Response to Harold Benenson, “Victorian Sexual Ideology and Marx’s Theory of the Working Class”

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Karl Marx radically shifted the terms of socialist discussion of women's needs, in Harold Benenson's view, by ignoring concerns with the authoritarian structure of families that had been raised by earlier Utopian criticism, by accomodating himself to the hegemony of skilled males over the working class through trade unions and the suffrage movement, and by legitimizing that hegemony in his basic theoretical concepts. Despite the validity of some points Benenson raises along the way, his exercise in the intellectual history of socialism is misleading, and his condemnation of Marxist methods of analysis, if accepted, would deprive those of us who are attempting to conceptualize the historical relations of gender and class of analytical tools that are indispensible to that task. If a fundamental contrast existed between the views of Utopians and those of Marxists on women's needs and women's activity, it was not of the type described in this paper. Benenson himself notes that forthright of the rights of were few in Utopian ranks, though he quite rightly adds that those whom he discusses (especially Flora Tristan and Frances and James Morrison) were remarkably perceptive and suggested a much more thorough analysis of women's position under capitalism than was to be found in The Communist Manifesto. To understand the history of socialism, however, it is equally important to compare those forthright champions with the attitudes toward women and toward the expressed in other dominant currents of Utopian criticism, especially with those of Etienne Cabet, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Wilhelm Weitling. The com parison should be made, not to score a debating point, but to ask why utopias with widespread appeal among artisans of the 1830s-1850s should have offered a roman tic reification of the and (especially in the case of Weitling) celebrated family love as proof that a non-competitive society could be created by the proper exercise of human reason. An important task confronting historians is to explain why these ideas flourished in particular artisan circles at the time (especially among tailors and shoemakers), and how they reflected and perhaps influenced the changing relation ship of women to the trades involved. Benenson's arguments steer us away from this historical problem, and consequently from investigating the role played by influen tial Utopians in creating a plebeian version of the Victorian sexual ideology.