Gender and Sexuality in Early Marxist Thought

Soma Marik 1
Membership No.: AM-12979
Section: Countries other than India
(Abstract)

This paper intends to examine how the development of the Marxian socialist movement in Europe
intersected with issues of sexuality. Marxist and socialist feminist discussions have been more
interested in discussing proletarian identities. Sexuality has not always been the central issue.
Discussions will focus mainly on Marx and Engels, and German and Russian social democracy till
1917, with brief digressions either spatially or temporally where necessary.
An attempt has been made to explore the relationship between class struggle and a number of
issues – marriage, childbirth, equal opportunity within the context of inequalities due to different life
situations, birth control, prostitution, women’s right of choice, same-sex relations, the role of love in
human (especially women’s) life. The core argument is that early Marxism was less patriarchal –
which does not mean not patriarchal-- than the dominant strain of twentieth century socialism, that
is, parties and political practices influenced by Stalinism. However, it would be erroneous to state
that all was well before Stalinism. But despite its limitations, socialist discourse and practice often
did provide a degree of alternative in issues of sexuality.
Utopian socialists saw relationships between the sexes and within the family as core issues. In
Classical Marxist view heterosexual relationships were, at one stage, not governed by tight control
over women exercised by men. Women’s subordination, including male control over their sexuality,
male definition of what female sexuality is or should be, were located in historical time, rather than in
nature. A prehistoric mother-right centred social order was superseded at a particular juncture by
patriarchy.
Within the Marxist movement, however, the most influential figures were August Bebel, Kollontai,
Armand whose relatively unprejudiced visualisation of sexual needs and patterns created a new
dimension. Bernstein was in fact the first Marxist to speak out against the persecution of gays.
A number of Marxist women played an important role in the birth control movement, which was
connected to women’s right to choose.
Finally, it is argued that political radicalism and radicalism in matters of sexuality were not
automatically directly related, by examining the contrasting positions of several Bolsheviks.

1
Reader in History, Ramakrishna Sarada Mission Vivekananda Vidyabhavan

0
 Gender and Sexuality in Early Marxist Thought
Soma Marik
Membership No.: AM-12979
Section: Countries other than India

This paper intends to examine how the development of the Marxian socialist movement in Europe
intersected with issues of sexuality. Contemporary studies on sexuality have been much indebted to
the work of Michel Foucault, though the more dogmatic Marxists tend to avoid discussing him.
Foucault’s work on western sexuality argues that there was a propagation of disciplinary regimes,
intensification in the management and policing of sexuality in the modern period, leading to
distinctions of bourgeois identity. 1 Marxist and socialist feminist discussions have been more
interested in discussing proletarian identities. Sexuality has not always been the central issue.
However, it has come in, in a number of ways. Thus, Heidi Hartmann’s well known essay on “dual
systems” tried to argue that exploitation of working class women could not be reduced to purely
exploitation by the ruling class, as working class males also benefited in some ways from women’s
oppression. By contrast, Lise Vogel’s class reductionism means that she is unable to explain why the
so-called socialist societies continued to have male dominance in all spheres. Young, who also
opposed the dual systems approach, did mention sexual harassment and pornography. Such
simplifications mean an inadequate basis for the understanding of sexism in mixed groups, and a
downplaying of issues of sexuality under the belief that all this would disappear once capitalism was
overthrown. 2 Allison Jaggar also says that patriarchy and capitalism are inseparable, but she argues
that the Marxist idea of “base” must be extended to include realm of sexuality apart from production.
This means that sexuality and conditions of procreation should be analysed as part of the base
rather than being determined by it. 3 Within this vast debate, my aim is to locate the nature of early
socialist interventions (or often the lack thereof). 4 Discussions will focus mainly on Marx and Engels,
and German and Russian social democracy till 1917, with brief digressions either spatially or
temporally where necessary.

An attempt has been made to explore the relationship between class struggle and a number of
issues – marriage, childbirth, equal opportunity within the context of inequalities due to different life
situations, birth control, prostitution, women’s right of choice, same-sex relations, the role of love in
human (especially women’s) life. The core argument is that early Marxism was less patriarchal –
which does not mean not patriarchal-- than the dominant strain of twentieth century socialism, that
is, parties and political practices influenced by Stalinism. However, it would be erroneous to state
that all was well before Stalinism. Despite its limitations, socialist discourse and practice often did
provide a degree of alternative in issues of sexuality.
Utopian socialists were the first in the field. The three most well known figures, about whom Marx,
and especially Engels, would write, were St Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen. They saw
relationships between the sexes and within the family as core issues, rather than peripheral ones to
be solved “in passing”. Very clearly, their goal was not equal rights within the existing system, but
within a radically transformed one where private property was to be abolished or severely curtailed.

