been no shortage of struggles by women workers.
In 1884 the textile workers and the following year the shirt makers of New York, men and women
together, had gone on strike, winning higher wages and shorter hours. In the Knights of Labor, the
strongest union federation at this time in history, there were 50,000 female members in nearly 200
women’s assemblies. Women leaders, albeit with difficulty, were emerging, such as Leonora Barry, an
Irish woman who emigrated to the United States and became the “master worker” of her assembly.40
    The arguments used to delegitimize the importance of women’s work, primarily the valorization
of their role in the domestic and family sphere, were a double-edged sword for the workers’ organiza-
tion. Not only was the maternal and domestic role in which women were enclosed and oppressed the
basis of the specific exploitation of women, but it also became the weapon with which entrepreneurs
could impose workload and wage differences. Women workers had understood this mechanism, and
for this reason their pressure inside the trade unions was essential, caused tensions, and forced changes.
Women’s struggle was always doubly demanding compared to that of male workers, since they were
fighting on three different fronts: against tradition and the patriarchal system, against a process of ac-
cumulation and industrial expansion that could not exist without them, and against the trade unions’
reservations based on the assumption that, as a poor and blackmailable workforce, they were auto-
matically seen as a threat to workers’ conquests and organization.41
    Throughout her writings and during the rallies in which she participated Eleanor voiced these
conditions, but despite this she never claimed a separate women’s struggle: not only because of her
dedication to the socialist cause, but because, as she wrote on several occasions, the women’s question
was a question not only for women but for society as a whole.
    The problem of women’s separate struggle, however, has to be understood also in the context of the
American women’s movement that saw it as a strategic choice, something that Eleanor did not consider
at all. Eleanor saw that women’s wage labor questioned the patriarchal organization of the family and

36. See Eleanor Marx, “The Irish Dynamiters,” Progress, (May 1884).

37. Ibid, 23–24.

38. Marx, “How Should We Organize?,” 2.

39. Marilyn Power, “From Home Production to Wage Labor: Women as a Reserve Army of Labor,” Review of Radical Political
    Economy, 15(1983): 71–91.

40. Susan Levine, “Labor’s True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labor,” The Journal of American History,
    70(1983): 323–339; Siobhan Brown, A Rebel’s Guide to Eleanor Marx (London: Bookmarks Publications, 2015): 29.

41. Ibid.



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The Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx                                                            USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




society. The economic dependence on men was the main problem to her, therefore she defined the
woman question “one of economics and not of mere sentiment,”42 was to all intents and purposes for
women workers the most ferocious weapon through which their subordination was reproduced, at
work and in society at large. Moreover, she firmly believed, and she found confirmation of this in the
United States, that strikes and mixed forms of organization were possible and, given adequate political
education, even probable: in New Jersey, women had organized and joined the Knights of Labor, who
eventually accepted their participation. By working together, they were able to secure the same wages
for women as for men.

       Now, it seems to me that we must commence by organizing as trade-unionists using our
       united strength as a means of reaching the ultimate goal, the emancipation of our class.
       The job will not be easy. In fact, the conditions of female labor are such that it is often
       heartbreakingly difficult to make progress. But from day to day the job will become easier,
       and it will begin to look less and less difficult in proportion as the women and especially
       the men learn to see what strength lies in the unification of any workers.43

   It was then a matter of showing that the construction of a socialist struggle implied the abandon-
ment of traditions, the challenge to the patriarchal hierarchies reproduced by family, the economic
and political understanding of the sexual division of labor as an essential moment of exploitation.
Feminism, in other words, was not a mere cultural struggle or, as she defined it, one of “sentiment.”



