Most commonly known as the daughter of
Karl, Eleanor Marx was an impressive figure in her own right. Raised
in a household that unsurprisingly instilled a sense of social
responsibility in its children, she nevertheless took her father’s
towering legacy and diverted it in her own, more practical direction.
Born in 1855 in London, Eleanor grew up
in an era where even the daughter of a renowned intellectual like
Marx possessed no right to formal education or to the vote, but she
refused to let these limitations stand in the way of the socialist
struggle to which she devoted her life. Yet she did not just follow
the footsteps of her father: she linked the struggle of the working
class with the plight of her gender - while women were paid lower
wages, they were used to undercut male workers and cement the power
of employers - and was pivotal in organising key women’s strikes
including the famous match girls’ and Gasworkers’ strikes. (The
perennial gender pay gap that still exists today makes this campaign
seem depressingly current).
Eleanor was a writer and
multi-linguist, travelling across Europe and to America to
investigate employment conditions and spur on the workers’
movement, admirable now but astounding for an unmarried woman of the
period.
Yet if Eleanor Marx is an example of
the intellectual force and drive possessed by the female sex and of
what women can achieve in the political sphere against the odds, she
is also a cautionary example of the power relations and violence
women so often face in the personal sphere. Eleanor was found dead
at the age of 43, poisoned by prussic acid. Suspicion fell on her
long-term on-off partner Edward Aveling who had purchased both
chloroform and prussic acid on the morning of her death, and had left
the house later that morning, returning only when Eleanor had been
dead for hours. An inquest was held at which Aveling blamed
Eleanor’s depression and was not charged, leaving with the
remainder of the inheritance Eleanor had received from Engels.
Whether her death was suicide or something more sinister, Eleanor the
person fell victim to a manipulative and possibly abusive partner,
and her legacy to stereotypes about female mental weakness and lack
of resilience.
But the sad
circumstances of her passing should not overshadow the achievements
of this early activist and intellectual, who built on a family
heritage but was not dominated by it; who created her own socialist
and feminist inheritance.
To read more about the life and work
of Eleanor Marx, please see her biography, ‘Eleanor Marx: A Life’
by Rachel Holmes - which inspired this Page 3.
NS
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