About the author
German philosopher, businessman, and revolutionary (1820–1895), Karl Marx's lifelong collaborator and patron. Co-author of The Communist Manifesto, Engels edited the later volumes of Capital after Marx's death and wrote widely on history, science, and society; this late work became a founding text of Marxist and socialist-feminist thought.
Synopsis
Drawing on the anthropologist Lewis Morgan, Engels sketches a history in which early societies were relatively egalitarian and matrilineal until the rise of private property concentrated wealth in men's hands, producing the monogamous patriarchal family to secure inheritance — 'the world-historical defeat of the female sex.' The state then emerged as the instrument by which the propertied class secures its dominance.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Public domainEngels argues that the subjugation of women and the rise of the state were not natural facts but historical products of private property — that the patriarchal family and the state arose together to guard the wealth of a ruling class.
By treating both patriarchy and the state as historical creations of property relations rather than eternal givens, Engels makes them objects of political struggle and change. The claim that women's oppression is bound up with class society became a cornerstone of socialist feminism.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with anthropologists who dispute Engels's evolutionary scheme and his reliance on Morgan's now-dated ethnography, and with feminists who argue that patriarchy predates and outlasts class society and cannot be reduced to property relations.
Reading note
Read it as the bridge between Marxism and feminism, granting that its anthropology is dated while its central linkage — property, family, and state — remains influential. Pair it with Angela Davis and later socialist feminists.
Best paired with
Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class; Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto.