Study On Women’s Emancipation Of Marx And Engels And Its Contemporary Value

In the research of human history, Marx and Engels applied dialectical materialism and historical materialism to explore women’s issues and its development process, and pointed out the necessity of women’s liberation. In the age of human ignorance, Marx and Engels assumed that women and men were on an equal footing, and women tended to have a higher status. In the age of barbarism, women also enjoyed greater freedom and more respected position, but by the high stage, women’s position had been gradually decreased due to the male domination and the competition of slaves. By the age of human civilization, by virtue of the emergence of large-scaled industries, women, teenagers and children played vital roles in the production process organized by society beyond their family. And the industries also created a new economy foundation for the formation of higher-level family and gender relations. They deemed that women’s issues were changed along with the evolution of human history, and they were stemmed from the imbalance between the material production and the human production. In any society, the extent of women’s liberation was the natural measure of the universal human emancipation.Marx and Engels believed that the emergence of private ownership and social class was the root cause of women’s issues. Women’s issues had certain economy, social class and culture roots. As a great force for promoting the development of society, the failure of women’s liberation would lead to the failure of all mankind’s liberation. Marx and Engels claimed that the first prerequisite for women’s liberation was to let all women rejoin the public works. Mankind’s liberation is the fundamental objective of social development of human beings, while the proletariat’s liberation is the fundamental way of mankind’s liberation. And the ultimate goal of both women’s and mankind’s liberation is to achieve human beings’ free and overall development. Therefore, Marx and Engels’ s ideology of women’s liberation provides the significant source and pointed out the direction for the women’s liberation in the modern of China.