Eleanor Marx (1855-1898): Life, Work, Contacts, and: Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (review)

Thirty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, to learn about "minor" British turn-of-the- century women—and almost all of them were defined that way—meant to do so through studies of their male contemporaries. One could read about a feminist activist such as Clara Collet in biographies of George Gissing, a comic writer such as Ada Leverson in books about Oscar Wilde, a novelist such as Florence Henniker in relation to Thomas Hardy, or a socialist such as May Morris through a discussion of her father, William. Hardly ever did one find a volume devoted either to the woman herself as sole subject or to the connections between and among women in late-Victorian movements.

Since then, feminist critics have not so much remade as restored our picture of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British cultural and social history, working as painting restorers might, by cleaning away what previously concealed the importance of individual women of the past and of their networks of female contemporaries. Such women now stand out from the canvas as clear and luminous beings whose presence, moreover, must change the spectator's entire sense of the composition as a whole. That is certainly one of the points that June Hannam and Karen Hunt wish to make in Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s. As they argue persuasively, the formative years of the British socialist movement and the history of political organizations such as the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) will be "mapped differently if seen through the eyes of socialist women" (12). Although their interest is in representing the experiences of a broad spectrum of both working- and middle-class women (and in demonstrating that the distinctions between these groups were not absolute, since many so-called "educated" women received very spotty educations and were dependent upon their own labor for financial support), they do focus on some individual female icons, such as Eleanor Marx.

Among the ways they see her as having influenced the landscape of early British socialism was through her work in globalizing the debate over the Woman Question. Marx, for example, "helped to publicise the ideas of Clara Zetkin," the holder of an "eminent position in the German Social Democratic Party and also within the Second International," and thus to bring to British readers Zetkin's class-based critique of the kinds of demands for "economic, social and intellectual independence" associated in England with the "New Women," whose concerns sometimes had little relevance to the lives of their proletarian counterparts (63). That neither Zetkin nor Marx went far enough in recognizing "the patriarchal power of men over women" or in recommending that women band together to liberate themselves is something that Hannam and Hunt find understandable and forgivable (63). As their research has confirmed, "the practice of socialist parties encouraged female socialists not to identify primarily, or even at all, as women in their political lives" (202).

If Hannam and Hunt have an axe to grind, it is not with figures such as Marx and her contemporaries, who tried to develop a politics that "highlighted the specific needs of women as a sex" and to convince their fellow socialists "to do something about this," but sometimes failed nonetheless (82). Rather, their quarrel is with later scholars who, in their opinion, have characterized wrongly the ILP as friendlier to women's issues and more feminist in its structure than the SDF. This view of the ILP as having afforded women members "a degree of equality in its organisation which was far greater than any other group...fails...