1
Women were to have not only legal, but also economic independence, and the traditional division of
labour between the sexes was widely attacked. Men were to share communal responsibility for
domestic work, and the family as an institution was to be rejected as an institution that served as a
source of individualistic male power, incompatible with socialist co-operation, as well as a coercive
restraint on free choice. Following from this, some early socialists stressed the importance of free
expression of sexuality, and argued that ‘free love’ was the necessary basis of a free society.
Charles Fourier, for example, condemned conventional morality as an instrument that controls
sexuality. He saw control over sexuality, disciplinary regimes, as key to general disciplinary regimes. 5
Robert Owen, whose writings are more straightforward, put it clearly, when he stressed that to stop
married women being treated as the property of her husband, it was necessary to abolish both
marriage and private property. 6
Women themselves took up the ideas. Three women should be mentioned in this context --Frances
Wright, Anna Wheeler and Frances Morrison. Wright in her lectures talked about equality for women,
emancipation for slaves, the political rights of working men, freedom of religious thought, free public
education for all, and advocated birth control and equal treatment of illegitimate children. 7 Anna
Wheeler’s ideas were set out in a pamphlet by William Thompson, a leading Owenite and economist:
Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to
Retain Them in Political and Thence Civil and Domestic Slavery . S/He presented both a socialist
case, arguing why without common ownership and cooperation women would continue to be
disadvantaged, since formal equality takes no account of actual differences, and an analysis of the
enslavement of women in a manner that foreshadowed the later development of the concept of
patriarchy.8 Like Wheeler, Frances Morrison has left no signed writings. But articles in James
Morrison’s The Pioneer show a strong feminist consciousness. On sexuality, Morrison had little to
say. But what he had to say was important. “Yet where is the woman who can say she is free? Why
are the ladies so very reluctant to go out alone? Because, by going free, they subject themselves to
reproach.” 9 “An unmarried woman is a ghost as well. Thus, for instance, if an unmarried woman
should be so unfortunate as to have a child, that child can inherit nothing, because, as the law says,
“he is the son of nobody ”.”10 He also rejected punishment for prostitution since it is the refusal to
train women for jobs and provide them with jobs that leads them to prostitution. There are good
reasons to think that his views on women were not his alone, but co-authored with a woman, in this
case his wife, Frances Morrison.

Marx and Engels

Turning to Marxism we find a duality. On the positive side, the Marxist analysis of modes of
production and the base-superstructure model, whatever their limitations, are extremely useful tools.
If the base in the final analysis determines the superstructure, this means that family, sexuality, etc
are not eternal and immutable, but are socially constructed. 11 On the other hand, at a personal level
there was much conservatism. Well known, for example, is Marx’s unhappy reference to a daughter
being born (“if it were male, it would be better” 12). Neither Marx nor Engels ever questioned the
desirability of female chastity, marital fidelity, heterosexual romance, or the nuclear family. Yet both
also inherited from the utopian socialists a belief in the beneficial power of mutual erotic attraction,

2
an idea that constituted a break with the Victorian view of true love as an affinity between two
disembodied souls. 13
The Manifesto of the Communist Party argued that the bourgeoisie wanted to impose controls on
women’s sexuality – for women of all classes. In addition, it argued against idealisation of any pre-
bourgeois family either. 14 Capitalism, they averred, had revealed the pure cash nexus. And this was
underscored by the passage, which stated that social forms are historical relations related to the rise
and fall of property relations. This was followed by the call for the abolition of the family, justified by
the argument that the bourgeois family was founded on capital and in its complete form existed only
among the bourgeoisie, along with its complement – prostitution. 15 Here Marx and Engels agree with
the views of the utopians concerning the family. Secondly, they resolutely oppose attempts to turn
the family into a natural or eternal category and assert that it was historically specific, relating it to
forms of property. Female chastity, marital fidelity of the female, and the nuclear family are
preserved by having a differently ordered world by its side. Finally, a close examination suggests
that in this passage, contrary to a widely accepted reading, they did not claim that the proletariat had
no family, but only that for all practical purposes, the bourgeois norms were not present in it.
However, there is an assumption that the abolition of the bourgeois family will automatically lead to
the abolition of prostitution. Why the abolition of the rule of capital would also mean the defeat of
male domination is not clearly worked out, so even if there is support for a progressive cause, the
implications of their own arguments are not fully worked out.
The Manifesto argues that the bourgeois family is oppressive towards children, as parents control
and exploit them. It charges the bourgeoisie with controlling female sexuality in all forms – the wife
of the bourgeois as “mere instruments of production”, and all who are not one’s owned woman as
objects of sexual gratification. 16 It was only in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State , written in 1884, that Engels presented monogamy more clearly as a historical construct, going
back to the radicalism of the Manifesto and deepening it. Today, Engels’ anthropological data may
appear considerably dated. But his analysis of the family and women’s role in it is crucial. First,
sexual relationships between men and women were, in his view, at one stage not governed by tight
control over women exercised by men. He located women’s subordination, including male control
over their sexuality, male definition of what female sexuality is or should be, in historical time, rather
than in nature, and thereby he opened a political and research agenda. According to him, a
prehistoric mother-right centred social order was superseded at a particular juncture by patriarchy. In
the pre-class or communistic society, men and women held equal power. Engels also associated the
realm of unalienated labour and life with women and the collective household of the commune
society.17 The transition to production for exchange increased social wealth, but it also created a
system of private ownership and dominated marriages that benefited males. The woman was to
become “the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument for breeding of children”. 18 With the
development of the nuclear family came the final privatisation and degradation of household labour.
However, unlike the utopians, Engels drew back from the most radical conclusions. Thus, we read in
The Origin that ‘sex love is by its very nature exclusive”, and therefore “marriage based on sex love
is by its very nature monogamy”. 19 Having excoriated the nuclear family, he now proposed that
women should fully enter the public workforce, thus eliminating their confinement to domestic labour.
He wanted the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society , but he also

3
expected, not a variety of sexual preferences, but true monogamy on both sides, to be based on
mutual love. In particular, he came down strongly on same-sex relationships. 20 On the other hand, he
made out a very strong case for a new morality, saying that if marriages were to be based on love,
then the logical consequence should be to accept that marriages should last only as long as love
lasted, and separation should be simple and without messy divorce proceedings. 21
Engels also practised what he preached, as far as possible. Marx’s life, notably his attempt to
suppress his paternity of Frederick Demuth, son by their maid Helen, (it was Engels who
acknowledged paternity – revealing the truth only on his death bed) reveal gaps between theory and
practice. His wife Jenny would later write that an event of 1851 had contributed greatly to the
increase of their worries. 22 This raises the question of double standards in Marx – between his
professed political stand and his personal attitudes.

