Like in many other areas, even on the question of women Marx made Hegel his starting point. Hegel regarded women as inferior, with less reasoning ability, and saw the natural differences between men and women as immutable. Marx himself said little about the role and position of women; he took it for granted that socialism would bring about their emancipation. In The German Ideology and Capital he spoke of the natural and spontaneous division of labour within the family, where the first property relationship arose when the man treated his wife and children as his slaves and held power over their labour. Marx did not explain how this came about and did not focus his attention on the position of women.

Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, gave a materialist account of the origins of patriarchy and linked the subordination of women to the rise of private property. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels observed that the degree of emancipation of women could be used as a standard to measure general emancipation, a view Marx repeated in an 1868 letter to Dr. L. Kugelmann. In 1845, criticising Max Stirner, Marx warned against treating the family without regard to its specific historical setting, noting that the bourgeoisie had endowed the family with the character of the bourgeois family, whose ties were boredom and money.