Note 80 — Chapter III

The development of capitalism has led to the paid labor of married women, and consequently to one of the most important causes of the demoralization of the children of the working class. When there is no one to watch a child, when he is left to himself, he becomes demoralized. In his work, “The Condition of the Working-Class in England”, F. Engels has put the situation briefly: “The employment of the wife [in the factory] dissolves the family utterly and of necessity, and this dissolution, in our present society, which is based upon the family, brings the most demoralizing consequences, both for parents and for the children. A mother who has no time to trouble herself about her child, to perform the most ordinary loving services for it during the first year, who scarcely indeed sees it, can be no real mother to the child, must inevitably grow indifferent to it, and treat it unlovingly, like a stranger. The children who grow up under such conditions are entirely ruined for later family life, can never feel at home in the family which they themselves found, because they have always been accustomed to isolation, and they contribute therefore to the already general undermining of the family in the working class.”80