Political Economy of the Family

One of the most successful rhetorical ploys in defense of socialism is to present socialism as “going beyond” liberalism in liberating the human being. Socialists such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had praised capitalism for unfettering production. But capitalism had not gone far enough in abolishing the institutions that hampered the flowering of the human race. There was still private ownership in the means of production. Socialism would do away with this last bulwark of the exploitation of man by man. Only then would the reign of full liberty begin.

The socialist feminists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century had used an analogous argument to make their case. They conceded that the condition of women had vastly improved in the course of the previous centuries. But it had not improved enough. Further progress was prevented through the institution of marriage, which enshrined male domination over the inherently weaker women and curtailed their productive powers. The solution was to outlaw marriage and to replace it with spontaneous and loose bonds between mates.

The exact analogy in the two arguments could not fail to attract Mises's attention. Just as he had shown that the socialist case against the institution of private property was fallacious, so he now proceeded in Socialism to denounce the fallacies of the feminist case against the institution of marriage. He showed that the historical progress in the condition of women had resulted from advances of the contractual principle, which was based on the recognition of private property rights, and from the elimination of violence against the property rights of women. Men could dominate women only so long as they owned their wives' person and property.¹² When women came to be recognized as legitimate property owners, the economic basis for that domination was destroyed. It followed that feminism was but a branch of liberalism to the extent that it advocated liberty within the confines of private property and full legal equality between men and women. These claims were indeed the rational basis for the development of individual personality.

Woman's struggle to preserve her personality in marriage is part of that struggle for personal integrity which characterizes the rationalist society of the economic order based on private ownership of the means of production. It is not exclusively to the interest of woman that she should succeed in this struggle; to contrast the interests of men and women, as extreme feminists try to do, is very foolish. All mankind would suffer if woman should fail to develop her ego and be unable to unite with man as equal, freeborn companions and comrades.¹³

But socialist feminists got it wrong. They called for outlawing marriage. They sought to prevent women from associating with men in a way that they, the feminists, thought was harmful for these women. Where did the reasoning go wrong? The case against private property was untenable because private property fulfilled a social function that no other institution could.

But what was the social function of marriage? There had to be such a function; after all, there was no legal obligation for women to get married. They chose to marry. Therefore they could easily avoid the fate that, according to the feminists, marriage would entail for them. But why did women choose to marry? He argued that marriage served specific female needs, and that it served them better than any alternative social arrangement. These specific needs were rooted in the fact that the “sexual function,” the urge to “surrender to a man” and “her love for husband and children consumes her best energies.”¹⁴

Clearly, Mises would not do well in the court of current left-wing feminist opinion. However, the opinions he professed in Socialism were not the idiosyncrasies of a resentful chauvinist. Rather, they were a cautiously worded version of the most widely accepted theory of gender differences of his time, the general theory of men and women that Otto Weininger had construed at the turn of the century, based on a comprehensive review of the scientific data available at the time. Weininger distinguished between a male principle (M) and a female principle (F) that were present in different proportions in each individual. Women were of course dominated by the F principle. Said Weininger:

The state of sexual arousal is for the woman merely the highest increase of her total being. The latter is always and quite sexual. F is completely immersed in her sex-life, in the sphere of intercourse and reproduction, that is, in the relation to man and child. Her existence is completely filled up with these things, while M is not merely sexual....

Thus, whereas F is totally fulfilled and taken by sexuality, M knows a dozen of other things: fight and play, sociability and [Gelage], discussion and science, business and politics, religion and art....

F is nothing but sexuality, M is sexual and also something above.¹⁵

This is why women had a tendency to choose marriage. And by that same decision, they renounced the achievements they could have realized outside of marriage. In Mises's view, apparently, this went a long way to explaining why female achievements have not matched the achievements of males.

It may be that a woman is able to choose between renouncing either the most profound womanly joy, the joy of motherhood, or the more masculine development of her personality in action and endeavour. It may be that she has no such choice. It may be that in suppressing her urge towards motherhood she does herself an injury that reacts through all other functions of her being. But whatever the truth about this, the fact remains that when she becomes a mother, with or without marriage, she is prevented from leading her life as freely and independently as man. Extraordinarily gifted women may achieve fine things in spite of motherhood; but because the functions of sex have the first claim upon woman, genius and the greatest achievements have been denied her.¹⁶

Mises was one of the few men in a leadership position who actively promoted young female intellectuals. Lene Lieser, Marianne Herzfeld, and others wrote their doctoral dissertations under his supervision. Lieser, Herzfeld, Ilse Mintz, Martha Stephanie Braun, Elisabeth Ephrussi, and others were regular members of his private seminar. It is true that he could get none of them a professorship—he could not do this even for his male students, or even for himself. But he could help some of them to obtain one of those coveted jobs that earn a living while allowing the pursuit of intellectual interests. Again this was the case with Herzfeld and Lieser, both of whom were employed at the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers.

When Mises rejected the claims of radical feminism, it was not because he lacked sympathy with his female associates or because he was driven by some vicious desire to keep women “in their place.” Rather, it was intellectual integrity that led him to insist on his views about gender relations, views that even in his circle were likely to be resented by ambitious women such as M.S. Braun. As Mises saw it, these were the facts, and it was pointless to argue around them:

the difference between sexual character and sexual destiny can no more be decreed away than other inequalities of mankind. It is not marriage which keeps woman inwardly unfree, but the fact that her sexual character demands surrender to a man and that her love for husband and children consumes her best energies. There is no human law to prevent the woman who looks for happiness in a career from renouncing love and marriage. But those who do not renounce them are not left with sufficient strength to master life as a man may master it. It is the fact that sex possesses her whole personality, and not the facts of marriage and family, which enchains woman. By “abolishing” marriage one would not make woman any freer and happier; one would merely take from her the essential content of her life, and one could offer nothing to replace it.¹⁷