THE historic contribution to the cause of women’s emancipation by Friedrich Engels, co-founder along with Marx, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism, has not dimmed with the passage of time. It continues to light the path of struggle being waged by millions of women across the world against systemic discrimination and violence which prevails even in the most developed capitalist societies.

His work challenged and exposed the lies and deceptions concocted by the ruling classes of any given class based society over centuries to justify the subordinate status of women such as “biological and physiological factors’, “religious texts and beliefs of women’s subordinate status” “nature and natural causes”  etc. Engels work thoroughly exposed such theories.

It was also Engels who made the most scathing indictment of the barbaric cruelties of “juvenile stage of capitalist exploitation” as he later described it, in its exploitation of female and child labour and set a high standard through his writing of “ finding truth from facts.”

FEMALE AND CHILD LABOUR

Engels was just 24 years old when he wrote what can be described as a classic, a treatise against capitalist exploitation of labour, The Condition of the Working Class in England. He was helped in this project by Mary Burns, an Irish working class girl who later became his life partner. In his moving dedication of the book to the “working classes of Britain” he writes “I have studied various official and non-official documents – I have not been satisfied with this. I wanted more than an abstract knowledge of my subject I wanted to see you in your homes, to observe you in your every day life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances…” The combination of direct observation and official documents resulted in the most detailed exposure of the brutalities of capitalism.

Specifically Engels turned his attention to the introduction of female and child labour in textile and garment industries in England. This was perhaps the first time that such a detailed picture emerged of the horrific conditions under which women and children were forced to work. In an analysis of how machines are replacing men and how female and child labour are being employed, Engels studied the various work processes. For example, where the main job was “piecing together broken threads in spinning which required ‘not muscular strength but flexibility of the finger’ women and children work more cheaply and in these branches better than men and take their place.” He assessed that in the cotton  mills, females were 56 per cent of the workforce, in the woolen mills 69 per cent, in the silk and flax spinning mills 7O per cent and that this led to increased profits for the capitalist.

He describes the sexual harassment of women who were threatened with dismissal by bosses who let “nothing interfere with their vested rights.” His exposure of the conditions of women and children certainly helped to bring reforms in the conditions of work.

The exploitative relation between labour and capital is not restricted to the workplace but affects all aspects of a worker’s life. The young Engels did not limit himself to the study of work conditions but also to the wider impact of capitalist industrialisation on the families of workers, the brutalisation of the lives of working women and children and the break up of proletarian families backed by the most retrograde laws. It was the early and direct experience of the lives of proletarian families which shaped his later critique of the hypocrisy of the bourgeois family under capitalism.

There were sections of workers who were against the employment of women as it was thought that they were taking away male jobs. While this issue is not addressed by Engels in this particular book, he and Marx made their position clear in support of women’s work on several occasions. In 1866, Marx and he opposed a resolution which was moved by some workers associations in favour of banning women from paid employment.  Decades later the issue was raised again by some leaders of trade unions. Writing to Gertrude Guillame Shak in 1885, he said “equal wages for equal work to either sex are as far as I know are demanded by all Socialists... that the working woman needs special protection against capitalist exploitation because of her special physiological functions seems obvious to me.. The Second International in 1886 adopted a resolution       “it is the duty of male workers to admit female workers as equal in their ranks on the principle of equal pay for equal work”….

ROOTS OF WOMEN’S OPPRESSION
The fundamental difference between Engels and social reformers of his time in different parts of the world, including in India who worked against the cruelties against women, was that Engels shone the light on the root causes of women’s secondary status and by identifying the historical circumstances, causes and connections he showed the way for fundamental social change. The culmination of his work in this direction was the seminal publication entitled Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in the light of the research by Lewis H Morgan. The first edition was published in 1884, a year after Marx had died. The publication was based in the main on the work done by Morgan, an American anthropologist, in his book called Ancient Society: Study of Seneca Iroquis Tribes.

Using the data provided by Morgan through his over forty years of work among the tribal communities and also the extensive notes earlier made by Marx on Morgan’s work, Engels developed an analysis of the “enslavement” of women, linked to the development of class society which persists in capitalist societies till today. Engels major contribution was that he placed the “women’s question” within a materialist conception of history which views the development of human society through the dialectical links between development of productive forces and control over the means of production with evolving social relations, including between men and women and the institution of the family. He showed how the earlier “mother right societies” where descent was decided through the mother were more equal because at the time there was no social surplus produced given the low level of productive forces. In such ancient societies, women had a central role in the production of the means of existence and reproduction, which was critical for the survival of the species. In fact, recent research shows that women were not just procurers of food but also hunters.