2 The Necessary Unity of an Impossible Coincidence
Eleanor Marx’s struggle for free love and women’s independence, that is, the fight against the commod-
ification of women, in her political and in her personal life,44 led her to see with extreme clarity the
political value of feminist freedom for socialist organization. To introduce a revolutionary discourse
on women’s sexuality in the specific context of the working class meant to her to give legitimacy to a
“sex instinct”45 recognized by science and legalized by the state for men but not women. It was thus
not just a matter of recognizing a two-dimensional, smooth, ripple-free antagonism, but of seeing,
within the workforce, the barriers and projections of a male domination that, while supporting the
oppression of all, traced an internal rift within the working class that could not simply be recomposed
but neither could allow to abandon the ultimate purpose of a common struggle.
     Were marriage or prostitution really the only possible forms of the workers’ relationship? What
was the cause of this distorted “solidarity” of exploited labor? Eleanor’s political reflection attempts to
connect the subjective and the collective dimensions of emancipation, and thus to read exploitation,
male domination, and the socialist struggle against them first and foremost as a set of social relations
to be fought and built inside the workers’ movement:

       The man, worn out as he may be by labor, has the evening in which to do nothing. The
       woman is occupied until bedtime comes. Often with young children her toil goes far into,
       or all through, the night. When marriage has taken place, all is in favor of the one and is
       adverse to the other […] Our marriages, like our morals, are based upon commercialism.
       Not to be able to meet one’s business engagements is a greater sin than the slander of a
       friend, and our weddings are business transactions.46

42. Marx Aveling and Aveling, The Working-Class Movement in America, 42.

43. Eleanor Marx, “How Should We Organize?,” 3.

44. Chushichi Tsuzuki, Eleanor Marx. Una tragedia socialista (Milano: Mondadori, 1972); Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx; Edward
    P. Thompson, “Eleanor Marx”, in Persons and Polemics. Historical Essays, ed. Edward P. Thompson (London: Merlin Press
    1994), 66–76. See also Roberta Ferrari, “Miss Marx. Film d’amore e socialismo,” Ricerche di storia politica, 2021: https:
    //www.arsp.it/2021/04/26/miss-marx-film-damore-e-socialismo-o-della-storia-politica-dellamore/.

45. Marx Aveling and Aveling, “Woman Question,” 6. Karl Heinzen’s The Rights of Women and the Sexual Relations was already
    translated in English in 1875 by Emma Heller Schumm, an American lady of German descent. We can be sure Eleanor read
    that book, also because Heinzen had a quarrel with Karl Marx regarding the moral root of socialism in 1848.

46. Marx and Aveling, “Woman Question,” 6.



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The Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx                                                       USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




    If marriage is a commercial transaction, how can it be possible for wife and husband to struggle
together for their emancipation? Even in dealing with the issue of divorce, Eleanor gives expression
to this dilemma. The commercial basis of marriage shapes also the freedom divorce can grant:

       To oppose anything that facilitates divorce is a most serious interference with the liberty
       of the subject. The whole question of divorce, complex in any case, is made more com-
       plicated by the fact that it has to be considered, first in relation to the present conditions,
       second in relation to the socialistic conditions of the future. Many advanced thinkers
       plead for greater facility of divorce now. […] and most important of all, that the condi-
       tions of divorce should be the same for the two sexes. All this is excellent, and would be
       not only feasible but just, if—but mark the if—the economic positions of the two sexes
       were the same. They are not the same. […] The man would be able to take advantage of
       them; the woman would not, except in the rare instances where she had private property
       or some means of livelihood. The annulling of the union would be to him freedom; to
       her, starvation for herself and her children.47

    Divorce could not be treated in isolation from its social consequences. While for some, divorce
could guarantee freedom, for others, it had the cost of poverty. That is to say, for Eleanor there could
be no universal discourse on women, because the social position that defined dependence on men split
the “women’s class” in two. To claim women’s rights, then, was not enough, because often women’s
rights did not consider the real conditions of existence of the subjects they speak of.

