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Industrialization and the Family
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10394 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
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12 / 1986 |
3,039 Words |
| Author
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Allan C. Carlson
Allan C. Carlson is affiliated with The Rockford Institute.
This article, first appearing in the 1983 Spring/Summer issue
of This World, is reprinted by permission. |
Jack was sitting before the hearth fire darning his working wife's sock. A tear lay in his eye. "No," the wretched man said in a thick Yorkshire accent, "there is plenty of Wark for Wemen and Barns (children) in this quarter but very Little for men--thou may as well go try to find a hondred pounds, as go to find wark aboats heare--but I hed not ment neather thee nor eney one Els to have seen me mending t'wifes stockings, for it's a poar job."
The bloke wiped away the tear. "I do not [k]now what is to become of us," he whimpered, "for she as been t'man now for a Long time, and me t'woman--it is hard wark." When he had married, Jack said, he held a fine job and the couple "gat on very well--we got a good firnished Home...I could wark for us boath." But now "t'world is turned up side down. Mary has to turn out to wark and I have to stop at home to mind Barns--and to Wash and Clean--Bake and mend." At that point, Jack lost control and wept violently, declaring over and over his wish that he had never been born.
The writer who described Jack and Mary's fate swelled with indignation. "Can one imagine a more senseless and foolish state of affairs...? It deprives the husband of his manhood and the wife of all womanly qualities. Yet it cannot thereby turn a man into a woman or a woman into a man." The situation was "shameful and degrading," the corruption of the efforts of a hundred generations to improve the lot of humankind. "If all that can be achieved by our work and effort is this sort of mockery," the author concluded, "then we must truly despair of humanity and its aspirations."
What sort of degraded reactionary could have written such a passage?
The author, in fact, is Friedrich Engels, co-founder of modern communism. The passages in quotation are lifted from the theoretical heart of his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. It is crucial to note that Engels' apparent social conservatism, so shocking to modern sentiments, was not merely a vague proto-Victorian excursion outside the boundaries of Marxist theory. Rather, the sex-role inversion which he saw as a consequence of capitalism was central to his understanding of the historical dialectic.
Karl Marx pursued the same theme in Capital (1867). He described capitalism's destruction of the old craft industries, which used skilled male workers, and the creation of a new division of labor based "on the employment of women, of children of all ages...in a
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