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.
Progress issued this book in English more than once, and in two different translations, both out of Moscow. The one nearly every reader knows is Alick West's, made in 1942 and later rechecked against the German of the Marx–Engels Werke: it is the version carried in the three-volume Selected Works, and the source of the sentence everyone quotes — "the world historical defeat of the female sex." An older and looser rendering, of the Untermann–Kerr lineage (1902), also circulated in the Moscow printings; it gives that same sentence flatly, as "the defeat of the female sex, an event affecting the history of the world." The translation used here is West's, from Selected Works, Volume Three (1973), set against Engels's fourth German edition of 1891 — the right base. (One small thing to watch: in this Selected Works setting West's famous phrase is printed "the world-historic defeat of the female sex"; the fuller "world historical defeat" form, from the same 1942 translation, is the one that passed into common quotation.) The Selected Works text is spare — Engels's own prefaces, his text, the editors' endnotes. The book's Soviet career, though, is inseparable from the apparatus the free-standing Moscow editions wrapped it in — above all the Foreign Languages Publishing House printing of 1948, which fronted Engels with an eight-page preface by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee. That preface is the specimen this introduction examines, because it is considerably more revealing than its authors intended.
Start with what the book gets right, because a great deal of it is right and it changed how the world thinks. Engels's governing move is to take three institutions that every respectable authority of his day held to be natural, eternal or divinely ordered — the monogamous family, private property, the state — and show them as products of a datable history, with beginnings and therefore with ends. The Institute's own preface summarises this fairly: Engels "demonstrates that historically all forms of family, property and state are transitory." The chapter on the state is still the crispest short statement of the materialist case. Classes with irreconcilable interests, Engels argues, would consume each other and society in sterile struggle; so there arises "a power, apparently standing above society... and this power, arising out of society, but placing itself over it, and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state." Not an arbiter above the fray, and not a conspiracy imposed from outside: a growth of the conflict itself, which then floats free of the society that produced it. Anyone who has watched a modern state acquire interests of its own will recognise the description.
The chapters on the family are the reason the book still sells. Engels's claim is that the subordination of women is not a fact of nature but a fact of property. Once herds, land and slaves gave a man wealth to bequeath, descent had to be traced through him, and the household ceased to be a public, collective concern and became his private one: "the wife became the first domestic servant, pushed out of participation in social production." From this he draws the analogy that has done more work than any other sentence in socialist writing on the subject: "In the family, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat." The modern family, he insists, "is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman," and monogamy in its historical form is not the reconciliation of the sexes but "the subjection of one sex by the other." It follows — and this is the part that matters most — that a remedy exists and can be specified. "The first premise for the emancipation of women is the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry: and that this again demands that the specific feature of the individual family of being the economic unit of society be abolished." Housework must stop being a private burden and become a public service: "Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public matter." Two conditions, not one. Hold on to that; the century turned on it.
Now the weaknesses, which are real and which the tradition that produced this introduction has no interest in hiding. The scaffolding is Morgan's, and Morgan's scaffolding fell down. The ladder of savagery, barbarism and civilisation, each rung defined by a technology; the claim that group marriage was a universal stage; above all the story of an original "mother-right" overthrown in a single reversal — none of this survived the anthropology of the following fifty years. In West's translation the famous sentence reads: "The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex." As a datable event it did not happen, and no serious ethnographer now thinks it did. Engels can hardly be blamed for using the best evidence available in 1884, and to his credit he wrote the escape clause himself, on his first page of argument: Morgan's classification would hold, he said, "unless important additional material necessitates alterations." Important additional material arrived. What survives the collapse of the narrative is the analysis underneath it: that women's position varies with the organisation of production and inheritance, that the separation of the household from social production is what impoverishes women's standing, and that this can be changed. That thesis has proved far more durable than the ladder it was carried up.
There is a second limitation, and it is the one the twentieth century tested to destruction. Engels called entry into social production the "first premise" of emancipation. It is a premise, not a guarantee. Where women entered paid work in their millions and the household remained a private workshop staffed by them after hours, the result was not liberation but a double load. Engels knew this in outline — he observed that a woman who takes up public industry "is not in a position to fulfil her family duties" — but he treated the second condition, the socialising of care, as following naturally from the first. It does not follow. It has to be paid for, and someone has to want to pay.
Which brings us to the question those Moscow editions could not ask about themselves: was the state that printed the book consistent with it? The answer was written into the front of the 1948 edition, in the open.
The Institute's preface does something startling. It stops, halfway through, to correct Engels. "But there is one inaccurate statement in Engels' Preface to the first edition of the book which must be noted," it announces, and quotes the passage in which Engels calls the decisive factor in history "the production and reproduction of immediate life," which "is of a twofold character" — the production of the means of subsistence on one hand, "the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species" on the other. The Institute rules this out: "The family, however, cannot be placed on a par with labour, with material production, as a determining cause of social development." The correct formulation, the reader is told, "was elaborated by Comrade Stalin in his Dialectical and Historical Materialism."
Consider what has been struck out, and when. Engels's twofold-production passage is precisely the one that makes the family and the bearing and rearing of children a site of material determination in their own right — the one place in Marxism that licenses a hard-headed materialist audit of what a state is doing to its households. Demote it to a mere "condition" of social life, and the family becomes a passive reflex of the mode of production: whatever the mode of production is socialist, the family is by definition fine, and no further questions arise. The sentence was removed in the years when the questions were most pressing. The young Soviet republic had gone furthest of any state in Engels's direction — full civil equality, secular and easily dissolved marriage, and in 1920 the first legal abortion service in the world — and it had then reversed course: abortion recriminalised in 1936, the Party's women's department (the Zhenotdel, wound up in 1930) long gone, and in 1944 a family decree that made divorce slow and expensive, stripped unregistered fathers of obligation to their children, and handed out medals to mothers of large families. Every one of those measures restored the individual family as the economic unit of society — the exact thing Engels said had to be abolished — and reprivatised the care of children that he said had to become "a public matter." The apparatus edited the standard, then failed it.
Trotsky had already given the reason in 1936, in The Revolution Betrayed. He is careful, and his care is the point: "The October revolution honestly fulfilled its obligations in relation to woman," he writes, and the revolution "made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called 'family hearth' — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death." The crèches, the social dining rooms and the laundries were built, badly, on the ruins of a wrecked economy, and they failed. A poor and encircled country could not buy its way out of the household in a decade. But the retreat, Trotsky insists, went "infinitely farther than the iron economic necessity demands," because the bureaucracy discovered a use for the family it was too poor to replace: "the need... for a stable hierarchy of relations, and for the disciplining of youth by means of 40,000,000 points of support for authority and power." Poverty explains the failure. The cult built on top of it — the medals, the moralising, the pretence that a forced retreat was a socialist triumph — explains the falsification. And Trotsky's warning against the easy conclusion still holds: "It would be incorrect to regard this retreat as a condemnation of the socialist system, which in general was never tried out."
The same reversal was performed on the book's other great theme, and again the preface says so. Engels ends by promising that with classes "the state will inevitably fall," and that a society of "the free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe." The Soviet state did not go to the museum; it grew, and by 1939 it was official doctrine that it must go on growing under socialism and might persist under communism itself. The Institute prepares the reader for this on the last page of its preface, in one flat sentence: "Lenin and Stalin developed further the basic ideas expressed by Engels in this book, particularly the question of the abolition of classes and of the state during the period of Socialism and of Communism." Developed further is the apparatus's term of art for reversed. Nor can it leave even a footnote alone. Where Engels's appendix reports on the Giliaki of Sakhalin — the small Amur people whom, a note tells us, "Soviet ethnographers" now call the Nivkhi — the editors append a testimonial: October "rid them of the baneful influence of capitalism, saved them from extinction and enabled them to develop freely under the Soviet system." That note went to press in 1948, while whole deported nationalities were living under guard in Central Asia.
None of this is an argument against Engels, and it is not an argument that the seed of 1944 lay in 1884. The causes of the reversal were objective before they were political: a backward country, a revolution left isolated when the German rising failed, a working class destroyed by civil war and famine, and no material surplus with which to socialise a single kitchen. On that ground an apparatus raised itself above the society it administered — becoming, in Engels's own words, a power "arising out of society, but placing itself over it" — and then rewrote the founder to fit. The tell is that it had to rewrite him at all. You do not correct a text you have superseded; you correct a text that is still convicting you.
So what is this Marxism worth now? More, not less, than when the corrections were being printed. The 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 state chapter reads as freshly as ever in a world of governments visibly detached from the societies that pay for them. And the central unfinished demand is the live political question of our own decade. Women's entry into paid work — Engels's first premise — has largely happened across the rich world, and it 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 is still overwhelmingly private, unpaid or badly paid, and still overwhelmingly done by women; every fight over childcare, parental leave and social care is a fight over whether the rearing of human beings is "a public matter" or a household's private misfortune. Engels put that question on the agenda and it has never been taken off. Read this book, then, not as scripture and not as a museum piece, but as an unpaid bill — one that the state which reprinted it for forty years defaulted on, and that is still outstanding.