sawyl | Engels: feminist and sexist? (Reply)

Apparently Engels' attitudes to women were slightly confused. According to Tristram Hunt in today's Guardian:

The life of Friedrich Engels, the mill-owning Marxist, was one of supreme self-contradiction - particularly when it came to feminism. He was a socialist who condemned the use of prostitutes as "the most tangible exploitation - one directly attacking the physical body - of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie", but then regularly enjoyed their services. He demanded female equality, but couldn't bear the company of high-minded women. Engels was the intellectual architect of socialist feminism, and an old-fashioned sexist.

Rather amusingly, the Graun seems to have picked the wrong photo from their library to accompany the article. The caption claims that the picture is of Engles in 1840, but actual portrait is very obviously a photo of Leo Tolstoy from the 1900s. Not sure how the two got confused. Maybe because they both sported absurd whiskers?

ETA: From today's Corrections and Clarifications:

A seated man with a white beard pictured yesterday under the headline Feminist friend or foe? was identified in a caption as Friedrich Engels, circa 1840. Engels was 20 in 1840. As a reader noted, judging from the photograph, Engels's views on women (discussed in the associated article) were not only contradictory but immensely ageing. In fact it was taken in 1908, and its subject was Leo Tolstoy at age 79.