Eleanor Marx :: Economist Writers Literature Essays

Eleanor MarxEleanor Marx has not been remembered as an economist. Her life, though more so her closing, has captured the imaginations and curiosities of novelists and biographers and her public 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 She edited Marxs unpublished textbooks after his death and contri only ifed several articles of her own on economic topics.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 grip 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 an d in the way she conducted her personal life, Eleanor Marx was first and foremost an economist.An Economist in WritingEleanor Marxs essay, The Woman Question, clearly delineates her role as an economist and her dedication to womens lib 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 Eleanors belles-lettres to bear the imprint of a commercial publisher (Kapp II, 1972, 83). While Aveling certainly was involved in producing the final document, in Kapps analysis at least, the bulk of the underlying argument was Eleanors (83). Thus, we can reasonably say that this document, framed as a review of Bebels Woman-Past, Present, and Future, is indicative of Eleanors 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 plant 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 fathers socialist theories and her own feminism becomes clear.