Bebel and the German Social Democrats

The most popular writer on socialism and women, in the formative period of Marxist party politics,
was August Bebel. But either historical accounts focus on Marx and Engels as the key theoreticians
in considering the relationship between Marxism and women’s liberation, or they focus on Clara
Zetkin as the key figure for the growth of a Marxist movement for women’s liberation. 23 So Bebel
usually tends to get ignored. Yet his seminal work, Women and Socialism (first published in 1879),
was issued in his lifetime in 50 German editions (as well as in several other languages), and sold
over 140,000 copies. This was the text that emerged as the most popular Marxist introduction to
socialism as well as the gender question. What was refreshing was Bebel’s relatively unprejudiced
visualisation of sexual needs and patterns. In course of his discussions he wrote that the sex urge is
a very strong force in both men and women, and there can be no completion of the human
personality without fulfilment of the sexual life. 24 Bebel, like Engels, took it for granted that
heterosexual monogamy was the norm and should be realised in an ideal form, without the
compulsions of economic pressures, in the society of the future. 25 Discussing repressive sexuality,
he wrote that even when marriage is not too happy, it is better than compulsory celibacy, providing
statistical data on suicides, madnesses, and arguing that no social norms that obstruct sex urges
can be called good. 26
Bebel’s discussion on freedom of love is of some importance, as the demand for ‘free love” was
capable of misinterpretation and prudish rejection dressed as class line. Bebel was arguing for equal
rights of men and women, based on mutual attraction. He insisted on sex-education for both women
and men, arguing that this would enable people to tackle many undesirable realities directly, and
with better results. He argued that in the given social order, with its male domination, prostitution
was as essential an institution as the police, or the church. He discussed the laws controlling
prostitution, and showed how the women victims of the system were treated as the criminals who
had to be policed so that syphilis was not spread, ignoring the power of the customer. He also
sought to disclose a class dimension, pointing out that sacked women workers or destitute women
formed the bulk of prostitutes. 27 At the same time, without glorifying prostitution, Bebel pointed out
that existing marriage and family rules meant that even a street-walking prostitute had the right to
refuse a customer, while a wife had no right to refuse sexual service to her husband. 28 He
condemned the societal manipulation of sexuality in the form of pornography, and pointed out that

4
women were the principal victims of this. 29 Surprisingly, Lopes and Roth accuse him of peddling
surreptitious pornography himself, since any writing with sexual content functions in a repressive
environment as pornography. 30 Aware of the imprecision of their arguments, the authors assert: “That
there is no direct evidence to support this argument does not mean that Women and Socialism did
not function as pornography.” 31

One author who was influenced by Bebel and went on to make significant arguments was Eleanor Marx-
Aveling. The youngest Marx daughter was also the most committed activist socialist. Eleanor had been
viewed too often as Marx’s daughter, protected by Engels and sadly abused by the scoundrel Aveling. As a
result, her own contributions were often inadequately examined. 32 Yet Eleanor was seriously involved in
English labour and socialist politics, and helped in organising workingmen and workingwomen. In 1886,
Eleanor and her companion Edward Aveling wrote an article, ‘The Woman Question’, in the form of a review
of Bebel’s book, though in fact the essay went beyond a review. The entire content of the present day idea,
that sexuality is a social construct, was clearly present in the article: “Society provides, recognises, legalises
for the latter [the men – S.M.] the means of gratifying the sex instinct. In the eyes of that same society an
unmarried woman who acts after the fashion habitual to her unmarried brothers and the men that dance with
her at balls, or work with her in the shop, is a pariah. And even with the working classes who marry at the
normal time, the life of the woman under the present system is the more arduous and irksome of the two.” 33
She discussed double standards in dealing with adultery and divorce. Discussing socialist policy and
prescriptions for the future, Marx and Aveling contended that sex education was essential in order to bring
up children properly. (“To us, it seems that the reproductive organs ought to be discussed as frankly, as
freely, between parents and children as the digestive”34), since they contended that it was the unwarranted
secrecy that resulted in creating morbid or unhealthy ideas and conditions. Discussing how society imposes
norms on women, Eleanor was to say very strongly: “chastity is unhealthy and unholy…. The criminal is not
the individual sufferer, but the society that forces her to sin and to suffer.” 35 Eleanor’s life points to some of
the difficulties of living by principles. For over a dozen years, she lived with a man who had a legal wife but
with whom he did not stay. Despite this, Eleanor did not allow Aveling to provide for her, but earned her own
livelihood – through acting, through teaching, through translating and through working as a typist. Yet,
despite this staunch independence, there was a level of emotional dependence which she could neither
explain nor cope with. So when Edward, after the death of his first wife, married the actress Eva Frye,
Eleanor committed suicide. It is also worth noting that despite her abilities, which included sustained work as
trade union organiser, in the international socialist movement she tended to be assigned supportive
functions. This suggests that women still found it difficult to break through to leading positions.