The evolving forms of the family and its different stages from a system of clans where all men belonged to all women and vice versa, to a gradual prohibition of sexual relations by generations, by mother gens and father gens, and then narrower forms of group marriage to pairing marriage was mainly through natural selection. Engels writes “Natural selection with its progressive exclusions from the marriage community had accomplished its task... unless new social forces came into play there was no reason why a new form of family should arise…”

It was with the development of productive forces and of a surplus over and above the needs of immediate survival, that wrought fundamental changes into those societies with ‘new social forces coming into play.’ The first class antagonism appeared with some gaining control of the instruments of production and the surplus, turning what was hitherto held collectively by the clan or the tribe into private property. The position of women changed. It was the men who had control over the instruments of production outside the domestic sphere. The issue of inheritance became paramount, evidence that the progeny was of the male property holder could only be established if the man gained control of the woman herself and her sexuality. As Engels put it              “In order to make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore of the paternity of the children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights.” the “monogamous family” became the norm. As Engels wrote “Monogamy...was the first form of the family to be based not on natural but on economic conditions, on the victory of private property over primitive natural common property.” Further              “The first class antagonism which appeared in history coincides with the development of antagonism between men and women in monogamous marriage and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.” “The overthrow of mother-right was the world historic defeat of the female sex.”

We now know that societies developed in different ways not necessarily in the different stages defined by Morgan and later developed by Engels. The actual process of male takeover of the means of production and the resistance of women against their enslavement through the thousands of years it took, are not known although myths and legends of different cultures including in India provide examples that do reflect the transformation through the depiction of proud independent, all powerful goddesses being reduced to just the consorts of the more powerful male gods. There are gaps in research into ancient societies but the research done in the last 150 years have not required any major revision in the basic analysis done by Engels. On the contrary, examples of the role of women playing a more critical role in that period including women’s role in the development of agriculture only strengthen the basic analysis. Engels established the fundamental truth that there is nothing eternal or “natural” about the subordinate position of women; that her enslavement is directly linked to class based societies driven by private ownership over the means of production and the development of private property; and therefore that a revolution that eliminates such private ownership and the amassing of private property leads the road to women’s emancipation.

CRITIQUE OF THE FAMILY UNDER CAPITALISM
AND THE SEX BASED DIVISION OF LABOUR

It was in his later writings that Engels developed the original statement made by Marx and him in a draft of The German ideology in   1846 that “the first division of labour is that between man and woman for the propagation of children.” In ancient society as we have seen, as part of the struggle for survival the tasks done by women and men were neither inferior nor superior  but were a division of work. It is later with the development of class society that the division of sex based division of labour gets transformed in multiple ways into an instrument for the subordination of women with the reproduction of labour and labour power seen as a “woman’s job”  converted into a private service performed by women for a  “privatized” family.

Engels writes “If the woman carries out her duty in the private service of the family she remains excluded from public production and unable to earn; if she wants to take part in public production and earn independently she cannot carry out her family duties... the modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.” Engels elsewhere writes of the dual burdens on working women.

Whereas capitalism has provided avenues for women’s productive work outside the domestic sphere far in advance of what was available when Engels was writing, enhancing avenues for her economic independence the almost exclusive responsibility on women of reproduction of labour power in an unequal and unjust sex based division of labour continues today even in the most advanced capitalist societies. This in turn has an impact on the nature of employment avenues for women. Now there are not many industries or sectors which can be considered “male domains” as earlier. Nevertheless, in spite of women having breached many of these barriers, wages and incomes earned by women are still at least one third less on average than what men earn. In many countries including our own, dominant cultures promote the primary role of women as “householders.” In fact the unpaid work done by women in care services have increased with the advent of neoliberal policies and the retreat of governments from provisions of free health care, provisions for child care, the old and the sick.

It was in a challenge to this unjust and unequal sex based division of labour that Engels developed the idea that Marx and Engels had expressed in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. “The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, (socialist slogan of common ownership of the means of production) and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.”

Engels advanced the Socialist alternative to the unequal sex based division of labour that (1) the common ownership of the means of production and the abolition of private property would end the material basis for the patriarchal monogamous family as it exists and “the single family ceases to be an economic unit of society” (2) Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry, the care and education of children becomes a public affair…” It is these alternatives that 50 years later were implemented in the land of the first Socialist revolution under the leadership of Lenin. What was a dream for women when Engels was writing started becoming real in the early years of the Russian revolution. The experience showed that indeed the defeat of capitalism and the establishment of a Socialist system is the only way for women’s emancipation.

In their writings both Marx and Engels were sharply critical with no holds barred about the hypocrisy and double standards prevalent in patriarchal families. Engels writes that in a family “within the possessing classes... he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat”.. “the woman is the head servant”, holding that it is property and the rights to property which determines the nature of the relationships in capitalist families leading to violence against women. Engels differentiated between families of the upper classes and those of the proletariat “now that largescale industry has taken the wife out of the home into the factory and made her often the bread winner..no basis for any kind of male supremacy remain” but recognized that “except perhaps of something of the brutality towards women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy.”

Engels has been accused by some present day activists of promoting a kind of “economic determinism” which ignored factors such as culture, male supremacist ideologies and so on. Engels himself had explained in a letter to J Bloch in 1890 “If anyone says that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms the proposition into a...senseless phrase…Marx and I are ourselves to blame for the fact that younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-a-vis our adversaries who denied it and we had not always the time, place or opportunity to give their due to other elements...there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant historical event.” These intersecting forces would include issues like the role of male supremacist practices and ideologies through religion, culture, tradition which are mentioned in various places in his writings.

By bringing together all the work on historical materialism done by both Marx and himself and taking it forward into a concrete analysis of the material basis for women’s secondary status and also pointing to the way forward, women of the world owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Engels.