QUESTIONS of man-woman relationship, of women’s bondage and liberation, have been an integral part, a central component, of the Marxist worldview right from its formative stage. “The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person” — writes the young Marx in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 — “is the relation of man to woman. In this natural relationship of the sexes ... is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man ... From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development ... the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.” One can cite many instances to show that Marx retained and developed this viewpoint in later years. But we shall avoid that and come straight to Marxism’s magnum opus on the subject: Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (henceforth Origin). To an extent it was a joint work of Engels and Marx, for the former drew liberally on the latter’s extensive notes on Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), on which Origin is mainly based.

Published in 1884, Origin analyses the oppression of women in terms of (a) the relationship between the modes of subsistence/ production and procreation and (b) the connection between forms of the family on one hand and systems of property ownership and the state on the other. This is clearly spelt out in the preface to the first edition:

“According to the materialist conception the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This again is of a two-fold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, articles of food and clothing, dwellings and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organisation under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular community live is determined by both kinds of production, by the stage of development of labour on the one hand and of the family on the other.”

In this perspective, let us now take a short tour across Engels’ basic teachings on the subject. Save the subheadings, a few obvious insertions on our part and the last paragraph which seeks to summarise the relevant observations of Marx, Engels and Lenin, what follows in this instalment are excerpted entirely from Origin, with very nominal editing.