Marx would not work as a “wage slave,” and he saw what this would mean for his daughters. They would have to marry well or become servants. So Marx pretended at a bourgeois life. His girls were given lessons in art and riding and music, and they hosted a ball in the new house. All this, Marx wrote to Engels, was in the interest of “securing their future.” A proletarian life would be quite all right for him, he insisted, “if the girls were boys.”
