# The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels/Chapter 18

​ The Position of Women in Society
Side by side with this, the household, as a social institution or function, necessarily shrinks in importance, the social life of society ​is now in the new industries, and the man who now has to occupy himself as heretofore with obtaining the means of subsistence, now becomes the owner of herds of animals, of the tools for tilling the soil, then, later, also of slaves, and thus, owing to the fact that the household is now no longer a social function, but purely a private one, the man begins to take the first, the woman the second, place in society.
At the same time, to insure the inheritance to his own children—since he knew them now—the man used his new power to definitely change the law of inheritance from the mother's to the father's side, thus further strengthening his position in the family and in society. The position of woman in society, as that of every class at a given epoch, thus has nothing to do with her inferiority to man, but is due to the historical development in the modes of obtaining the means of subsistence and the growth of private property. Speaking of the woman’s question, Engels says:—"Only by the great industries of our times was the access to social production again opened to women. … This occurs in such wise as to exclude them from earning anything in public industries, if they fulfil their duties in the private service of the family; or that they are unable to attend to their family duties, if they wish to participate in public industries and earn a living independently. As in the factory, so women are situated in all business departments up to the medical and legal professions.
"The modern monogamous family is founded on the open or disguised domestic slavery of women, and modern society is a mass composed of molecules in the form of monogamous families. In the great majority of cases the man has to earn a living and to support his family; he thereby obtains a superior position that has no need of any legal special privilege. In the family he is the bourgeois; the woman represents the proletariat. … It will be seen that the emancipation of women is primarily dependent on the reintroduction of the whole female sex into the public industries. To accomplish this the monogamous family must cease to be the industrial unit of society. … We are now approaching a social revolution in which the old economic foundation of monogamy will disappear just as surely as those of its complement—prostitution. Monogamy arose through the concentration of considerable wealth in one hand—a man's hand—and from the endeavour to bequeath this wealth to the children of this man to the exclusion of all others. This necessitated monogamy on the woman's part, not on the man's part. … Now, the impending social revolution will reduce this whole case of inheritance to a minimum by changing at least the overwhelming part of permanent and inheritable wealth—the means of production—into social property."
As to the question whether monogamy will survive when the economic reason for its existence has disappeared, Engels, refusing to prophesy and to indulge in useless speculation, simply points out that prostitution must certainly disappear with the introduction of ​Communism, since there will no longer be any economic reason for it. If monogamy continues to exist for the woman, for the first time in history it will be equally compulsory for the man.
Whilst the private household of the present day, with all its wastefulness and pettiness, will certainly disappear, and children, whether legal or illegal, will be the equal care of the State, yet for the first time in history individual sex-love, which is supposed to form the basis of all marriages and of the monogamic family, will attain to this position in actual fact as well as in theory. Mutual love will then be the only real consideration which will force a couple to live together, and to be true to one another.
As for how exactly the men and women of the future will regulate their lives, Engels says: "That will be decided after a new generation has come to maturity—a race of men who have never in their lives had occasion for buying with money or other economic means of power the surrender of a woman; a race of women who have never had any occasion for surrendering to any man for any other reason but love, or for refusing to surrender to their lover for fear of economic consequences. Once such people are in the world, they will not give a moment's thought to what we to-day believe should be their course. They will follow their own practice and fashion their own public opinion about the individual practice of every person—only this and nothing more."
Thus, whilst private ownership in wealth and the means of production, with its concomitant existence of classes and subjection of women, was a necessary result of the accumulation of wealth, it yet bears within itself the germs of its own destruction. Private property and class domination can no longer cope with the problems confronting it. By the rise of the great towns, by the massing together of large numbers of men in factory and workshop, by forcing them to unite in defence of their interests, by the recurrence of trade crises and unemployment, by the production of unheard-of luxuries side by side with the direst misery, by the collective methods of production the owners of private property have themselves been forced to introduce—in short, all the facts of our modern industrial life have been digging and are rapidly completing the grave of private property and the inevitable extinction of all class or sex domination. But if we say that this is inevitable, it does not mean that we are to fold our hands and do nothing. All things in society are brought about by human beings, but the psychology of these human beings is moulded by the economic conditions of the time, and this psychology again reflects and exerts an influence in changing these economic conditions. In pure self-defence, and partly unconsciously, the workers are compelled to carry on a constant class struggle. Some of them are led again by these economic conditions to see the real trend of this struggle, its necessary aim, the doing away with private property, and the establishment of the Socialist ​Commonwealth or Communism. The more consciously and vigorously we work for this aim, the sooner shall we do away with all class domination and bring the organisation of society into harmony with the present vast and still developing productive forces.