Woman Question: Selections from the Writings of Karl Marx

by International Publishers

Genres: Theory

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Chrisley Carpio · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is exemplary and it stitches together some of the best works on this whole question. This book answers "The Woman Question" unlike any other. Find me a book or collection of excerpts that, as gracefully as this one, lays out the need to abolish the family as it exists and marriage as it exists - the social unit of a bourgeois society, and "hetaerism for the man, adultery for the woman" respectively - and also an understanding of women's liberation, sexual liberation, that does not hinge upon, as Lenin puts in his letter to Inessa Armand, "freedom from serious problems in marriage, from childbirth, and from the possibility of adultery," bourgeois demands which Clara Zetkin would compare to "navel-gazing."

The book is a careful compilation of many excerpts of Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, especially the ones that give a historical materialist analysis of where monogamy and sex-love come from, but also speeches by Stalin and Lenin on the role of women in production, in revolution, and in socialist construction, and even letters written by women leaders of communist parties like Armand and Zetkin in which they debated which demands come from bourgeois women and which ones come from proletarian women.

I appreciated that the authors all find that the kernels of the future - marriage based upon individual sex-love, dissoluble - formed as a germ within the restrictive feudal monogamy, and that it is in fact at least partially practiced by proletarian men, women and others today, since no worker is passing on or inheriting anything worth mentioning. Under socialism and in a society where women are embraced within social production to the fullest, marriage and family can fully become what they are turning into: bonds held together by promise and by love, instead of economic necessity. It is a pretty profound revelation and a realization of our assertion that the working class benefits not at all from oppression - not of women, nor of anyone else - and in fact can lead society towards the emancipation of all.

[Kevin Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 4 big names in Socialism discuss the position of women through history and posit their spot in the world of Communism. Lenin and Stalin are redundant in their incessant patting themselves on the back over the accomplishments of the Bolshevik revolution, but the quartet show that they were ahead of their time while addressing such issues as divorce, prostitution, reproductive rights, women in politics, etc.

[Mykolas Yamakaitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice spread of Marxist thought on the woman question. Definitely offered a good sense of what was being said around those times. Not entirely relevant to current circumstances in today’s age but interesting and informative nonetheless

[Real Betis Balompie · Rating 5 out of 5]

No solo hablan de las mujeres

[bubu]

crazy how much talk there is abt het marriages being whats natural when monogamy and the nuclear family were explicitly created to fit economic conditions