Abstract

The paper will show that on women and the family his writings exhibit a contradictory stance between nineteenth-century patriarchalism and progressive ideas; he appears to oscillate, as it were, between Hegel or Ruskin and Engels or J.S. Mill. This seems curious to a late twentieth-century reader, but was by no means eccentric in the context of German feminist and socialist discourse of his time. His philosophy of gender cannot be dismissed as a mere collection of tired patriarchalist cliches; like his philosophy of society it is rich and still worthy of attention