Consequently Eleanor proposed, ‘Lissagaray’s History of the Commune is the only authentic and reliable history as yet written of the most memorable movement of modern times.’14 Eleanor’s preface to this edition is a clear statement of her internationalism in the 1880s. She follows her father’s interpretation of the Commune as ‘the first attempt of the proletariat to govern itself’ and its potential for ‘the substitution of true co-operative, ie. Communistic, for capitalistic production’, but departs from and develops her analysis further by proposing international collectivism: ‘the participation in this Revolution of workers of all countries meant the internationalising, not only the nationalizing of the land and of private property.’15
Revising Lissagaray’s book was familiar territory but later in the year Tussy revealed to Peter Lavrov her new venture into the world of ghostwriting, which she called ‘hackwork’. ‘I am writing a biography and critical sketch of the artist Alma Tadema for someone who will publish it under his own name, not mine!’16 Invited as the sidebar wife, ghostwriting, speech-writing, underwriting articles she’d written with Edward’s name when he’d never touched them: Tussy seemed to be getting into a habit of doing things in – or with – the name of a man. But this trouser-writing paid and she needed the money. Tussy was actually good at earning money, as her ability to juggle her paid freelance work demonstrates. She ‘imagined herself to be in financial difficulties’;17 in fact, Aveling was her financial difficulty. As fast as she could earn money from journalism, translation, research, teaching and hackwork, he spent it. She was thrifty for herself and generous to others, he profligate. But she was the chief breadwinner and for Tussy this constituted a form of economic independence.
The year 1886 was Eleanor’s thirty-first. She saw it in with a memorable birthday. Over the Christmas season Tussy’s friends received invitations to a performance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House – or Nora, as the play was called at the time – to be given in Tussy and Edward’s living room at 55 Great Russell Street on 15 January. It was a Friday, so the plan was to party through the night in celebration of her birthday after the staged reading. Tussy urged Havelock Ellis to try and come. ‘I feel,’ she wrote to him, ‘I must do something to make people understand our Ibsen a little more than they do, and I know by experience that a play read to them often affects people more than when they read by themselves.’ Fifty years later Shaw recalled that:
at the first performance of A Doll’s House in England, on a first floor in a Bloomsbury lodging house, Karl Marx’s youngest daughter played Nora Helmer and I impersonated Krogstadt at her request with a very vague notion of what it was all about.18
Eleanor’s close friend May Morris, daughter of William, took the role of Christine Linde and Edward, inevitably, played Torvald Helmer. Shaw had pledged an unconventional ‘Mystic Betrothal’ to May Morris the previous year, adding frisson to their playing opposite each other as hard-won lovers.
May Morris was a brilliant textile designer with an extraordinary talent for the arts of embroidery and tapestry. She also secretly desired and adored Tussy, though no one knew it until many years later. May gave Tussy as many gifts as she would accept, and Tussy’s lodgings were adorned with modern William Morris furnishings and fabrics.
May Morris studied at the National Art Training School (later Royal College of Art, South Kensington) and combined artistic flair with a good business sense and political commitment. In 1884 she joined the SDF Hammersmith branch, following her father and Tussy in the breakaway formation of the Socialist League in 1885. At the beginning of 1886 she was just about to be appointed head of embroidery at Morris & Co., as well as producing wallpaper designs, at which she also excelled. In time, she became general manager of her father’s hugely successful interior design, furnishings and fabrics business run on collective principles. To William’s satisfaction, May combined artistic ability with a capacity for the practical sides of commerce that far exceeded his own. As he cheerfully boasted, May was a far better businessman than he was.