Clara Zetkin became active when mass working class parties, mostly with male members, had
already come into existence. The development of a uniform class discourse by these parties had
dual consequences. A revolutionary party fighting for power for a new class has to try and
concentrate all its energies. But this could also have the effect of deciding that the non-principal
contradictions were to be ignored since taking them up might mean alienating large chunks of the
class. Fighting patriarchal ideas, fighting dominant disciplinary systems of sexuality, were not
conducive to quick success. This does not mean that ignoring these was a good idea. Tony Cliff’s
defence of an anti-feminist socialism shows all the problems clearly. 36 But avoiding those thorny

5
issues could make it possible to concentrate on growth. So socialist women organisers like Zetkin
felt the pressure to conform, and thereby grow. In addition, they had come out of bourgeois
feminism, and had rejected it as an inadequate solution to women’s search for equality. Finally, like
many nineteenth century feminists, their own stand was that in the absence of effective birth control
there were difficulties for women if one advocated an apparently libertarian sexual morality that
ignored hard realities. So while utopians and free love advocates talked about abolishing marriages,
both bourgeois feminists and socialist women were concerned with mitigating the deleterious
consequences for women of sexual intercourse within marriage, and on confining sex to marriage as
far as possible. But she also insisted that women and men within the working class could be equal
only when the equality was recognised by male workers and when they stopped treating women as
sex objects. 37
Much more retrograde was the fact that as she became a major organiser of the first mass socialist
women’s movement, she moved away from a critique of the family. In 1889, speaking at the first
Congress of the Socialist International, she believed that economic change was swiftly undermining
the institution of the family and she saw this breakdown as a positive development. But in her 1896
speech to the Socialist party Congress, one of her most famous texts on women’s emancipation, she
argued that socialism did not want to alienate the proletarian women from her duties as mother and
wife. “.... Many a mother and many a wife who fills her husband and children with class-
consciousness accomplishes just as much as the female comrades that we see at our meetings”. 38
Applauded by the male delegation at this point, her retreat shows that the socialist men were
expecting the prime function of women to be family functions, where they would transmit socialist
values to their (presumably male) offspring.
Zetkin admitted in 1896 that her previous views on the family had been one-sidedly negative, and
that she had since become more positive in her assessment of the family as an institution. 39 But this
did not mean that in her work, sexuality was totally ignored. One instance is the struggle for
maternity benefit, where class identity was clearly intersected by a question of sexuality. Maria Mies
has criticised this demand, saying this meant protectionism and an abandonment of the goal of
equality.40 Responding to similar liberal-feminist views aired in the 1890s, and supporting Zetkin’s
position, Eduard Bernstein wrote in Neue Zeit : “It is wrong to cry ‘No workers’ protection for women,
which is not also given to men'. That is taken from the bourgeois twaddle about women's rights.... If the
prohibition of work for women who have just given birth discriminate against them economically, then there
is a simple remedy: society should pay compensation .... these things do not constitute exceptional laws
against women; they are merely an acknowledgement of actual differences....”41
In this period, the SPD fought alone for a gender just civil code, the party criticised Germany’s penal
abortion laws and favoured the availability of contraceptives. While the pressure of the bourgeois
concept of sexual modesty limited open discussion of abortion and contraception, Die Neue Zeit,
edited by Karl Kautsky, published a large number of articles on women especially on the sexual
relations of the working class. Out of a total of 498 articles including book reviews, 55 were on this
subject. 42
In 1895, Die Neue Zeit published two pieces by Bernstein, on the trial of Oscar Wilde on sodomy
charges. Bernstein ridiculed the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, which knew of Wilde’s orientation
but tolerated it as long as he had not offended a nobleman and had then been actually caught. More

6
important, Bernstein pointed out that “abnormal” sex, like same-sex relationships, had existed in all
ages, and were not sudden instances of depravity. 43 Bernstein’s second article tried to engage SPD
practice and theory. He argued that socialists were not unanimous in matters of sexuality and sexual
orientation, and suggested that many in the party were swayed by ultra-puritan patriarchal morality,
rather than the scientific attitude which the party claimed was its guideline in all things. 44
Bernstein wanted the SPD to reflect on anti-gay laws in order to influence contemporary legislation.
He wanted to change the term unnatural, preferring ‘abnormal’. A norm is a social construct. To call
homosexuality unnatural is to accept the claim that heterosexuality and monogamy are things we
inherit naturally, through the evolutionary process. As Bernstein put it, every social act, including
such things as writing letters, were more unnatural than any form of gratification of the sexual urge,
which was itself a natural urge. 45 He went on to argue that in reality, heterosexual relationships were
also not carried on solely or primarily for the reproduction of the species. Homosexuality was
proscribed and punished, because here the pretence of procreation could not be kept up.
Continuing his discussion, he showed that we in fact know less about abnormal sexuality than about
punishment. And he then showed that on one hand, the law assumed that short of rape, a woman’s
body cannot be sexually abused. Prostitution was carried on as a trade, often under police
regulation. Showing an awareness of the first works on sexuality then being done, Bernstein took
issues with Krafft-Ebing. The latter had held that since lesbianism was not legally punished, this was
discrimination against men. Bernstein stressed that in fact, this stemmed from the belief that a
woman’s body was not hers and therefore the law could not punish her. The Prussian law, for
instance, punished anal sex between two men, but not between a man and a woman. Women’s
bodies were evidently not to be treated in the same way, for short of rape or crude physical violence,
anything done to them remained unpunished. Indeed, the state supervision of prostitutes added to
compulsions on them only if they contracted sexually transmitted diseases, and did not ever punish
those who bought their bodies.
Bernstein also took issue with Krafft-Ebing on another matter. He warned against reducing
homosexuality to pathological explanations. This would have meant changing the designation of
gays from criminals to mentally unbalanced persons, and would not have amounted to an
acceptance of different sexualities as regular and legitimate aspects of human existence. However,
Bernstein’s conclusion did not conform to his analysis. The concluding argument seems to suggest
that in his view, once the class struggle had ended and communist society had overcome
exploitation, “natural sexual pleasure” would be easily available, not punished, and therefore
“abnormal” sexual intercourse would cease.

