Role of women in society and history

Marxism and the Female

The Role of Women

The purpose of this work is to explore the relationship be between men and women since the late 1700's and find the reason as to how the factors in this relationship can be linked to broader issues such as those of "freedom of equality" within society and modernity.

The publishing of the work "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" took place over 150 years ago and was published in London during the year of 1848. This document has been read by many. The Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels and is said to have been strongly influenced by Engel's "practical experience of capitalism." Engels grew up in England during the mid-1840's. Engel's work "The Condition of the Working Class in England" was a critical work focusing on British capitalism. At the time of the writing of the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Frederich Engels were in the latter part of the twenties. Marx and Engels were co-authors of "Holy Family" in 1845 and "The German Ideology" in 1846 before beginning work on the Communist Manifesto. In the work Marx and Friedrich suggested that since machinery had come into existence that women and children could do the work that it previously required the strength of a man to complete. The Marxist belief is that men and women are equal and that there are societies in which this is the case. The Marxist belief is that men have not always been dominant over women but instead sought a historic reason why this had become the case and studied the possible economical causes for this to have happened. Marx and Engels further believed that the "dangerous classes" who could easily be "swept into the movement of a proletarian revolution" but didn't foresee any victory for them.

The poor and downtrodden were only to be held in utter contempt according to the view of Marx and Engels. Women were also set in their prospective place from the viewpoint of Marxism in this work when in Chapter Two the writers state that while men were suited for heartier professions such as building of ships that women were suited to lighter tasks. The family unit is less than not valued by Marx and Friedrich and can be clearly seen as the express their obvious contempt and disdain for the parent-child relationship where education is related is seen in the statement that the "hallowed correlation of parent and child" in little more than "bourgeois claptrap."

Marx and Engels see marriage as a capitalist trap or economical trap believing that no love is present but the marriages made by the capitalist society were marriages of convenience only having been "pre-arranged" by the parents of the couple possibly even from the time of birth and was agreed upon will no consideration of the true happiness of the couple but all consideration being applied toward economical and capitalistic advancements. However, the woman was not advanced because she was required upon the marriage to surrender to her husband all of her property and in actuality became nothing more than something he had obtained the possession of. Other works of this time period give insight as well to the 'role of women'. Frederich Engels wrote in his work "Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State II. The family: The Monogamous Family" that:

As regards the legal equality of husband and wife in marriage, the position is no better. The legal inequality of the two partners, bequeathed to us from earlier social conditions, is not the cause but the effect of the economic oppression of the woman. In the old communistic household, which comprised many couples and their children, the task entrusted to the women of managing the household was as much a public and socially necessary industry as the procuring of food by the men. With the patriarchal family, and still more with the single monogamous family, a change came. Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social production"

Head servant is the woman's expressed role according to Engels and it is documented in written history clearly that the plight of women in the period of time in the 1600's to early 1900's was less than desirable in the areas of equality and of being respected and history reveals a real travesty concerning the woman's loss of property rights upon entering the institution of marriage. Engels went as far to claim that the only way marriage could ever be established as an institution that was inclusive of equality was to destroy all capitalist elements in society. The following is his statement:

Full freedom of marriage can therefore only be generally established when the abolition of capitalist production and of the property relations created by it has removed all the accompanying economic considerations which still exert such a powerful influence on the choice of a marriage partner. For then there is no other motive left except mutual inclination."

Thus is the claim of Engels but in reality the human nature would be inclined to classify itself in other ways that economical and it is most likely that another system of class distinction would arise in the place of the economical concessions that were the deciding factor as to marriages during that time period.

In another work entitled, "The Woman Question" the authors Edward and Eleanor Marx Aveling state that: