The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Engels wrote this book in the spring of 1884, in about two months, out of a dead man's notebooks.

Marx had spent the last years of his life reading Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), an American lawyer's study of the Iroquois and of ancient Greece and Rome, and had filled a long abstract with critical remarks; he meant to write the book himself and did not live to do it. Engels, as he says in his 1884 preface, offered "but a meagre substitute for that which my departed friend was not destined to accomplish". The result is the most widely read thing either man wrote about women, and the only sustained Marxist account of where the family, private property and the state came from - and therefore of the conditions under which they might go.

Its historical method has won so completely that we forget whose it was. Nobody serious now argues that our particular family form is written into nature, and the argument that it is not began in these pages. The chapter on the state reads as freshly as ever in a world of governments visibly detached from the societies that pay for them. And the central demand is still unfinished: Engels's first premise was women's entry into paid work, which has largely happened across the rich world and has not delivered equality, exactly as the second half of his argument predicts it could not. Care of the young, the old and the sick remains overwhelmingly private, unpaid or badly paid, and overwhelmingly done by women.

The translation here is Alick West's of 1942, rechecked against the German of the Marx-Engels Werke - the version carried in the three-volume Selected Works, and the source of the sentence everyone quotes about the world-historic defeat of the female sex - set against Engels's fourth German edition of 1891.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.