Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-r7bls Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-14T07:45:46.997Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”1: How Intellectual Biography Obscures Marx's and Engels's Gendered Political Partnerships

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Abstract

Four women have been conventionally framed as wives and/or mistresses and/or sexual partners in the biographical reception of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) as heterosexual men. These women were Jenny Marx (née von Westphalen) (1814–1881), Helene Demuth (“Lenchen”) (1820–1890), Mary Burns (1821–1863), and Lydia Burns (1827–1878). How exactly they appear in the few contemporary texts and rare images that survive is less interesting than the determination of subsequent biographers of the two “great men” to make these women fit a familiar genre, namely intellectual biography. An analysis of Marx–Engels biographies shows how this masculinized genre enforces an incuriosity that makes gendered political partnerships unthinkable and therefore invisible. By contrast, a positive interest in these women, which rethinks what a gendered political partnership is or could be, results in a significantly different view of the two men. As historical figures, they shift from being individualized or paired‐with‐each‐other “great thinkers” to communist/socialist activists working in and through everyday spaces and material practices. Their pamphlets, articles, and books thus appear more as immediate political interventions and less as timeless theorizing or as the raw material for such intellectualizing reconstructions.

Type
Cluster on Gender and the “Great Man”: Recovering Philosophy's “Wives of the Canon”
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Berlin, Isaiah. 1939/2013. Karl Marx: His life and environment. 5th ed. Ed. Hardy, Henry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Brennan, Teresa, and Pateman, Carole. 1979. “Mere auxiliaries to the commonwealth”: Women and the origins of liberalism. Political Studies 27 (2): 183200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carver, Terrell. 1983. Marx and Engels: The intellectual relationship. Brighton, UK: Harvester.Google Scholar
Carver, Terrell. 1989. Friedrich Engels: His life and thought. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Carver, Terrell. 2003. Engels: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carver, Terrell. 2005. “Marx's illegitimate son” or Gresham's Law in the world of scholarship. https://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/terrell-carver/article.htm.Google Scholar
Carver, Terrell. 2016. Review of Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and illusion. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2016/2456.Google Scholar
Carver, Terrell. 2017. Marx. Cambridge, UK: Polity.Google Scholar
Carver, Terrell, and Blank, Daniel. 2014. A political history of the editions of Marx and Engels's “German ideology manuscripts.” New York: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1981/1993. Public man, private woman: Women in social and political thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gabriel, Mary. 2011. Love and capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the birth of a revolution. New York: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Alan. 1981. Marx's politics: Communists and citizens. Oxford: Martin Robertson.Google Scholar
Henderson, W. O. 1976. The life of Friedrich Engels. 2 vols. London: Frank Cass.Google Scholar
Holmes, Rachel. 2014. Eleanor Marx: A life. London: A&C Black.Google Scholar
Hunley, J. D. 1991. The life and thought of Friedrich Engels: A reinterpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunt, Tristram. 2009. The frock‐coated communist: The revolutionary life of Friedrich Engels. Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane.Google Scholar
Institute of Marxism‐Leninism, ed. n.d. Reminiscences of Marx and Engels. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.Google Scholar
Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984/1993. The man of reason: “Male” and “female” in Western philosophy. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Frederick. 1990. Collected works. Vol. 26. London: Lawrence & Wishart.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Frederick. 1995. Collected works. Vol. 46. London: Lawrence & Wishart.Google Scholar
Mayer, Gustav. 1920/1933/1936. Friedrich Engels: A biography. Trans. Gilbert and Helen Highet, ed. Crossman, R. H. S.London: Chapman & Hall.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLellan, David. 1973/1987. Karl Marx: His life and thought. New edn. Basingstoke: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCrea, Gavin. 2015. Mrs. Engels: A novel. New York: Catapult.Google Scholar
Mehring, Franz. 1918/1951. Karl Marx: The story of his life. Trans. Edward Fitzgerald. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Nicolaievsky, Boris, and Maenchen‐Helfen, Otto. 1933/1973. Karl Marx: Man and fighter. Trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher. London: Allen Lane.Google Scholar
Pateman, Carole. 1988/1997. The sexual contract. Cambridge, UK: Polity.Google Scholar
Riazanov, D. B. 1927/1973. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: An introduction to their lives and work. Trans. Joshua Kunitz. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Rigby, S. H. 1992/2007. Engels and the formation of Marxism: History, dialectics and revolution. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Rojahn, Jürgen. 2002. The emergence of a theory: The importance of Marx's notebooks exemplified by those from 1844. Rethinking Marxism 14 (4): 2946.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Jonathan. 2013. Karl Marx: A nineteenth‐century life. New York: Liveright.Google Scholar
Stedman Jones, Gareth. 2016. Karl Marx: Greatness and illusion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wheen, Francis. 1999/2000. Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. 1987/1990. The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Yanow, Dvora, and Schwartz‐Shea, Peregrine. 2013. Interpretation and method: Empirical research and the interpretive turn. 2nd ed. Milton Park, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar