ENGELS TO GERTRUD GUILLAUME-SCHACK !°+ 

[Draft] 
[London, about 5 July 1885] 

Dear Madam, 

In reply to your inquiry, I can only say that I am not entitled to 
provide any information ultimately intended for publication with re- 
gard to Marx’s and my collaboration on those political writings 
which we were asked to do in confidence. Nor can I accept any respon- 
sibility, either in my own or Marx’s name, for the French programme 
as a whole? the very nature of which meant that ° we were at most act- 
ing in an advisory capacity. I can, however, tell you i confidence, that 
the Preamble of the programme of the Parti ouvrier, of the Roanne 
trend, originated with Marx.*?? 

If the French are less inclined than the Germans to demand the li- 

* Karl Marx vor den Kélner Geschwornen. Prozeß gegen den Ausschuß der rheinischen Demo- 
kraten... -” ‘Programme électoral des travailleurs socialistes’, L’Egalité, No. 24, 
30 June 1880. - © Crossed out in the draft: ‘we were only represented as advisers’. 

mitation of female labour, this is because in French industry, more 
especially in Paris, female labour plays a comparatively subordinate 
role. Equal wages for equal work regardless of sex are, so far as 
I know, demanded by all socialists until such time as wages are totally 
abolished. That the working woman, because of her particular phys- 
iological functions, requires special protection against capitalist ex- 
ploitation seems clear to me. Those Englishwomen who championed 
a women’s formal right to allow themselves to be as thoroughly ex- 
ploited by capitalists as men are, have, for the most part, a direct or 
indirect interest in the capitalist exploitation of both sexes.* As for 
myself, I must confess that [ am more interested in the health of the 
coming generation than in absolute, formal equality between the 
sexes during the final years of the capitalist mode of production. 
True equality between men and women can, or so I am convinced, 
become a reality only when the exploitation of both by capital has 
been abolished, and private work in the home been transformed into 
a public industry.