       Whether we consider women as a whole, or only that sad sisterhood wearing upon its
       melancholy brews the stamp of eternal virginity, we find alike a want of ideas and of ideals.
       The reason of this is again the economic position of dependency upon man. Women, once
       more like the laborers, have been expropriated as to their rights as human beings, just
       as the laborers were expropriated as to their rights as producers. The method in each
       case is the only one that makes expropriation at any time and under any circumstances
       possible—and that method is force.48

    To put desire, “a want of ideas and of ideals,” ahead of the melancholy of an imposed virginity
meant radical opposition to male domination, to that power that was imposed on women to “belong,”
it meant reappropriating a sexuality not defined by male conquest and dispossession.
    Eleanor railed against bourgeois feminism because her aim was not to find a place for women in
the existing society, but to overthrow its economic and political order, since patriarchy and capitalism
never acted in isolation and therefore could not be fought separately.
    However, she did not consider that divorce was no less problematic for middle-class women. The
coverture system and the issue of child protection were no less stringent for middle-class women.
Indeed, significantly, Eleanor’s political semantics do not name patriarchy and male domination but
privilege a discourse on women’s conditions and their organization as working-class politics: “For
this women’s-rightser as for this misogynist, ‘woman’ is just woman. Neither of them sees that there
is the exploiter woman of the middle class and the exploited woman of the working class.”49 There
was no “woman question” from the bourgeois point of view any more than there was a man question.
Nevertheless, she recognized that, where bourgeois women demanded rights that also served working
class women, they could and would fight together. A contradiction remained thus open in Eleanor’s
socialist discourse: her feminism always seemed on the point of conflicting with the crucial principle
of the socialist cause, that of workers’ unity, of the universality of socialism, but at the same time she
intended to use it as a weapon to empower workers. In this sense her experience in the US had made
her more conscious of the need to articulate the problematic intersection among feminist and socialist
causes, or better to define a socialist feminism.

47. Marx and Aveling, “Woman Question,” 7.

48. Ibid, 5.

49. Eleanor Marx, “Women’s Trade Unions in England;” Eleanor Marx Aveling, The Working Class Movement in England [1884]
    (London: Twentieth Century Press, 1896).



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The Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx                                                  USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




     In the American movement she had recognized the strength of the “youthfulness of many of the
working-class agitators and writers,” a generation of brilliant and cosmopolitan orators and activists,
“as well as the various nationalities of the names we have given in these pages—e.g., Black, Morgan,
Mielliez, Macdonald, McGuire, Hruza, Trautwein, Vrooman—show the universality of the Socialist move-
ment in America, and tell of the certainty of its ultimate triumph.” This passionate search for universal-
ity, however, is also the most problematic element within her reflection on women and class struggle,
of which in the United States she had been able to discover further differences, of race and citizen-
ship. Universality had to be continually reconciled with the partiality that Eleanor recognized in the
conditions and struggle of women. If against bourgeois feminism she affirmed, “for us there is only
the working-class movement,” in her critique of society Eleanor recognized that the voice of women
was continually marginalized, set aside, while morality supported the discourse of their social sub-
ordination, expropriating them: “To cultured people, public opinion is still that of man alone, and
the customary is the moral.”50 The allegedly natural vocation of woman was a necessary invention of
this moral order. The truth was that there was no female vocation any more than there was a natural
law of capitalist production.51 Nature appeared as a cultural and political product, functional to the
exploitation and subordination of women.
     The clearest evidence of Eleanor’s American feminist turn with which we have introduced this
essay lies in the speech she gave on November 8, 1886, at Aurora Turner Hall in Chicago, in which she
addressed herself directly to working-class men and offered a different response to the well-known
polemic found in Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party:

       We are told that ‘socialists want to have women in common’. Such an idea is possible only
       in a state of society that looks upon woman as a commodity. Today, woman, alas, is only
       that. She has only too often to sell her womanhood for bread. But to the socialist a woman
       is a human being, and can no more be ‘held’ in common than a socialistic society could
       recognize slavery.52

    It is not a matter of opposing the hypocritical and disguised bourgeois communality of women
with a supposedly frank and free socialist communality, nor is it simply a matter of abolishing women
as mere instruments of production, but of recognizing that when we speak of communality, we are in
fact talking about possession, that even before being exploited producers, women are commodities.
By restoring the subversive value of women’s freedom of desire, Eleanor rejected the male perspective
that is convinced to be able to determine women’s position, behavior, or sex life.

