Socialist Feminism and Sexual Instinct: Eleanor Marx and Amy Levy

At the end of The Woman Question, their co-authored essay of 1886 which discusses the English translation of August Bebel’s Woman in the Past, Present and Future, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling bring their argument to a climax by holding out the glittering prize of harmonious heterosexual monogamy that will be made possible by socialist revolution: The woman will no longer be the man’s slave, but his equal. For divorce there will be no need … two great curses that help, with others, to ruin the relations between men and women will have passed. Those curses are the treatment of men and women as different beings, and the want of truth. There will no longer be one law for the woman and one for the man … Husband and wife will be able to do that which but few can do now – look clear through one another’s eyes into one another’s hearts. For ourselves, we believe that the cleaving of one man to one woman will be the best for all, and that these will find each in the heart of the other, that which is in their eyes, their own image. 1 This prophecy of mutuality and mutual regard, of a perfect fit of the sexes, mirrors the neatness with which the two main categories of the essay – women and the working class – are compressed into a single analytic model. Under capitalism, Marx and Aveling argue, women are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised tyranny of idlers’ (6). In the socialist utopia envisaged by their essay, intellectual, sexual and economic independence are to be equally the lot of women and men: Her education and all other opportunities [will be] as those of man. Like him, she, if sound in mind and body (and how the number of women thus will grow!) will have to give her one, two or three hours of social labour to supply the wants of the community, and therefore of herself. Thereafter she will be free for art or science, or teaching or writing, or amusement in any form. (15) 114 The Woman Question seems to waver momentarily over the question of whether single or multiple partners will be the norm: ‘Whether monogamy or polygamy will obtain in the Socialistic state is a detail on which one can only speak as an individual. The question is too large to be solved within the mists and miasmata of the capitalistic system’ (15). The abolition of the double standard of sexual shame might, the essay argues, necessitate the practice of polygamy for women: ‘If the coming society, like European society to-day, regards it as right for man to have mistresses as well as a wife, we may be certain that the like freedom will be extended to women’ (16). But Marx and Aveling, in this essay at least, ultimately plump for a happy ending: Personally, we believe that monogamy will gain the day. There are approximately equal numbers of men and women, and the highest ideal seems to be the complete, harmonious, lasting blending of two human lives. (15) Another prophecy of sexual futurism from the second half of the 1880s, ‘A Ballad of Religion and Marriage’, written by Eleanor’s friend Amy Levy offers, by contrast, a quite different prospect for the heterosexuality to come.