The Complexities of the Revolutionary Trend

Marxism in the twentieth century split between reformists, who wanted to reform capitalism, make it
less harmful for the poor, without abolishing it altogether, and the revolutionaries, who remained true
to the original perspectives of the founders. At this stage, there was a left wing realignment, which
was further consolidated when the Russian revolution ended with the establishment of soviet power,
under Bolshevik leadership. By 1919, a Communist International had been founded, and by 1920, a
degree of centralisation was being imposed on the left wing. Since the Bolsheviks alone had
succeeded in smashing ruling class power and in leading a proletarian revolution, Bolshevik theories

7
and practices came to be heavily imitated by others. I have argued at length elsewhere that the
concepts of vanguard party and professional revolutionary could have negative consequences
unless the concepts were carefully gendered. 46 At the simplest level, it was a matter of the fact that
for a woman to become a full time revolutionary meant being forced to make choices concerning her
sexuality (marriage/childbirth).
The first attempt in Russian Marxism to discuss sexuality as political issue was made in 1908, when
Alexandra Kollontai wrote The Social Basis of the Woman Question . By taking up the question of
marriage not merely from a legal point, but as a matter of male control over women's sexuality, she
placed the discussion on women's liberation in terms where it was not possible to simply repeat a set
of demands addressed to government and employer, but to force the class to look inwards.
According to her analysis, at the same time, the contemporary class-state was the defender of legal
marriage and the family. So socialism meant overthrow of the ruling class state, while real women’s
liberation meant social responsibility for motherhood and child-rearing. Hence the two came together
in a new and gendered vision of socialism, which could not be a discourse framed only by male
experiences. A sharp ideological struggle must be carried out in order to redefine class struggle and
socialism. 47 But even Kollontai could not come out of the ideological pressure of patriarchy fully.
While she envisaged that in the society of the future, the family set-up and childcare would not
burden the individual woman, various essays by Kollontai indicate that women, collectively, would
carry out those tasks. 48
Kollontai had been a Menshevik till 1914-15. To look at Bolshevik women and their feminist
consciousness, we need to examine the views of Inessa Armand. Armand’s importance has been
established only in the last decade and a half by her biographer Elwood, who starts to look at her as
a serious Marxist and feminist 49. She was among a handful of women Bolsheviks who advocated
bringing out a journal directed to the women, which they did despite getting no funding from the party
leadership. Contrary to the standard mythmaking that ascribes all positive developments in bolshevism to
Lenin, it is clear that a group of women took the initiative here. They included, from emigration Inessa
Armand and Nadezhda Krupskaya, and inside Russia Samoilova and Elizarova.
Struggles, when involving women workers in significant numbers, showed how demands could be
gendered. In 1912 alone, in 22 strikes in which women were present in a significant or dominant number, an
end to sexual harassment in the name of searching workers as they left the factory premises, was a major
demand. In 1913, this was even the main reason for the strike at the Grisov factory. The demands raised by
the women workers displayed a growing awareness that standardised "class demands" did not take their
specific oppression into account. Sexual harassment by supervisory staff was one of the prominent
demands in a large number of struggles. Equal pay was a very infrequent demand, but it too began to be
raised.50 Armand’s feminism was ignited at least in part by this reality of the life of women workers. Till 1913,
her writings did not show any discussion on such issues as prostitution or female sexuality. But by early
1915, we can discern a change. She drafted an outline on the ‘family question’ which she sent to Lenin.
Lenin wrote back, saying the draft was unclear, but stressed that ‘freedom of love’ had no place in a Marxist
pamphlet. He thereby ignored all the other points in the proposed outline, and focussed on one point with
which he declared disagreement. Lenin’s claim was that bourgeois women meant, by freedom of love, one
of the following three things: freedom from seriousness in love, freedom from childbirth, and freedom of
adultery.51 Let us note that Lenin clubs adultery with freedom from childbirth, and asserts that both are

