“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”: Marx’s and Engels’s “love interest” Terrell Carver University of Bristol School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies Working Paper No. 01-16 This paper has been prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia PA, 1-4 September 2016. Panel: Gender and the “Great Man” I: Recovering the Wives of the Canon Division 31: Women and Politics Research Friday, 3 September 2016, 2.00 to 3.30 pm. Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. He has published extensively on Marx, Engels and Marxism, and on sex, gender and sexuality.
[email protected]. 1 Abstract This paper explores the way that four women have been framed as wives and/or mistresses and/or sexual partners in the biographical reception of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820- 1895) as heterosexual men. These women were (Frau) Jenny Marx (née von Westphalen) (1814- 1881), Helene Demuth (“Lenchen”) (1820-1890), Mary Burns (1821-1863), and Lydia Burns (aka “Mrs Lizzie,” and only on her deathbed, Mrs Frederick Engels) (1827-1878). How exactly they appear in the contemporary texts and rare images that survive is less interesting than the determination of subsequent biographers to make them fit a mold, or in this case, two molds – gendered and classed. The sub-genres through which biographers construct only somewhat variable narratives about these women – and their various circumstances and relationships – needs investigation. This paper presents a typology that testifies to malestream authorial incuriosity, and offers significant criticisms of intellectual biography as an established genre.