Eleanor Marx

Eleanor Marx

Eleanor Marx has not been remembered as an economist. Her life, though more so her death, has captured the imaginations and curiosities of novelists and biographers and her existence has been cast into the role of the “tragic socialist.” Yet, as the daughter of Karl Marx, she was a prominent writer and activist for socialist reform. She edited Marx’s unpublished texts after his death and contributed several articles of her own on economic topics. Similarly, in her daily interactions, she worked for social reform that was fundamentally economic in nature and associated with a wide range of feminist and socialist activists. Many of these people themselves have been classified, or perhaps reclassified in recent years, as economists themselves. Yet Eleanor has by and large been overlooked by historians and economists. She has been relegated to the role of tragic heroine at best and a curiosity at worst. This paper will argue that both in her written legacy and in the way she conducted her personal life, Eleanor Marx was first and foremost an economist.

An Economist in Writing

Eleanor Marx’s essay, “The Woman Question,” clearly delineates her role as an economist and her dedication to feminism at the same time. The text was written and published with her common law husband, Edward Aveling. As Kapp points out in her extensive biography, this text was the first of Eleanor’s writings “to bear the imprint of a commercial publisher” (Kapp II, 1972, 83). While Aveling certainly was involved in producing the final document, in Kapp’s analysis at least, the majority of the underlying argument was Eleanor’s (83). Thus, we can reasonably say that this document, framed as a review of Bebel’s Woman-Past, Present, and Future, is indicative of Eleanor’s intellectual processes.

The text of “The Woman Question” is ardent in its defense of economics and women. For Eleanor, the only way to improve the status of women was to tie it to the class movement. “The question is one of economics. The position of women rests, as everything in our complex modern society rests, on an economic basis” (Marx 1886). With the phrase, “everything in our complex modern society,” Eleanor not only casts herself as an economist, but establishes that any venture, be it social or academic, is fundamentally economic in nature. Thus, once she establishes that feminism is inherently an economic issue, the connection between her father’s socialist theories and her own feminism becomes clear.