Eleanor Marx and women today

Dana Mills, lecturer in political theory at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, discusses Eleanor Marx and socialist feminism.

Dana Mills

Political Theorist

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Dana Mills

Political Theorist

17 Nov 2022

Key Points

As a young woman, Eleanor Marx was influenced by her father, Karl Marx, as well as Friedrich Engels and the Burns sisters.
For Eleanor, socialism and feminism were inseparable. Rachel Holmes’ new biography of Eleanor Marx positions her as the foremost thinker of socialist feminism at the end of the 19th century.
She played a key role as a grassroots organiser in the workers’ movement, helping to create the trade union that would become Britain’s largest today.

Early influences

(Jenny Julia) Eleanor Marx (later Marx-Aveling) by Grace Black (later Grace Human). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Eleanor Marx was Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, a socialist-feminist revolutionary activist, writer and organiser in the 19th century. She was the only Marx born in England. Karl Marx was a political refugee who found a home in Victorian London. Eleanor was born when he was working on Das Kapital, which would be a social-economic book that would change the entire world.

Most of the Marx children died due to a lack of good nutrition and healthcare, so Eleanor, the youngest, was the family favourite and especially her father’s favourite. Karl spent a lot of time with her when she was growing up and explained to her the principles on which he was working, which he explained through stories so that she could understand.

When Eleanor was a young woman, she started organising with her father and going with him to meetings, so she learned the process of organising from the bottom up. But she was also very much influenced by Friedrich Engels, who she saw as her second father, and by two women with whom he had romantic connections, both working-class women, known as the Burns sisters.

The foremother of socialist feminism

Eleanor then became what she is and what we understand her as today: the foremother of socialist feminism. Rachel Holmes’ new biography of Eleanor Marx positions her as the foremost thinker of socialist feminism at the end of the 19th century. On the one hand, she got the principles of socialism from her father, Karl Marx. But on the other hand, she saw that women in Victorian Britain had a lot of challenges to deal with, which were not experienced by men. She saw that the working conditions of women were incredibly hard. In addition, they had to labour in the home and were not compensated. So Eleanor learned from her experience and the experience of people like her what it meant to be dually oppressed: once by capitalism, and again by patriarchy.

Socialism and feminism as inseparable

It isn’t easy to reconcile socialism with feminism, and this is a question that still haunts us today. But for Eleanor Marx, these two were inseparable. You can’t resolve one without looking at the other; you cannot just talk about the working conditions of workers without acknowledging that women are the most oppressed within the category of workers.

But on the other hand, you can’t just talk about feminism as something that demands legal reforms through the State without acknowledging that capitalism sustains inequality. In an 1886 text, Eleanor Marx wrote: ‘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.’

Eleanor Marx saw feminism and socialism as two things that are inseparable. In her view, it’s in everyone’s interest to break down capitalism and the patriarchy, because no one benefits when women are oppressed, especially when working women are oppressed.

Were bourgeois women oppressed?

Bourgeois women had an easier ride than their working-class sisters, so they weren’t as oppressed. At the same time, even bourgeois women in Victorian Britain did not have very easy lives. They were barred from education. They were barred from political participation. Eleanor Marx never lived to see women get the vote. She saw that inequality can be experienced in multiple layers.

But bourgeois women did have many advantages that working women didn’t have; indeed, bourgeois women often exploited the labour of working-class women. So Eleanor Marx understood that feminism couldn’t just focus on bourgeois women, although they had access to many spheres of influence that working-class women didn’t have. She knew that we needed to think about those most oppressed in society: working-class women.

A grassroots organiser

Eleanor Marx comes into her political consciousness in the strongest way after her father dies in 1883. In the 1880s, there’s a series of grassroots strikes in Britain, including strikes led by the gas workers, the chain makers and those in other forms of manual labour. People were organising themselves to go on strike.

Eleanor Marx was already politically involved and sure of her ideology, so she became a very important organiser in these strikes that later became known as “new trade unionism”. Instead of organising workers from the top down, with officials sitting in offices and telling workers what to do, trade unions became a way for workers to organise themselves. This is an important moment in the history of Britain and in Eleanor’s biography.

Mrs Eleanor Marx Aveling, daughter of Karl Marx. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

She worked within these strikes, always attentive to the needs of the people with whom she organised. She didn’t impose her own consciousness but listened and learned. From the 1880s and into the 1890s, she became a very big force in these organisations. The Gas Workers’ Union, which she helped found in the 1890s, is now the GMB, which is the largest trade union in Britain, with more members than all political parties put together. This new trade unionism gave Britain the labour movement as we know it today, and also became the grounds on which the Labour Party was founded.

