Rosalind Pollack Petchesky writes, in the chapter titled "Fertility, Gender, and Class" in her book _Abortion and Woman's Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom_ Rev. ed. (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1990):
Grasping the breadth and complexity of Malthusian and neo-Multhusian ideology makes it easier to come to terms with its powerful hold, even among its critics. Marxists, trade unionists, radical birth controllers, and feminists in the nineteenth century were opposed to various aspects of Malthusian doctrines; yet their thinking became trapped in some of its basic assumptions. Marx's critique of Malthus...struck directly at the naturalistic, mechanistic bias of a theory of population that claimed abstract, universal validity ("an abstract law of population exists only for plants and animals, and even then only in the absence of any historical intervention by man"). The critical point about Marx's anti-Malthusian concept of a "relative surplus population" was not only that "overpopulation" is a product of the cyclical processes of capital accumulation (which create unemployment and deteriorated housing), but, more generally, that shifts in human population, presumably including fertility, are always the result of particular historical circumstances and social purposes. [52] But since Marx did not see women as an integral part of the proletariat, as both reproducers and producers, he had no basis for theorizing a "law of population" whose dynamics included women's need for fertility control, apart from the shifts in the capitalist demand for labor; he did not see fertility control as part of the class struggle, much less the gender struggle. Thus the Marxist critique of Malthus was partial rather than total. It recognized the social basis of population, but it ignored the progressive and potentially liberating dimension of human efforts to control reproduction as well as production.
Engels, writing in the 1840s and 1880s, expressed sympathy with the anti-birth-control sentiments that characterized many of the British male trade unionists throughout the nineteenth century. In 1844, for example, referring to Malthus's doctrine as a "repulsive blasphemy against man and nature," he asserted that "children are like trees, returning abundantly the expenditure laid out on them...that a large family would be a most desirable gift to the community." [53] The idea that controlling fertility is a "blasphemy against nature" and that large families, not small, are morally desirable clearly reflects a reversion to an ahistorical, naturalistic concept of fertility, not a transcendence of it. Though less explicitly, Engels here evokes the same Jacobin conception of a male-dominated patriarchal family expressed in William Godwin's _On Population_ (1820):
...it is one of the clearest duties of a citizen to give birth to his like, and bring offspring to the state. Without this he is hardly a citizen: his children and his wife are pledges he gives to the public for good behavior; they are his securities, that he will truly enter into the feeling of a common interest, and be desirous of perpetuating and increasing the immunities of his country from generation to generation. [54]
Reproduction through the male-dominated nuclear family is the tie that binds the proletarian male to the state; more children, not fewer, signal woman's domestication within the working class. (Petchesky 40-41)
[52] Karl Marx, _Capital_, trans. Ben Fowkes (NY: Vintage, 1977), 1: 783-84, 849n. [53] In Ronald L. Meek, ed., _Marx and Engles on Malthus_ (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955), p. 61. Only under communism, wrote Engels to Kautsky in 1881, could it be decided "whether, when, and how" population, or fertility, might be limited (p. 109). [54] Quoted in McLaren, p. 71; emphasis added. (Petchesky 61)
Petchesky's analysis makes clear that both Malthusians and anti-Malthusians often (though not always) share the same premises: (1) it is natural for women to bear (a large number of) children and to want to do so; (2) community or state interests take precedence over women's concerns for our own physical and psychological well-being and our interest in developing our own powers and freedoms (physical, intellectual, and political); and (3) there is no contradiction between women and men with regard to 'whether, when, and how' to control reproduction. All three premises were and are dead wrong and against women's interests. As you may see, Marx and Engels, for all their contributions to the understanding of women's oppression, were unable to think historically, with women's well-being in mind, about the intersection of biology, social relations, and often gendered character of "moral" changes where it counts most from the feminist point of view: women's interest in control over our own bodies. Historical materialism must pay closer attention to the question of reproductive control _from women's points of view_, and we must not assume that women's interests can be subsumed under class interests and/or the interests of oppressed ethnic/racial groups as a whole. Such subsumption makes us blind to gendered aspects of reproduction, thus disabling the (physical + intellectual) development of women and hindering our participation in public life (labor, education, and politics).
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