By: Eloïsa Palerm,Marc Montagut & Unai Cadaval

PERSONAL DETAILS Eleanor Marx lived between She was born in London on the 16th, January 1855 and she committed suicide the 31st, March She was a Marxist author, political activist and literary translator.

FAMILY BACKGROUNDS Karl Marx She was educated by his father and after she was her secretary. Her mother died in 1881 and her father in Jenny von Westphalen. Her father was Karl Marx (Founder of Marxism) Her mother was Jenny von Westphalen. She was the youngest sister of six brothers.

PERSONAL LIFE After being her father’s secretary she started teaching at Brighton College. She had an affair with Hipolit Lissagaray but his father rejected it. In 1884 she married Edward Aveling. In January 1898, Edward Aveling became seriously ill, and Eleanor spent several months nursing him back to health. Soon afterwards she discovered that Aveling had secretly married another woman. Eleanor decided to commit suicide. As a teenager she collaborated with the exiled from the Paris Commune and with the Irish immigrants that came to England. She was in a theatre group that made performances to collaborate with the union and socialist movement.

SHE CAMPAIGNED FOR … In 1884 she joined the Social Democratic Federation. Later on, she split up when she saw the reformist tendency of this union and its distancing of the labourer movement. She created the Socialist League, a rival for the SDF. Eleanor and her husband helped other socialist organizations. They did a tour around the United States to raise money for the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The Socialist League would only exist until 1889 when the anarchist movement started entering in this organisation. In 1884 she became involved in Women's Trade Union League. She would go on to support numerous strikes including the Bryant & May strike of 1888 and the London Dock Strike of 1889 She was an excellent orator, she decided to diffuse socialism in United States, where she travelled for the first time in 1886.

ANYTHING ELSE? Eleanor wrote several books and articles including The Factory Hell (1885), The Women Question (1886), The Working Class Movements in America (1888), Shelley's Socialism (1888), and the The Working Class Movement in England (1896). She also contributed with many articles for Justice, the political journal edited by H. H. Champion

SHE ACHIEVED… Eleanor, who had a reputation as one of the best orators in England, was elected to the SDF Executive. In December 1884 she joined William Morris to form the Socialist League. Eleanor now openly advocated "Revolutionary International Socialism" and in 1885 she helped to organize the International Socialist Congress in Paris. Her organisation raised money for the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 1886 Eleanor helped Annie Besant in her successful Bryant & May match-girl strike. The following year Eleanor helped Will Thorne to organize the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers and in 1889 became involved in the Docker's Strike led by her close friend, Ben Tillet.

MORE ACHIEVEMENTS Before his death, Karl Marx had given Eleanor the task of preparing his unfinished manuscripts for publication. Eleanor also had the task of dealing with the English publication of Das Kapital. Marx regularly wrote in the League's monthly newspaper, Commonweal, about women's issues. In 1880s Eleanor took a close interest in the theatre and for a time considered a career in acting. Like Elizabeth Robins, Eleanor was a strong advocate of the plays of Henrik Ibsen. She believed that the theatre could play an important role in rejecting the traditional views of love and marriage and as a mean of propagating socialism. On 9 September 2008 a blue commemorative English Heritage plaque was placed on the house on Jews Walk, Sydenham, southeast London, where Eleanor spent the last few years of her life.

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