The striking difference of this century and the last is, that free-thought was the privilege of the upper classes then, and it is becoming the privilege of the working classes now. We want to make them disregard the mythical next world and live for this world, and insist on having what will make it pleasant to them.
Eleanor Marx, quoted by Beatrice Webb in My Apprenticeship (1938)
Eleanor Marx was a feminist socialist activist who dedicated her life to improving the lives of working people. Influenced and encouraged by her father Karl Marx, she lived an unconventional life for the time, and personified humanist values. She played a key role in organising and establishing trade unions and campaigning for the rights of workers, particularly working class women.
Eleanor was an accomplished writer and translator, as well as a gifted public speaker, and was an active member of the Social Democratic Federation and later the Socialist League in Britain, frequently contributing to their publications.
Eleanor Marx was the youngest child of Karl Marx and Jenny Von Westphalen. She was born in Soho, but the family later moved to Hampstead, North London.
Eleanor had little formal education but benefited from her upbringing in a house filled with some of the greatest freethinkers of the day, including Friedrich Engels, who played a key role in her life. From an early age, she showed a keen interest in politics and social justice. When she was nine, she wrote to Abraham Lincoln because, as she later explained, ‘I felt absolutely convinced that [he] badly needed my advice as to the war’. From the age of 14 she was her father’s secretary and research assistant. Later, she prepared with Engels the first English language edition of Das Kapital and sorted her father’s extensive papers after his death.
The Paris Commune was an important influence on the teenage Eleanor, both in terms of her future politics and her first love, Prosper Lissagaray, a renowned Communard. By December 1871 she was assisting refugees and coordinating the relief committee.
Another passion was the theatre. Eleanor set up a club for fans of Shakespeare and socialised with theatrical people like Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry, and Henry Irving. Although unable to realise her ambition to be an actor, she used her theatrical training to persuade people to socialism. She performed with Shaw and others, including the first reading of Ibsen’s The Doll’s House in England. A gifted linguist, she was the first person to translate into English notable works by Ibsen, Flaubert, and Zola.
Both parents and one sister died within a short time, leaving Eleanor with only one sister. Soon after, she met Edward Aveling, an actor and secularist campaigner who followed Darwin and was involved in running the Secular Society. Eleanor and Aveling developed a long lasting but difficult and eventually destructive relationship. They lived together from 1884 to her death, despite his faithlessness and lack of financial integrity.
Eleanor was a diligent and hard worker, often to the detriment of her health, and a great organiser and networker. Her activism included campaigning through speaking tours and journalism, as well as helping to establish and run various organisations. Her tours preached the need for unity: promoting internationalism and reducing factionalism between interest groups and men and women. Her account of her four-month tour of the USA in 1886, reassured readers that socialists didn’t want to abolish private property ownership, but wanted workers to be better paid so they could afford their own property.
In the 1880s she wrote a range of articles and leaflets supporting various social and political campaigns. Her article, ‘The Woman Question’, argued that feminism was an integral part of socialism, not just a single aspect. She was critical of the women’s suffrage movement as being limited in its aims and only benefiting women with property. Another article criticised British imperialism for exploiting natives and imposing religion.
Eleanor contributed to the birth of the Labour Party, which emerged out of the battle between various left-wing groups. She was very influential, and records of the time show her at the centre of strategy and organisation. She helped bring people together and steer the direction away from anarchism to parliamentary democracy.
Eleanor became immersed in fighting for the rights of workers, most notably the London dock workers, gas workers, and the women workers at the Bryant and May match factory. She helped organise union committees and campaigns for the eight-hour day. Known affectionately as ‘Our Old Stoker’ and ‘Our Mother’, she was a popular orator. She addressed a crowd of 100,000 at a rally in Hyde Park in support of the Dock strike in 1889, which led to the formation of the dockers union. Eleanor supported Will Thorne to draft its rules and constitution, and to run the union.
Eleanor and her father disagreed on many things, but one value they shared was religious unbelief. Eleanor was a resolute secularist and atheist, believing people should be accountable to one another and not to an unseen judge. Debating with Beatrice Webb, she described Christianity as an immoral illusion and said that modern socialism was aiming to educate people to, ‘disregard the mythical next world and live for this world and insist on having what will make it pleasant for them’.
Engels provided emotional and financial support all her life. On his death she inherited enough to buy a house in southeast London. Tragically, only three years later she took her own life at the age of 42, after discovering Aveling had secretly married another woman. Friends and associates wanted to take legal action against Aveling for irregularities relating to Eleanor’s Will, but he died before this could happen. Her ashes were kept by the British Communist Party until 1956 when they were interred in the new tomb for Karl Marx and family in Highgate Cemetery.
If Eleanor Marx will never be forgotten as long as the memory of the great struggle for the emancipation of labour and of humanity will last, it will not be because she is the daughter of Karl Marx, but because she is Eleanor Marx.
‘Eleanor Marx’ by Wilhelm Liebknecht in The Social Democrat, September 1898
As Eleanor’s biographer Rachel Holmes describes:
the life of Eleanor Marx was one of the most significant and interesting events in the evolution of social democracy in Victorian Britain. Not since Mary Wollstonecraft had any woman made such a profound, progressive contribution to English political thought and action.
She made a significant contribution to many of the freedoms and benefits of British modern democracy: the eight-hour day, access to equal education, trade unions, and universal suffrage. Her unwavering commitment to social justice remains a powerful legacy.
Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2014)
Siobhan Brown, A Rebel’s Guide to Eleanor Marx (Bookmarks Publications, 2015)
Rachel Holmes, ‘How Eleanor Marx Changed the World‘ in New Statesman, 26 November 2014
Articles by Eleanor Marx | Marxist Internet Archive
Eduard Bernstein, ‘What Drove Eleanor Marx to Suicide‘ (1898) | Marxist Internet Archive
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