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Marx-Engels Correspondence 1868
Marx to Kugelmann
In HanoverAbstract
I am also returning Dietzgen's portrait. The story of his life is not quite what I had imagined it to be, although I always had a feeling that he was "not a worker like Eccarius." It is true that the sort of philosophic outlook which he has worked out for himself requires a certain amount of peace and leisure which the everyday workman does not enjoy. I have got two very good workmen living in New York, A. Vogt, a shoemaker and Siegfried Meyer, a mining engineer, both from Berlin. A third workman who could give lectures on my book, is Lochner, a carpenter (common working man), who has been here in London about fifteen years.
Tell your wife I never suspected her of being one of Generaless Geck's subordinates. My question was only intended as a joke. In any case ladies cannot complain of the International, for it has elected a lady, Madame Law, to be a member of the General Council.
Joking aside, great progress was evident in the last Congress of the American "Labour Union" in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).