Curiously, no one remembered who played Dr Rank on this occasion. Whatever the identity of Nora/Eleanor’s loyal, undeclared admirer, this event was a landmark in Eleanor’s declared passion for Ibsen in general and A Doll’s House in particular. Eleanor’s first written reference to the play is to her sister in June 1884. She’d recently been introduced to the Swedish writer Ann Edgren, at the time on a visit to England, and admired her short stories and novels. Edgren was about to visit Paris and Tussy asked Laura to meet her and introduce her to the Parisian socialist demi-monde:
It is strange how immensely rich Scandinavia is just now in authors! . . . I send you an English translation of the Norwegian (this is rather Irish!) Ibsen’s splendid play Nora. I don’t say anything about it, because I know how you will appreciate it.19
Edward was also a firm admirer, stating in his Today column that Ibsen ‘sees our lop-sided modern society suffering from too much man, and he has been born the women’s poet’.20 Ibsen’s aim, Edward claims, is to revolutionise the marriage relationship – an ambition with which he identifies. Indeed.
The intense conflict and contradictions of contemporary marriage that Ibsen gave life to on the stage mirrored the struggles between Eleanor and Edward. Writing to Shaw and telling him he had to take the role of Krogstad, Tussy stressed how much Ibsen’s new naturalism brought the magnitude of private personal themes into the public realm of the modern stage:
I wish some really great actors would try Ibsen. The more I study the greater I think him. How odd it is that people complain that his plays ‘have no end’ but just leave you where you were, that he gives no solution to the problem he has set you! As if in life things ‘ended’ off either comfortably or uncomfortably. We play through our little dramas, and comedies, and tragedies, and farces and then begin it all over again. If we could find solutions to the problems of our lives things would be easier in this weary world.21
Tussy continued to twin her interest in modern theatre with political performance. In March the anniversary of the Paris Commune was celebrated in Moorgate, drawing a bigger audience than ever before. The SL, SDF and anarchists suspended animosities to make it a collective event. Eleanor spoke alongside Tom Mann of the SDF, fellow Leaguer Frank Kitz and Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist released that year from prison in France and now living in London. Hyndman, Morris, John Burns, Kautsky and Charlotte Wilson also spoke. By unanimous agreement Eleanor’s was the best speech of the evening and the finest of her political career so far. Her opponents praised the excellence of this address, including Hyndman, who described it as ‘one of the finest speeches I ever heard’:22
The woman seemed inspired with some of the eloquence of the old prophets of her race as she spoke of the eternal life gained by those who fought and fell in the great cause of the uplifting of humanity: an eternal life in the material and intellectual improvement of countless generations of mankind.23
But it was the role of womankind Eleanor spoke about. Matilda Hyndman, always a quiet ally of Eleanor’s politics, must have inwardly cheered her on this occasion as she made the central role of women in the Paris Commune and socialism the subject of her speech. This was the first time women’s leadership of the Commune was the subject of an anniversary address.
Eleanor drew a confident portrait of Communard women and the women’s unions and, from their example, raised the need for women’s emancipation as necessary to achieving the aims of the socialist movement. Not just integral or desirable, but a precondition for the progress of meaningful social change. She was the only person on the platform that night to address the questions of sexual difference and gender inequality but, resoundingly, the most well-received speaker. The audience, from many different classes and walks of life, did not feel hectored or lectured, or hear her assertive, confident and persuasive opinions on the revolutionary force of feminism as strident, brash or aggressive. Tussy was pitch perfect.
