Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

228 • The Making of a German Constitutionfor socialist constitutionalism. Engels directly contradicted Grimm’s philologicalfindings on the meaning of the term ‘woman’, writing: ‘among Langobards and Burgundianswe find ... the term fara, which Grimm derives from the hypothetical rootfi san, to beget’. 69 In opposition to this view, fara was linked to the ‘more obviousroot, faran, fahren’. 70 This, in his reasoning, was essentially the equivalent of theGreek genos and the Latin gens, an indication of the existence of genealogiae, characterizedby the collective living and communal ownership of property.From Engels and Marx, Bachofen’s theory of law permeated the rise of socialdemocratic political thought in Germany. Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, RosaLuxembourg, Clara Zetkin, Lily Braun, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebelwere all well versed on the importance of Bachofen. In his pamphlet Socialism,Liebknecht identified prostitution as the contemporary example of sex-labor exploitation.‘Thanks to the wrong conditions of society and the State’, he wrote, ‘womanis today without rights and in countless cases is condemned to wedded and unweddedprostitution’. 71 The politics of sex, however, was explicitly clear in Socialism.‘The intercourse of the sexes is unnatural and immoral’, he wrote, and ‘socialismwill bring the emancipation of woman as well as of man.’ 72 ‘It’, he stated, ‘insistson her complete political and social equality and equal position with man,’ and ‘itwill destroy prostitution, whether it walk ashamed under the mantle of marriagefor wealth or convenience, or whether it run shameless painted and naked upon thestreet.’ 73 While prostitution in socialist ideology was seen as the modern manifestationof sex-labor exploitation, as we see in Liebknecht, civil marriage was also seenas a form of property ownership of women and sex-labor exploitation. Sex was exploitativebecause it was a right of men and an obligation of women.Kautsky, who was recognized as the intellectual heir to Engels, was also thefounder of the leading Marxist journal, Die Neue Zeit. In the spring of 1881, he alsoundertook a detailed study of the works of both Bachofen and Morgan. 74 These worksvery much influenced his Die Entstehung der Ehe und der Familie, which appearedtwo years later in 1883. Clara Zetkin’s essay ‘Die Arbeiterinnen- und Frauenfrageder Gegenwart’ (1889) was based on her reading of Bachofen as well as Morganand Engels. 75 Developed from her reading of Das Mutterrecht, her work showed adialectical view of evolution and the likening of matriarchy with primitive communism.76 Following the work of Morgan and Engels, however, Bachofen figured mostprominently in August Bebel’s Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1879).August Bebel’s political history as the leader of the Social Democratic Party hasbeen duly considered by scholars. My interest here is in the ideological connectionbetween Bachofen and Bebel as a means of explaining the centrality of gender inGerman social democracy as metaphor for the redistribution of property and power.Richard Evans has described Die Frau und der Sozialismus as Bebel’s ‘lifework’,but scholars of German history have clearly struggled with the pivotal place genderoccupied in his book. 77 Traditional intellectual historians tend to divide Bebel’spolitical development into pre-Marxist and Marxist periods, arguing that Die Frau