ABSTRACT
WITH THE EXCEPTION OF a very few instances in scattered writings from different periods, the problem of women's emancipation conceived as a specifically female program of struggle was barely broached or treated by Marx and Engels. In their minds, the proletarian movement—an “independent movement of the vast majority in the interests of that vast majority” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848)—was the common concern of workers of both sexes, and the cause of the working class was that of men and women equally subject to the laws of capital and the constraints of paid wages. If working-class women warranted special treatment, it was because their professional status was close to that of children doing the same work. In both cases, the physical frailty of the employed individuals demanded a combination of protective measures and regulations, in the employer's own interest, that were to constitute the matter of the first factory legislation promulgated in England as industrialization advanced.