       And these virtuous men who speak of our wanting to hold women in common, who are
       they? The very men who debauch your wives and sisters and daughters. Have you ever
       reflected, you working men, that the very wealth you create is used to debauch your own sisters and
       daughters, even your little children? That is to me the most terrible of all the miseries of our
       modern society: that poor men should create the very wealth that is used by the man of
       ‘family and order’ to ruin the women of your class. We socialists, then, want common
       property in all means of production and distribution, and as woman is not a machine, but
       a human being, she will have her profits and her duties like men, but cannot be held by
       anyone as a piece of property.

    Here she did not only polemicize against the bourgeoisie, as her father had already done, but she
also turned on the workers, showing them how accepting the possession of women was functional to
their own exploitation.
    For her, women’s freedom and the power to end exploitation were inseparable, so she was able to
point to the importance of women’s organization as an essential weapon against the capitalist system, a
political weapon. Yet she became increasingly aware that there was an irremediable rift, on which her


50. Marx, “Women’s Trade Unions in England,” 3.

51. Ibid.

52. Knights of Labor, December 4, 1886. Quoted by Holmes, Eleanor Marx, 182.



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The Proletarian Feminism of Eleanor Marx                                                               USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




political activity remained somewhat suspended. The rift between male workers and women workers,
between the two sexes, was there and could no longer be denied. Her political militancy in the trade
unions, her writings, and even her biography had been the strenuous and courageous attempt to suture
this wound. However, her ultimate discovery, in her political and personal life, was that this was not
possible; it was not even possible in her love affair with Aveling. Eleanor Marx’s dramatic end is also
a sign of this conscious difficulty that does not end with her.
     The way Eleanor Marx articulated together the problems of the labor movement, organization and
women’s freedom contributed “to reshape the conventional concepts and narratives of labor history.”53
Her discussion of women workers articulates a critique of the conception of separate spheres and the
terms in which domesticity and work have historically been given to women; she showed the political
significance of wages54 and gender relations. Her reflections on the union form are also important,
insofar as her critique of a homogeneous and undifferentiated concept of class allowed her to see the
union as a workers’ weapon which, in order to be effective, would have had to definitively overcome its
category divisions, the legacies of crafts,55 and which only the organization of women, their internal
pressure, could transform.
     Her life, cut short by suicide, does not allow us to ascertain how Eleanor would have been able
to hold together her support for trade union struggles with “the emancipation of women as an op-
pressed class.”56 We can only imagine that her socialism would have been challenged. At the same
time, the connections she drew between workers’ struggle and women’s struggle, between class and
gender, between capitalism and patriarchy would become crucial to future feminisms and political
theory. However steadfast in her dedication to the workers’ cause, however opposed to the separate
organization of women, Eleanor Marx represents one of the figures of socialism on both sides of the
Atlantic who were able to give voice to a critical discourse on women’s oppression. She was also able
to underline the importance of their autonomy and independence within the socialist struggle. Her
feminism contained, moreover, the awareness of a contradiction that she had been able to identify,
the necessity of workers’ unity and the impossible coincidence between the sexes: “Women will find
allies in the better sort of men, as the laborers are finding allies among the philosophers, artists, and
poets. But the one has nothing to hope from man as a whole, and the other has nothing to hope from the
middle class as a whole.”57




53. Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
    Press, 1991), 4.

54. Alice Kessler-Harris, Woman’s Wage. Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky,
    1990), 6–33.

55. Ferdinando Fasce, Dal mestiere alla catena. Lavoro e controllo sociale in America 1877–1920 (Genova: Herodote, 1983), 29–46.

56. Marx and Aveling, “Woman Question,” 3.

57. Ibid.



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