8
bourgeois feminist demands. Let me present here the voice of one working class woman of Russia. A. Ilina,
writing in the textile workers’ journal Tkach, in 1917, wrote this:
“Having finished work at the factory, the woman worker is still not free. While the male worker goes off to a
meeting, or just takes a walk or plays billiards with his mates, she has to cope with the housework…
Unfortunately, one has to admit that male workers are still very prejudiced…. And on top of all these yokes
and burdens, the woman worker has still the heavy load of motherhood … Today for a working class
woman, having a baby is no joy – it’s a burden, which at times gets quite unbearable.”52 So working class
women wanted freedom from motherhood as well.
As for the bourgeois women, if by this Lenin was referring to bourgeois feminists, their conception of free
love did not mean freedom to commit adultery either. Many of the currents in bourgeois feminism, in country
after country, insisted that the goal must be stricter sexual morality for men, rather than so-called looser
morality for women.53 To give just one example, in 1856, Susan B. Anthony, a prominent activist, refused to
let Lucy Stone appear on the list of names associated with the announcement of a forthcoming convention.
The reason was that her refusal to use her husband’s surname was considered to be a reflection of her
support to “free love” in some objectionable sense. 54 To return to the Armand – Lenin debate, for Lenin ‘free
love’ meant promiscuity and multiple partners in casual sex (the so-called glass of water theory, which he
insisted on foisting on his feminist Bolshevik comrades). But nowhere in Armand’s published writings or
letters do we get such an interpretation. Rather, she equated freedom of love with a freedom to choose
one’s marriage partner, with marriage based on personal commitments between two equal people, a
relationship free of religious or social hypocrisy.
Thus, rival strands existed in Bolshevik history. One would find itself elaborated after Lenin’s death
as the Leninist position on women’s work. This was the story, as recounted by Clara Zetkin. 55
Zetkin’s essay shows Lenin’s very prudish conceptions of sexuality.
“I have heard some peculiar things on this matter from Russian and German comrades. I must tell
you. I was told that a talented woman communist in Hamburg is publishing a paper for prostitutes
and that she wants to organise them for the revolutionary fight. Rosa acted and felt as a communist
when in an article she championed the cause of the prostitutes who were imprisoned for any
transgression of police regulations in carrying on their dreary trade. They are, unfortunately, doubly
sacrificed by bourgeois society. First, by its accursed property system, and, secondly, by its
accursed moral hypocrisy…. But still, that is not at all the same thing as considering prostitutes –
how shall I put it? – to be a special revolutionary militant section, as organising them and publishing
a factory paper for them. Aren’t there really any other working women in Germany to organise, for
whom a paper can be issued, who must be drawn into your struggles? The other is only a diseased
excrescence. It reminds me of the literary fashion of painting every prostitute as a sweet Madonna.
The origin of that was healthy, too: social sympathy, rebellion against the virtuous hypocrisy of the
respectable bourgeois. But the healthy part became corrupted and degenerate”.
The point was of course not that prostitutes were a special militant section of women, but that some
woman communist in Hamburg had evidently viewed them as sex workers, and had felt the need to
organize them. Given their distinctive position, they could be organized only by work directed
specially towards them. For Lenin, in the end, this work even becomes degeneration. Yet, by his own
admission, also cited later on by Zetkin, even after the working class seizure of power, it was not
possible to immediately take sex workers into productive work and end the oppression on them. So,

9
while admitting that they were exploited and oppressed, he refused to countenance their
organization and recruitment into the communist party.
Lenin then went on to attack women members of the KPD for discussing issues of sex and marriage.
We find Lenin exaggerating (a polemical style quite usual with him, but if we are unaware of it, it can
lead to serious misunderstanding) and claiming that while Soviet Russia was surrounded by
imperialism, German communist women were doing nothing about such issues, but were simply
discussing sexual problems. Moreover, while Bebel had, in his time, tried to make sense of
contemporary research Lenin turns Bebel into an ultimate text. If something is written that is not in
Bebel, then it is useless. Without any serious knowledge of modern psychoanalysis, Lenin
exclaimed, “The extension of Freudian hypotheses seems ‘educated’, even scientific, but it is
ignorant, bungling. Freudian theory is the modern fashion. I mistrust the sexual theories of the
articles, dissertations, pamphlets, etc., in short, of that particular kind of literature which flourishes
luxuriantly in the dirty soil of bourgeois society. …This masked respect for bourgeois morality seems
to me just as repulsive as poking about in sexual matters. However wild and revolutionary the
behaviour may be, it is still really quite bourgeois. It is, mainly, a hobby of the intellectuals and of the
sections nearest them. There is no place for it in the Party, in the class-conscious, fighting
proletariat.”
This seems the most conservative variant of Bolshevism – for which sexuality is best left
undiscussed, and if discussed, to be settled by reference to what Bebel says, and definitely not by
attempts at integrating modern research with working class lived realities. The class-conscious
working class is so defined that it has no “abnormal sexuality”. Zetkin’s brief summary of her
response and Lenin’s reply are interesting. Zetkin argued that the questions of sex and marriage, in
an oppressive society, meant problems for all women. War and revolution had intensified the
problems. Women were questioning bourgeois hypocrisy. They were also seeking enlightenment by
starting from their lived experiences. Confronted by this, Lenin accused her of being an attorney for
her women comrades, and claimed that what had been done in Germany was a mistake. Since there
existed no authoritative Marxist text, the serious study she spoke of was not possible.