A charismatic personality

Eleanor Marx was a much-loved person and very popular in various circles. She was very charismatic. She loved theatre and wanted to be an actor. In the Marx household, plays were enacted in the family living room. Karl Marx used to practice his English by reading Shakespeare, an author that Eleanor also loved.

She was a talented speaker and had a naturally magnetic personality. Although she came from a very different background to many of the people with whom she worked, she never condescended to them, and she felt very close to them. She was also the only Marx to pronounce the Jewish roots of the family. She said that she was most at home organising in the East End with her fellow Jewish workmen.

Eleanor also stood up against antisemitism and racism within the labour movement. In the 1890s, many British workers wanted to ban Jewish workers from seeking refuge and coming to Britain to work. Eleanor stood up to this by saying: I am a Jewess. In doing so, she brought a lot of her convictions together.

Personal challenges

Feminism is a tough field to work with, something that we still know today, because it brings the personal to the forefront of what we organise in the political sphere. Eleanor had a complicated personal life. She was very close with her father, but he always had one advantage over her: he was a man and she was not. He had access to many things that she’d never had.

Towards the end of her life, she met a man called Edward Aveling who was like her, a radical, but didn’t have her talent, nor did he have her personality. He was very jealous of her, her success and the effortless way she was able to organise people. Eleanor died very tragically, in 1898, before she managed to see a lot of the processes for which she was organising take hold.

In the new biography of her by Rachel Holmes, there’s evidence that suggests she was murdered, although for the last hundred years it was assumed that she committed suicide because she discovered that Aveling, with whom she lived, actually married a younger woman. Holmes reveals that it’s unclear whether he murdered her or indeed she committed suicide. Holmes shows very persuasively that one way or another, he was responsible for her death, and tried to depress her, was very unsupportive of her work, although he was interested in the same fields. He always hindered her success and he always tried to hold her back, something that we still know from successful women the world round, that having a husband who is supportive of a very talented wife is something that is hard to find. So Eleanor felt very oppressed in the most intimate place, the home, and that brought her eventual untimely death. We will never know exactly what happened in the last few hours of her life, but it’s very clear that Edward Aveling is responsible for her death.

Socialist-feminist legacy

Eleanor Marx teaches us many important lessons today. First, she shows us that we cannot separate socialism from feminism; we cannot argue for the liberation of women and ignore other fields in which women might be oppressed. This, of course, includes race – Eleanor was involved with the abolitionist movement of her time, and she was very attentive to racism and other forms of oppression.

Eleanor is also a revolutionary to the core. As the daughter of Karl Marx, she really got that at every stage of her education: we must demand emancipation and revolution for all, insisting on revolutionary tendencies rather than just reforms. Of course, she was very aware of the need to alleviate the work of working-class people in her time. But she was also insistent on the need to achieve freedom and justice for all. Rachel Holmes claims her as the foremother of socialist feminism. And this is something that we need to remember when we consider how to take feminism forward. Is it enough to just talk about representation? Is it enough to just talk about political emancipation? She will always bring us back to economics and how we can bring justice.

The influence of Friedrich Engels

Eleanor Aveling (Marx). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Eleanor Marx had a very close relationship with Friedrich Engels, whom she called Uncle Angel. In many ways, he influenced her intellectually as much as her father. Engels wrote about feminism very early on. Karl Marx was often silent about the woman question, and in his own household he was not the most feminist of men. But Engels lived a much more emancipated life and shared his life with two working-class women, so his experience of what working-class women went through was much more immediate than Karl Marx’s.

Eleanor’s mother, an important revolutionary writer and thinker in her own right, spent much of her life giving birth to children who didn’t survive and managing the household. She was completely emptied of her intellectual tendencies, and Eleanor’s two older sisters, Jenny and Laura, also experienced a similar fate.

But Engels, through his relationship with the Burns sisters, and his attentiveness to women of the working-class movement, really gave Eleanor the push to understand gender and class as something that is interlinked and cannot be separated. They were incredibly close their entire life. He influenced and supported her very generously when she tried to be an actress but wasn’t very successful. He used to buy a lot of tickets so that she wouldn’t act in front of empty halls. Engels was like a second father to her.

A role model for women

Eleanor Marx can and should be a role model for today’s women because she insisted on a lot of principles that she was brought up with but developed further throughout her life. Her father’s education was really important. But just as important was her education in the labour movement, working with women and men who suffered incredibly hard lives. She was open-hearted and open-minded towards them. Reading her biography has taught me how to listen better to organisations around me, and how to be a better writer and thinker when processes are happening around the world. Eleanor is a role model because of her influence on history, but also because she shows us how to pay attention to bottom-up processes.