Mari Jarris's article "Forms of the Mother Right: Marxism's Matriarchal Origins from Friedrich Engels to Lu Märten" won the Women in German Best Article Prize for 2025.
The prize committee wrote the following description about the article:
In “Forms of the Mother Right: Marxism’s Matriarchal Origins from Friedrich Engels to Lu Märten,” published in German Quarterly in 2024, Mari Jarris dissents with the prominent view that Friedrich Engels had long settled “the woman question” in Der Ursprung der Familie (1884), which drew in turn on anthropological research about Indigenous kinship forms by Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society (1877). Jarris excavates Märten (1879–1970) as a pioneering queer-feminist Marxist theorist who envisions “polyamorous and androgynous forms” in a utopian future classless society. They cogently unpack Märten’s queer ideals of androgynous camaraderie as an alternative to the emphatically gendered notion of socialist Brüderlichkeit, drawing on ideas of queer temporality to illuminate Märten’s queer departures from notions of normative time and chronology. Jarris shows that Märten was a thinker who “attempts to draw alternative gendered and sexual social relations back into the realm of the possible within a non-linear temporality,” while developing a rich relational critique of ideas of solo authorship. The committee was particularly impressed by the deep historical and intellectual contextualization supporting Jarris’s close reading of works by this lesser-known thinker, bringing Märten’s contribution to the surface in a manner highly relevant for 21st-century readers. This article represents cutting-edge queer-feminist research that resurrects the utopian potential of socialist theory.