Eleanor’s speech at the Comm
une anniversary drew on her and Edward’s essay ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’, co-written in 1885 and published in both of their names in Westminster Review in the first quarterly edition of 1886.24 Eleanor had argued consistently throughout her political life so far that it was essential for women and men to work together in order to effectively address the question of women’s oppression in society. This thesis of co-operation was central to ‘The Woman Question’, both in its collaborative form of production and in its philosophical content. ‘The Woman Question’ was the first of several key projects they worked on together over the next decade. The division of labour varied over time but Aveling generally claimed that Eleanor did the lion’s share.25
Marx and Aveling26 propose that two of the greatest curses that ruin the relations between man and woman ‘are the treatment of men and women as different beings, and the want of truth’.27 It’s worth pausing to consider the implications of this. The publication of ‘The Woman Question’ opens up a significant new perspective on why Eleanor persisted in trying to make her relationship with Edward work. Her vision, apparently shared by Edward, of how women and men might resolve their differences is all laid out clearly and uncompromisingly in this essay:
And first, a general idea that has to do with all women. 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.28
The first answer to the woman question is that the oppression of women has a disastrous effect on men. It hampers the development of the whole of humanity. If both sexes are incomplete, both are damaged, ‘and when, as a rule, neither of them comes into real, thorough, habitual, free contact, mind to mind, with the other, the being is neither whole nor entire’. So far, so Kant, but Eleanor and Edward are not seeking to reconcile materialism (objective reality) and idealism. They start with far more practical, everyday experiences: sex, desire, marriage, earning a livelihood, property ownership, the bringing up of children, the impact of consumer capitalism.
They both believed, like Marx and Engels, that the existing social contracts between women and men were corrupt. It wouldn’t, therefore, surprise them to encounter common difficulties about property, economics and sexual infidelity in their own relationship. In their collaborative work, they tried to tackle and work out some of these all-too-familiar and thorny issues. They understood how things were in the concrete. They looked towards how they might be re-envisioned in the abstract future. It helps a great deal to keep this in view when reflecting on the question of why Tussy stuck by Edward.
The specific moment of ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’ was, in part, prompted by August Bebel’s Women and Socialism. Produced in Germany in 1879, Bebel’s book was, famously, banned from publication in Bismarck’s Germany under the anti-socialist laws. The English translation was published in 1885, providing an opportunity for Eleanor and Edward to bring the ideas of the role of the woman question in socialism to English-speaking audiences. With this objective to introduce socialist feminism to Britain held firmly in mind, it’s important to note the full title of their essay: ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’. Important, because subsequent reprints of the essay in English during the twentieth century persisted in dropping the subtitle – which so clearly states both the perspective and intent of this groundbreaking treatise.
The Marx-Aveling essay tested Bebel’s analysis in Women and Socialism that there could be no emancipation of humanity without the social independence and equality of the sexes. Therefore the abolition of sexual inequality was integral to the working-class movement. Bebel’s thesis, which Tussy studied closely, resonated with Engels’s book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, published just two years previously. The General’s book was another key influence on Eleanor to produce her statement on the relationship between feminism and socialism. Described by Lenin as ‘one of the fundamental works of modern socialism’,29 The Origin of the Family did not appear in English translation until 1902. Eleanor had discussed it with the General whilst he was writing it and read it in its draft stages.
As we already know, Engels sorted through Marx’s papers after he died, and found the notes his friend had made on the contribution of Lewis Henry Morgan, the American anthropologist, to the discussion of the origins and future of the family. Immediately seized by inspiration, Engels channelled his desolation at losing Marx into writing The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In doing so, he developed and far exceeded both Morgan’s and Marx’s findings. As made clear by his title, Engels drew on Darwin’s theory of natural selection and anthropological studies of matriarchal societies. For the present and future of the family, he drew on the living examples around him: his own life, the Burns sisters, Lenchen, Pumps, and Marx’s daughters.
Crucially, Engels introduced Herbert Spencer’s juxtaposition of the forces of production and reproduction into thinking about the family, sex and economics. This absolutely fundamental philosophical, political and economic realisation made a transformational impact on Eleanor. Engels had achieved what her father’s work did not; he had made the crucial step of identifying the relationship between the theory of historical materialism and feminism. This was the equivalent of Galileo’s discovery that the earth revolved around the sun and not, as had always been believed, the other way round. And as a theory it was greeted with just as much scepticism.
Bebel’s and Engels’s work enabled Eleanor to bring together her materialist, Darwinian understanding of history and economics with her reading of feminist thinkers, most particularly Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Eleanor always supported the campaigns for women’s suffrage and rights-based arguments but knew that their application was politically limited: creating access to the ballot box and education for bourgeois women was a partial intervention that would not address the broad, underlying structural problem of sexual inequality. Women were an economic and social class, globally oppressed. Working-class and middle-class women were conjoined by the inseparability of production and the reproduction required to replenish the work force. From this perspective, patriarchy and capitalism were not just blood brothers but twins. She was clear, like Clara Zetkin, that women were divided by economic class. Bourgeois women’s resistance tended to be reactive – they challenged their men – whereas working women had to be radical and challenge the whole society:
Here comes the true struggle against man. Here the educated woman – the doctor, the clerk, the lawyer, is the antagonist of man. The women of this class are sick of their moral and intellectual subjugation. They are Noras rebelling against their doll’s homes. They want to live their own lives, and economically and intellectually the demands of the middle-class women are fully justified.30
The position of the working woman was different. The proletarian woman was drawn into the vortex of capitalist production because her labour was cheap to buy. But her position was not merely reactionary; it was also revolutionary. As a worker, the proletarian woman had a different kind of independence to the housebound middle-class woman, ‘but truly she paid the price!’:
And that is why the working woman cannot be like the bourgeois woman who has to fight against the man of her own class . . . The objections of the bourgeois man to the rights of women are only a matter of competition . . . With the proletarian women, on the contrary, it is a struggle of the woman with the man of her own class against the capitalist class . . . For her . . . it is a necessity to build up new barriers against the exploitation of the proletarian woman, and to secure her rights as wife, and as mother. Her end and aim are not the right of free competition with men, but to obtain the political power of the proletariat. Truly the working woman approves the demand of the middle-class women’s movement . . . But only as means to the end that she may be fully armed for entering into the working-class struggle along with the man of her class.31
Eleanor was impa
tient with the caution within socialist organisations about how to treat the question of the equality of the sexes. Her and Edward’s objectives in ‘The Woman Question’ were to show that feminism was an integral necessity, not just a single aspect or issue of the socialist working-class movement, and that sexual inequality was fundamentally a question of economics. ‘The Woman Question’ was the first treatise of its sort written by a woman active in the working-class movement and the first manifesto by a woman on the woman question in the socialist international. Published on the eve of the founding of the Second International in Paris, where both Eleanor and Clara Zetkin spoke on women and labour, ‘The Woman Question’ is the founding text of socialist feminism and offers a concrete plan of action as well as theoretical abstraction. The necessity for women of all classes to work together, and for men and women to work together, were two of Eleanor’s key precepts. To this end, the collaborative writing of the essay was exemplary. They made it clear that theirs were the independent opinions of two individual socialists, and that they did not speak on behalf of any party or sect.
In the essay, Eleanor and Edward linked the oppression of women within patriarchal societies with that of the proletariat – arguing, like Wollstonecraft, Engels and Bebel, that the causes of women’s oppression within capitalist society were economic and social, not inevitably governed by instinct or nature. ‘The Woman Question’ explores all the key aspects of sexual inequality debated in the nineteenth century across the ideological spectrum: mercenary marriage; unregulated prostitution; segregation of the sexes; lack of health care; inadequate medical research into how women’s bodies function; lack of sex education for both sexes; different systems of moral judgement imposed on men and women’s behaviour; and the unnaturalness and hypocrisy of social expectations for the chastity of women. Many forms of sexual inequality, they suggest, transcend existing economic class divisions, making middle-class (bourgeois) women proletarians in their own homes. Eleanor and Edward argue therefore that, whilst they are wholly sympathetic to the impulse underlying the limited aim of campaigns for women’s suffrage and legal constraint on prostitution, the call for civil and parliamentary participation and representation are only a narrow approach to a broader problem. Women should be forming a united feminist front, challenging across class divisions the divide and rule that regulates production and reproduction.
Eleanor Marx Page 30