Birth Control and Socialists

The issue of birth control has always been a site of great contest. Women have attempted to place it in the
context of women’s right to control their own bodies. Male defined power structures, like family, community,
and state, have all sought to bring birth control under population policy or some other form over which
women have little control. The careers of Hope Adams in Germany, Margaret Sanger and Antoinette
Konikow in the United States, shows that unless birth control advocacy is closely tied to general progressive
politics, it can degenerate and even become crypto-fascist. In the early years of the twentieth century
Sanger, a nurse, was attracted to the socialist-anarchist-trade unionist radical milieu. She was elected an
officer of the Harlem Socialist Suffrage Society, and organised laundry workers and housemaids. Forced to
confront the harrowing conditions of pregnancy of working class women, Sanger wrote a small pamphlet
outlining contraceptive information. An initial run of 100,000 was distributed. In 1916, she was arrested for
opening a birth control clinic. From 1917, however, Sanger moved away from a socialist perspective. In
1921, at a birth control conference, she raised eugenic arguments regarding birth control. 56

10
Konikow’s career is one of a consistent revolutionary. She had joined, as a young student, the Gruppa
Ozvobozhdenii Truda led by G. V. Plekhanov. She entered medical school in Switzerland and came under
Tsarist surveillance when a fellow student’s accident with explosives alerted the police. She married William
Konikow, a fellow student, in a Christian-Jewish marriage forbidden under Tsarist law, and migrated to the
USA in 1893. There they joined the Socialist Labour Party, opposed the bureaucratic methods of Daniel De
Leon, and sided with Eugene Debs when he founded the Socialist Party of America. In 1902 she graduated
with honours from Tufts College and started practising medicine. From then till her death in 1946, she
combined socialist agitation and birth control advocacy. She joined the Communist party of USA, and left it
in 1928 in support of the Trotskyist opposition. Throughout the 1920s she was under police surveillance both
as a communist and as a feminist advocate of birth control. She developed an inexpensive contraceptive
jelly, and she tried to build up an international network of birth control activists.57
Hope Adams was a socialist of an earlier generation, the first translator, into English, of Bebel’s book, a
doctor suspected by the police of violating the law to perform abortion operations for poor working class
women on social rather than the restricted legally prescribed medical grounds. She combined her medical
campaigns with left wing socialism, including an opposition to the imperialist war. Further examination will
show that attitudes to birth-control were related to positions on socialism in general. This was clearest with
Sangers, whose move away from socialism meant a more elitist attitude that also went against ordinary
women.

Orthodox Marxism of certain varieties used to insist on the correctness of the Marxist line, and argue that
since inception such correctness had always been possessed by Marxism. This paper suggests that in
problematising the issues of sexuality, Marxism was groping its way forward, and quite often, progress and
retardation went hand in hand. Certainly, Marxist theory had much to contribute. Its recognition that all social
relations were historically created rather than being natural could be extended to sexuality, which thus
appeared the least natural. Engels, Bebel and Bernstein all contributed significantly here. By demanding the
reworking of the concept of class, integrating women on a footing of substantive equality, Zetkin, or
Kollontai, created a possible basis for considering sexuality seriously when thinking of class struggle and
working class emancipation. But there were also slippages, possibilities of conservative and patriarchal
responses. This is hardly surprising, if we consider Marx’s own dictum about the ruling ideas of an epoch
being the ideas of the rulers. But it had many positive achievements, on which people like Kollontai would
seek to build after the revolution of 1917. The Stalinist counter-revolution, by contrast, picked out the most
conservative elements in Marxism on this question, further deepened them with bourgeois-patriarchal
norms, and created an orthodoxy on that basis. But that requires a separate discussion.

