How Did Karl Marx Respond To The Oppression Of Women?

Literature review
The essential reading for the question under the examination were the works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In particular, the most relevant appeared to be ‘Capital. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital’, ‘The economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist manifesto’, and ‘The German Ideology’ due to their insights on the role of women. In the first volume of Capital K. Marx devotes a part ‘Appropriation of Supplementary Labour-Power by Capital. The Employment of Women and Children’ of Section 3 in which he illustrates the role of women’s, as well as child’s, labor in the economic process of production. In ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’ K. Marx and F. Engels proceed further and point out to the importance of elimination of the current form of social relation in order to obtain the desired form of classless society, where people would be valued for their identity, rather than for

This work offers an important idea which might be interpreted as the suggestion that the oppression of women will end only with the end of capitalism because then people would re-appropriate their ‘social creativity’ or true human essence. ‘The German Ideology’ provides a small contribution to the view that women’s subordination is unnatural and is prevalent in the underdeveloped forms of society. Finally, more attention is devoted to the women’s subjugation in F. Engels’s book ‘Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State’, in which he recognizes the fact of women’s oppression and examines the origins of it. He makes a hypothesis that the oppression of women comes from their role as reproducers of the inheritors for private property in the