Born: 12 February 1814, Germany
Died: 2 December 1881
Country most active: France, United Kingdom
Also known as: Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny Edle von Westphalen
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Jenny Marx was more than Karl’s wife. A dedicated socialist in her own right, she gave up life as a baroness to work for the future she believed in. An advocate for women’s rights from a young age, she was never afraid to point out that even the socialists generally placed men’s needs above women’s, if they even considered women at all. She was also her husband’s greatest supporter and worked tirelessly with him on his Communist Manifesto. As the political magazine Jacobin observes, “With Karl busy theorizing, Jenny bore the brunt of the family’s illnesses and poverty.” Marx himself was a heavy drinker who experienced chronic illness, meaning Jenny had to care for him in addition to their many children, suffering the loss of four of those children, and fending off the various parties to whom they owed money. He also likely impregnated their housekeeper while Jenny was out of the country begging relatives for financial assistance. When Jenny needed support, telling her husband, “Meanwhile I sit and go to pieces. Karl, it is now at its worst pitch…I sit here and almost weep my eyes out and can find no help. My head is disintegrating. For a week I have kept my strength up and now I can no more,” she received no sympathy. Yet she continued to support him, dutifully copying out The Great Men of the Exile as he dictated. She finally lost faith after the failure of his 1867 Capital, seeking escape from her husband’s “burdensome shadow.” At her funeral in 1881, her husband’s closest collaborator Friedrich Engels eulogised, “The contribution made by this woman, with such a sharp critical intelligence, with such political tact, a character of such energy and passion, with such dedication to her comrades in the struggle—her contribution to the movement over almost forty years has not become public knowledge; it is not inscribed in the annals of the contemporary press. It is something one must have experienced at first hand.”