11
1
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, New York, 1978, pp.24-5, 145-6.
2
Heidi Hartmann, 'The Unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union', in Lydia Sargent ed., The Unhappy
Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A Debate on Class and Patriarchy, London, 1986; Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women,
London, 1983; Iris Young, 'Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: a Critique of the Dual Systems Theory' in Lydia Sargent, ibid.
3
A. Jagger, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Brighton, 1983
4
As I have discussed many, though not all of these issues at length in several essays, I refer readers to them. ‘ German Social Democracy and
Women’s Liberation’, in Anuradha Chanda, Mahua Sarkar and Kunal Chattopadhyay (eds) – Women in History, Calcutta, 2003; ‘Gendering
the Revolutionary Party: An Appraisal of Bolshevism’, in Biswajit Chatterjee and Kunal Chattopadhyay (eds) – Perspectives on Socialism,
Calcutta, 2004; Proletarian Socialism and Women’s Liberation – in Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Millennium (61st) Session,
Kolkata 2001; The “anti-Leninism” of Rosa Luxemburg: A Reappraisal of her theory of party , Society and Change, vol.X, nos. 1& 2, April –
September 1995; ‘Bismritapray Samajtantri August Bebel’ (August Bebel: A Nearly Forgotten Socialist) , Dhanadhanye, March 2003, and
‘Alexandra Kollontai’s The Love of Worker Bees in Historical Context’ – in a forthcoming anthology edited by Tanika Sarkar and Kumkum Roy.
5
Design for Utopia; Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, New York, 1971, p.54.
6
For Owen’s writings, see R. Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings, London, 1972. For a critique of Owen and his limitations, see
Hal Draper, ‘James Morrison and Working Class Feminism’, in Hal Draper, Socialism from Below, (ed. E. Haberkern), New Jersey and
London, 1992.
7
Miriam Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement, New York, 1976, especially pp. 32-3.
8
For a detailed summary of Wheeler-Thompson, see Dale Spender, Women of Ideas, and What Men have Done to Them, London etc, 1982,
pp. 385 – 398.
9
This and other quotations from Morrison are based on an article that Hal Draper constructed by organising sentences from Morrison without
additions or alterations. See Hal Draper, Socialism from Below, New Jersey and London, 1992, p. 236 for the quotation, p. 235 for Draper’s
comments about the ‘synthetic” article.
10
Ibid, p.236
11
“The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of
men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Marx, ‘preface’ to the Critique of
Political Economy, in D. McLellan ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford 1977, p.389.
12
Marx-Engels Werke, Bd. XXVIII, Berlin, 1961, p. 423
13
Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, London, 1981, pp.168-9.
14
ME:CW, vol. 6, Moscow, 1976, p. 487.
15
Ibid, p.501.
16
Ibid, pp. 501-2.
17
ME:SW, vol.3, Moscow 1983 (original publication 1970), pp. 209-255.
18
Ibid, p.233.
19
Ibid, p. 254.
20
Ibid, p.239.
21
Ibid, p.254.
22
Quoted in H. F. Peters, Red Jenny, London etc., 1986, p.61.
23
Anne Lopes and Gary Roth, Men’s Feminism: August Bebel and the German Socialist Movement,Amherst, New York, 2000
24
August Bebel, Nari: Ateet, Bartaman O Bhabishyate, Calcutta, June 2003 (third printing of original edition of March 2003). This is a Bengali
translation by Kanak Mukhopadhyay from an English printing of 1976. I have avoided direct quotations because of the problem of multiple
translations.
25
Ibid, pp. 39; 184-5.
26
Ibid, pp.37-38.
27
See ibid, pp. 75-86.
28
Ibid, p.45.
29
Ibid, pp.70-71.
30
Lopes and Roth, Men’s Feminism, pp. 69-70.
31
Ibid, p.70
32
For Eleanor’s life, see Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, New York, 2 vols, 1972, 1976; and Chushichi Tsuzuki, The Life of Eleanor Marx
(1855-1898): A Socialist Tragedy, Oxford, 1967.
33
Eleanor Marx-Aveling and Edward Aveling, The Woman Question, ed. Joachim Muller and Edith Schotte, Leipzig, 1986, p. 19.
34
Ibid, p.21.
35
Ibid, p.24
36
Tony Cliff, Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation, London, 1987 (reprint of 1984 publication), especially Chapter 5 for Germany.
37
Clara Zetkin, Selected Writings, New York, 1984, pp.58-59
38
Ibid, pp.81-2.
39
Die Gleichheit, vol. VI, No. 25 (9 December 1896) and No. 26 (23 December 1896), 197-200, 203-207.
40
M. Mies, ‘Marxist Socialism and women’s Emancipation: The Proletarian Women’s Movement in Germany 1860-1919’, in Feminism in
Europe: Liberal and Socialist Strategies 1789-1919 , M. Mies, (The Hague, 1983), pp.134-135.
41
Werner Thonnessen, The Emancipation of Women, London 1976 (reprint of 1973 edition),pp, 47-48
42
Ibid, pp. 58-59.
43
Eduard Bernstein ‘On the occasion of a sensational trial’. I am giving no page reference as this is reproduced from a posting in the
Marxists’ Internet Archive.
44
Eduard Bernstein, ‘The judgement of abnormal sexual intercourse’. As with the previous article, this is cited from a posting in the MIA and
therefore I have given no page references, as it is in HTML format.
45
Ibid
46
S. Marik, ‘Gendering the Revolutionary Party’, in Biswajit Chatterjee and Kunal Chattopadhyay, eds., Perspectives on Socialism, Calcutta,
2004.
47
See A. Kollontai, Izbranii statii i rechii, Moscow, 1972, pp. 61-79. See also her autobiography. For a discussion see B. Farnsworth, op.cit.,
pp.36-37.
48
A. Kollontai, 'Zhenskii Dyen', and "Sovetskaia Zhenshchina -- polno pravnaya grazhdanka - svoei - stranii', in Izbranii statii i rechii, pp. 109-
112 and 378-383.
49
R.C. Elwood, Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist, New York, 1992.
50
B.Evans Clements, op. cit., p. 102; S. Smith, 'Class and Gender: Women's Strikes in St. Petersburg, 1895 -- 1917 and in Shanghai, 1895 --
1927', Social History, vol. 19, no.2, May 1994, pp.145, 159, 160; A. Bobroff, 'The Bolsheviks and Working Women 1905 - 1920', Soviet
Studies, October 1974, p.554. See further M. J. Hutton, ‘Russian and Soviet Women, 1897 – 1939: Dreams, Struggles and Nightmares’
(Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1986, p. 374). Hutton is cited in R.C. Elwood, Inessa Armand, p. 104.
51
V. I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, 55 volumes, Moscow, 1958-65, vol. XLIX, pp.51-2, 54-7. Armand’s views have to be reconstructed
from what Lenin says, since her letters are not available.
52
S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd, Cambridge, 1986 (reprint of 1983 edition), pp.26-27.
53
The evidence is too vast to present even in summary form here. Readers can profitably consult Richard J. Evans, The Feminists, London
etc, 1984 (reprint of revised edition of 1979);
54
Dale Spender, Women of Ideas, pp. 355-6.
55
Clara Zetkin, Lenin on the Women’s Question, from the Marxist Internet Archive. As with other articles from MIA, I have given
no page references, since these are in html mark-up.
56
Apart from Dale Spender, cited earlier, see Dianne Feeley, ‘Margaret Sanger & the fight or birth control’. This appeared in The Militant,
organ of the Socialist Workers Party, USA, 10 May 1979.
57
Dianne Feeley, ‘Antoinette Konikow: Marxist and Feminist’, International Socialist Review, 33, January 1972, pp. 19-23.