Forms of the Mother Right

Marxism's Matriarchal Origins from Friedrich Engels to Lu Märten

Bibliographic Data

ID21322207
AuthorsMari Jarris (Cornell University Ithaca USA, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume97
Issue4
Pages472-489
Publication date2024-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe German Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-8831 • E-ISSN: 1756-1183
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/gequ.12477
OpenAlexW4403695858
LanguageEN
References cited14

The nineteenth‐century discovery of the matrilineal origins of society shattered assumptions about the necessity of the bourgeois family. For Marxists, ethnographic studies of the mother right provided an aesthetic form to reevaluate the “woman question” from a scientific perspective. Although Marx and Engels had long rejected the idea of the family in favor of “family forms,” Engels's adaptation of Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats (1884) was canonized as the authoritative Marxist text on the subject. While the ethnographic form enabled the denaturalization of the family, its racialized and gendered temporality undercut socialist critiques of social forms. This article introduces Lu Märten's queer utopian response to the mother right, Geschichte der Frau vom Mutterrecht bis zur Gegenwart (1947), which dispenses with the evolutionary structure of the ethnographic study to offer a vision of polyamorous and androgynous forms in a classless society

Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

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