Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Inspired by reading the work of James Hinton, Ellis decided to study medicine so that he could lay bare the truth of human nature, including sexual behaviour, as he could not develop any ‘new conception of sex without studying the established conventions of medical science.’68 He returned to England in 1880 and enrolled as a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital in London.

  Ellis pursued his other interests throughout his medical training, writing literary criticism for the Westminster Review, The Indian Review and Modern Review, planning a series on contemporary science, and editing Hinton’s new work, The Lawbreaker (1884). Ellis’s legacy tends to be overshadowed by his monumental and controversial Psychology of Sex, but his contribution to the field of literature was considerable. He was the first to translate Émile Zola’s Germinal into English (1894), and forcefully directed attention in England outwards to new international writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen and Walt Whitman. He was a very good and copious literary reviewer.

  Ellis’s commitment to researching female sexuality and desire, his acknowledgment of its existence, force and power, was not motivated entirely by objectification or prurience. He constantly stressed the great beauty and pleasures of the body and its functions and he fought boldly against sexual prejudice and ignorance all his life. He demanded compassion, not condemnation, and demonstrated that many confused, antiquated notions about the sins or evils of the human body – particularly those of women – were merely biological occurrences within the laws of nature. In this progressive, sexual freethinking he met the minds and shared common cause with Eleanor and Olive.

  Feminism and the struggle for the emancipation of women from patriarchy, as they emerged in Europe from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and as Eleanor and her contemporaries inherited their philosophical, economic and political traditions, were always understood to be an imperative for all people. It was logically assumed and expected that as sexual inequality structured the whole of the functioning of all societies, it concerned men and women equally. This is the argument and assumption of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), as it is the argument of John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women (1869), August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism (1879), and Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Eleanor was studying all of these works in depth and detail during the early 1880s. In the case of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State she participated in its production, and read and discussed the manuscript with the General as he wrote it. Moreover, she was one of the women its author loved who inspired it. Hers was the case for the role of free love in radical social movements, hers the struggle for emancipation from patriarchy.

  The necessity for women’s emancipation as a primary requisite for free and equal societies is also a foundational precept of Marx’s own work.69 Grieving for Marx and concerned about the future of his friend’s daughters, Engels was prompted to explore the most fundamental form of patriarchy that begins close to home: the father–daughter relationship, and how mothers are co-opted to its cause.

  The relationships between Eleanor and her bohemian Bloomsbury circle (including Schreiner, Havelock Ellis, Shaw, Aveling), and their healthy enmities with worthy opponents such as Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, demonstrate, shockingly, the degree to which the active inclusion and participation of men in feminism later got lost, or went missing, after the First World War.

  Havelock Ellis, Engels and Shaw were amongst a talented cohort of men who thought deeply about their relationships with women, worked together professionally and politically with women, and made major contributions to feminism in the nineteenth century. However wrongheaded some of their conclusions, these were men genuinely interested in challenging universal patriarchy, and willing to roll up their sleeves to actively participate in a struggle for emancipation they regarded as necessary to their own well-being as that of women. In different ways these were also men who understood profoundly the demands patriarchy made on them to become and remain emotionally underdeveloped and hypocrites in their own homes. Sexual revolution had to begin at home; as long as women were unfree, so were men.

  12

  Peculiar Views on Love, etc.

  ‘It is a curious fact,’ wrote Engels:

  that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes into the foreground. With one set of people as a revolutionary progress, as a shaking off of old traditional fetters, no longer necessary; with others as a welcome doctrine, comfortably covering all sorts of free and easy practices between man and woman.1

  The latter, in Engels’s view, is indulgent philistinism; the former, an attempt to loosen the bounds of convention, unfetter love and make women and men free of the double standards of patriarchy. One promises a radical rearrangement of relations between men and women, holding out the promise of empowering those excluded from the privileges of influence and wealth; the other is a reactionary rerun of existing convention, masquerading as morality, working in the interests of those already in power.

  In 1884, when she was twenty-nine, the question of free love came into the foreground of Eleanor’s life. In June, she wrote to Laura:

  I must give you some other news – unless Engels has forestalled me – You must have known, I fancy, for some time that I am very fond of Edward Aveling – and he says he is fond of me – so we are going to ‘set up’ together . . . I need not say that this resolution has been no easy one for me to arrive at. But I think it for the best. I should be very anxious to hear from you. Do not misjudge us – He is very good – and you must not think too badly of either of us.2

  By July Eleanor and Edward had found rooms to rent at 55 Great Russell Street, directly opposite the entrance gates to the British Museum. They signed the lease and moved in on 18 July. With characteristic generosity the General gave them a handsome £50 as a ‘wedding present’ towards their new home and a honeymoon.

  Edward had also just come into a modest legacy from his father, who died on 3 July. It was a busy week: six days after they moved into their new lodgings Eleanor and Edward joined the launch of the Westminster branch of the Democratic Federation. Tussy told her sister that she and Edward were going to Derbyshire in the middle of July by way of a honeymoon, ‘then we return to London – and will give our “friends” a chance of cutting us or not, just as they please. Do write soon, Laura, and don’t misunderstand him. If you knew what his position is, I know you would not . . . I shall await a line from you and Paul very anxiously.’3

  Edward’s ‘position’, he told Tussy, was that he was a married man separated from his difficult wife Bell, who refused to agree to a divorce because of her religious beliefs. Tussy put the case openly to her friends. Ellis commented, ‘I think we regarded the free union which was open and public as based on principle.’4 Tussy was anxious not to compromise her women friends. She wrote to Dollie, now Mrs Radford since she and Ernest had married, conventionally, in July 1883:

  Well then this is it – I am going to live with Edward Aveling as his wife. You know he is married, and that I cannot be his wife legally, but it will be a true marriage to me – just as much as if a dozen registrars had officiated . . . E had not seen his wife for many, many years when I met him, and that he was not unjustified in leaving her you will best understand when I tell you that Mr Engels, my father’s oldest friend, and Helen who has been as a mother to us, approve of what I am about to do – and are perfectly satisfied . . . In three weeks we are going away for some little time . . . when we return we shall set up housekeeping together, and if love, a perfect sympathy in taste and work and a striving for the same ends can make people happy, we shall be so . . . I shall quite understand if you think the position one you cannot accept, and I shall think of you both with no less affection if we do not any longer count you amongst our immediate friends.5

  Tussy told Dollie that while she felt she was doing nothing wrong, she could understand that people brought
up differently, ‘with all the old ideas and prejudices’,6 might think her very immoral. ‘You know I have the power very strongly developed of seeing things from the “other side”.’7 Her power of seeing things from the other side made Tussy careful to try not to cause offence. She had recently become friends with kindred soul Edith Nesbit (Mrs Bland), poet and author of children’s books, married to Hubert Bland. When Edith invited Eleanor to visit her home, Tussy replied:

  I feel it is only right that before I avail myself of your very kind invitation I should make my present position quite clear to you . . . I am . . . with Edward Aveling, and henceforth we are going to be together – true husband and true wife, I hope, though I cannot be his wife legally. – He is, you probably know, a married man. I could not bear that one I feel such deep sympathy for as yourself should think ill of, or misunderstand us. I have not come between husband and wife.8

  In this case, Eleanor’s prudence was comically misplaced. Mr and Mrs Bland’s unconventional domestic arrangements and sexually complicated marriage were notorious and Edith was the last person to judge harshly Eleanor’s dilemma. Elsewhere, her concern was well founded. Eleanor’s invitation to Beatrice Potter to visit her at home was politely declined, as Potter recorded in her diary: ‘Asked me to come and see her. Exactly the life and character I should like to study. Unfortunately one cannot mix with human beings without becoming more or less connected with them.’9

  Eleanor’s decision to live openly with Aveling was not lightly taken, nor did she underestimate the difficulties of the position. Like George Eliot (Marian Evans), Eleanor formally informed her friends of her decision and gave them the option to withdraw from social connection with her. But there the likeness ends. Tussy was more robust, and didn’t suffer from the excruciating anxiety about what other people thought of her that turned Eliot into a virtual recluse when she set up with George Henry Lewes.

  Unremarkable today, these were radical actions in the 1880s. What Eleanor did share with George Eliot was the principle that other people should not be compelled to accept her moral choices. Aveling, on the other hand, didn’t have to send a single letter to anybody to explain or justify his position. That the same social conventions did not apply to him only underlined the double standards of patriarchal convention.

  Eleanor was justly anxious about how her decision might affect her political reputation. She knew the opponents of socialism, and women’s emancipation, could and would use her self-avowedly feminist free-love union as negative publicity. Tussy had also experienced first-hand the strong tendency towards social conservatism in Christian socialism. Her decision to live with Edward as his wife opened her to criticism and attack from political left, right and centre; from without and within her own movement.

  Eleanor’s correspondence with Scottish engineer and activist John Mahon illustrates the vulnerability to which she was exposing her public life. Mahon, a decade younger than Tussy, co-founded the Scottish Land and Labour League:

  It seems only right that I should acquaint you, both . . . as a friend and fellow-worker in the good cause, with the important step I have just taken . . . We are doing no human being the smallest wrong. Dr Aveling is morally as free as if the bond that tied him years ago, and that had been severed for years before I ever met him, had never existed. We have both felt that we were justified in setting aside all the false and really immoral bourgeois conventionalities . . . May I hope that you will be amongst those who have not misunderstood our motives? Anyhow, it is only right that as one of our most active and useful Scottish propagandists you should know.10

