The Times, They Are A-Changin: Gender, Citizenship, and the Transition to Socialism

As elaborated by Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, patriarchy, in its modern form, was a product of private property and sustained through women’s legal subordination and economic disempowerment.¹ Lacking basic rights, along with a living wage, women thus depended on family or a spouse for economic survival. Socialism, however, proposed to dramatically alter this situation. By abolishing private property and promoting women’s wide-scale and equal participation in paid labor, socialism, Engels believed, would facilitate women’s economic autonomy, emancipating them from patriarchal strictures. Upon demonstrating their competence in the workforce, women would, in