“When I set out to write the book about eight years ago, I think some of my friends said, “Oh god, a Marx, really?’” The latest biography by cultural historian and writer Rachel Holmes has salvaged the life of Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx and socialist-feminist activist, from oblivion, drawing her into a political climate, which is becoming progressively attuned to her early ideas.
“Quite unintentionally, I found myself writing on a very popular and topical subject,” she tells me. Holmes’ biography on Eleanor Marx has been published amidst a global groundswell of interest in Marxist ideas — particularly amongst people under the age of fifty. But why is this? “Marxism survives because it’s not a dry economic philosophy,” she tell me. “It’s an idea that’s full of all the ideas of human contradiction and culture.”
Eleanor Marx, or “Tussy” to Karl, gave life to the esoteric theories espoused by her father. She played a crucial role in the industrial struggle in late Nineteenth Century Britain, leading dock workers on strike and organizing the activity of their embryonic unions, as well as fighting for women’s rights and manifesting “the personal is political”. Holmes tells me how Eleanor would probably think the notion that you could separate the two rather strange. “I think it’s always useful to have a slogan,” she says. “But for Eleanor Marx there was no distinction between the personal and the political. The question of equality and of social democracy was about how you lived and brought up the family.” Even for the daughter of a revolutionary, these ideas seem forward-thinking in a Britain which had no electoral democracy, where neither working-class men nor women could vote, and where women were disbarred from higher education and serious political work.
On the day that we speak, Holmes is speaking at the Ruskin College, which was founded in 1899 (a year after Marx’s death) with the aim of providing university-standard education to working-class communities and trade unions, as well as host to the first National Women’s Liberation Conference in 1970 — both causes for which Eleanor herself fought unrelentingly. But given Eleanor Marx spent a great deal of her life campaigning for the eight-hour day, and we’re now in an age of “zero hour” contracts and modern slavery, I wonder how far she would approve of society in its current state. “There is much that she would be very heartened by,” Holmes tells me. “She would be fascinated by your student journalism and the fact that your newspaper is online as she was fascinated by new technology, and she would be delighted by the greater opportunity for self-fulfillment for women. But having said that, there are many things that would be familiar to Eleanor Marx.”
On gender equality, Holmes, who co-edited Fifty Shades of Feminism last year, says how she thinks things in Britain have slid back for women in the last forty years. She also believes that without leadership and organisation, this will continue. “It isn’t just an inevitable march forward of progress. We have fewer women in parliament than we did ten, fourteen years ago and fewer women in local governments.”
Holmes goes on to tell me how if Eleanor Marx were around today, she would rally behind Emma Watson’s call for men to take up the fight for gender equality. “Eleanor Marx, time and time again, said that men and women must stand together. Men are as constrained by patriarchy as women are. Yes, they get a lot more of the benefits, but patriarchy is deeply disfiguring for masculinity as well as femininity.” Holmes tells me of a history in Britain of men, both working-class men but also writers, playwrights, and politicians, who were active self-identifying feminists — a history, she feels, that was lost in WWI. “There are a few lone voices now, but somehow I don’t see that active participation in the same way.” Although perhaps this is changing, with a new generation of feminists ridding the term of lingering toxic connotations and bringing men back into the conversation.
Although Holmes builds up this dazzling visage of a fiery young woman, who stood out from other identikit reformers in acting upon every injustice around her, her personal life was clouded by dark family secrets and a foible, that happened to be a very “rotten bloke”. However, as Holmes puts it, this “makes her more human and like us”.
Until now, Eleanor Marx has been as famous for her untimely end as for her political activism. “For me, it’s her work that stands, and the importance of her pamphlet The Woman Question, and the impact she had on the new trade union movement. She is no more overshadowed by her personal life than the greatness of Winston Churchill is overshadowed by the fact that he was an alcoholic and had manic depression.” Perhaps it’s this idea, as Holmes lays out, that we tend to think of women as more three-dimensional, so bring all of their personal baggage into the writing of histories. “But you can read a whole history book on Trotsky,” Holmes tells me, “and only find out that he had a dog.”
Next year, Holmes plans to emulate Eleanor Marx’s agitation tour across America, visiting the same towns and trade union organisations that she went to, and “making a comparison between the economic and social conditions then and now.”
In honouring her as an international figure, an activist in her own right and not just the ghostwriter of her father, Holmes has given Eleanor Marx the end she deserves, and us a source of inspiration and leadership for the future.