  Engels worried that Tussy underestimated the force of social opprobrium that her decision might attract from her socialist allies, never mind political opponents. He wrote to Laura describing how Tussy had, finally, brought Edward to Regent’s Park Road to make a formal declaration of her relationship to him and Lenchen, in loco parentis:

  Of course . . . [we] have been fully aware of what was going on for a considerable time and had a good laugh at these poor innocents who thought all the time that we had no eyes, and who did not approach the quart d’heure de Rabelais [moment of confession] without a certain funk. However, we soon got them over that. In fact, had Tussy asked my advice before she leaped, I might have considered it my duty to expatiate upon the various possible and unavoidable consequences of this step, but when it was all settled, the best thing for them was to have it out at once before other people could take advantage of its being kept in the dark . . . 11

  Engels understood that as a man patriarchy allowed him sexual double standards that would not be tolerated in a woman, as he demonstrated in his writings. Whilst reflecting on Tussy’s predicament and trying to protect and publicly support her, Engels was completing The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, published in October 1884.

  Grief at losing Marx prompted the General to write this book. Lost and miserable without his soulmate, glumly sifting through the jumbles of papers, driven to distraction by the disorder in which Marx had left his work, the General stumbled upon Marx’s annotations and notes on the work of American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan on the origins of ancient society. He immediately cheered up. ‘There is a definitive book,’ he wrote enthusiastically, ‘as definitive as Darwin’s was in the case of biology – on the primitive state of society.’12

  The General’s class and social contradictions as a socialist man would and could play out differently in Eleanor as a socialist woman. Marx and Morgan’s was the theory; Eleanor’s life was the practice. Engels studied the historical sources with his usual scholarly rigour, but it was observing at close quarters the modern lives of Eleanor and her friends that inspired him to think about sex, socialism, free love and revolution in the early 1880s.

  The demands of being a father protective of his daughter’s sexuality in a patriarchal society had prevented Marx from properly engaging with Tussy on the question of the relationships between her political, public, private and sexual lives. He’d thought only to keep her, wisely it might be argued, away from an early marriage; and he succeeded. Others, like economist and historian Max Beer, thought Marx a sexual conservative who tolerated but did not approve of the General’s domestic arrangements:

  Marx, one of the greatest revolutionists that ever lived, was in point of moral rectitude as conservative and punctilious as his Rabbinic forebears. Breeding tells. I once asked my old friend Eduard Bernstein about these relations and he replied, ‘In the home of the Marxes they used to speak about Engels’ family life as in the home of Friedrich Schiller about Goethe’s amorous adventures.13

  The General wrote frankly to fellow German socialist Eduard Bernstein about the new living arrangements of the youngest, chosen Marx: ‘My London is a little Paris’ – which Bernstein interpreted a bit stiffly to mean that, ‘A somewhat free conception of life had perhaps permeated certain circles of London society.’14

  Now that her father was dead, the ceiling was lifted from Tussy’s sky. There was acute grief but also new possibility. Released from Marx’s protectiveness, the General could play a different role for Tussy, that of a paternal figure without the complications of being her real father. Her father and the General theorised about the emancipation of women and the possible future forms of free love. They made some significant experiments with these ideas in their personal lives but, as Victorian patriarchs, were largely immune from criticism.

  Eleanor’s historical role was to put free love to the practical test of evidence-based experience. ‘The woman question’ was in fact a multiplicity of questions. How should freethinkers, atheists and socialists measure their new ways of living against principle? How could equality be achieved in the workplace and the home? What constituted equality in marriage, bearing and raising children and running households together? Couples wanted to know what was the right thing to do and how to do it. Was there, for example, an ideal socialist home? Marjorie Davidson said to Shaw, ‘I don’t think we should have serva
nts,’ and wondered if it was ‘an open question’.15

  The General hoped for the best and prepared for the worst. Since Mohr’s death, the General and Laura had become frequent corres­pondents. This began as a consequence of the need to settle Marx’s estate and the future of the manuscripts, but the General also felt a great duty of care to look after the sisters. ‘I hope,’ he wrote to Laura,

  they will continue as happy as they seem now; I like Edward very much and think it will be a good thing for him to come more into contact with other people besides the literary and lecturing circle in which he moved; he has a good foundation of solid studies and felt himself out of place amongst the extremely superficial lot amongst whom fate had thrown him.

  Annie Besant, one of Aveling’s previous circle, might well object to being called one of this extremely superficial lot. Tenacious in all things, she wasn’t going to let socialism take Aveling without a fight. Mahon sent Tussy a clipping from the National Reformer by Besant, published at the end of December 1883: ‘My name is being used by a Miss Eleanor Marx . . . to give authority to a gross and scandalous libel on Dr Edward Aveling . . . Warning should be given of strangers who try and creep into our movement with the object of treacherously sowing discord therein.’16 Eleanor warmed to the fight, welcoming attack from ‘Mrs Besant, from whom I consider it the best compliment’. The reason for her animosity was evident: