Eleanor Marx and Womens Rights
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“It is a truism, and therefore it is constantly repeated, that no social movement is worth much until it has enlisted the sympathies, aesthetic and practical, of women. The Socialists are constantly preaching this obvious doctrine. They are constantly appealing to women, not on the basis of woman’s rights as against man’s, but of the rights of men, women, and their children of the working classes as against the capitalists. That is the essential difference that marks off the women’s rights movement on the one hand, and the socialist movement of men and women together on the other.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/eleanor-marx/1893/women.htm
Just uploaded to MIA is Eleanor Marx review of Bebel’s book “Woman…”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/eleanor-marx/1885/bebelrev.htm
Also with a focus on women’s issues is
https://www.marxists.org/archive/eleanor-marx/1885/pallmall.htm
“We, the women, must, above all the rest, bestir ourselves. Us chiefly it concerns, and we must work only with those who can really help us ; those who understand that the “salvation” of society means the revolution of society. The old biblical story may serve our turn. We need a deluge — aye! though it were one of blood — to wipe out the sin and wickedness of this society of ours. It is with those who would revolutionise society that our work as women lies.”
She certainly knew her stuff. I thought this from the second article was good;
“There are those who accuse us of being, to say the least, “unpractical,” because instead of trying “to help where we can” we demand a revolution. I maintain that we Socialists alone are truly practical, because we alone dare to go to the root of the ill. Ask a doctor to cure a patient living under absolutely unhealthy conditiens in the midst of pestilential air and unsanitary surroundings. He will tell you you must change these surroundings if you would save the life of the individual. We but apply to many, to all individuals — i.e., to society — what the doctor applies to the one. We say so long as human beings are the slaves they now are — whether they be the slaves of wealth or of poverty — this disease must continue.”
And in fact the instance she was writing about of child prostitution is still a problem 135 years later and for the same reason she said : poverty forcing some children to sell themselves for sex.
An article on Eleanor
“Women are the creatures of an organized tyranny of men,” she wrote, “as workers are the creatures of an organized tyranny of idlers.”
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