I feel the need to post this yet again about what Marx and Engels said about liberating women:
From: The German Ideology
"The Family
[In the family] entirely empirical relations dominate. The attitude of the bourgeois to the institutions of his regime is like that of the Jєω to the law; he evades them whenever it is possible to do so in each individual case, but he wants everyone else to observe them. If the entire bourgeoisie, in a mass and at one time, were to evade bourgeois institutions, it would cease to be bourgeois — a conduct which, of course, never occurs to the bourgeois and by no means depends on their willing or running [i.e., it is dictated by historical conditions]. The dissolute bourgeois evades marriage and secretly commits adultery; the merchant evades the institution of property by depriving others of property by speculation, bankruptcy, etc.; the young bourgeois makes himself independent of his family, if he can by in fact abolishing the family as far as he is concerned.
But marriage, property, the family remain untouched in theory, because they are the practical basis on which the bourgeoisie has directed its domination, and because in their bourgeois form they are the conditions which make the bourgeois a bourgeois, just as the constantly evaded law makes the religious Jєω a religious Jєω. This attitude of the bourgeois to the conditions of his existence acquires one of its universal forms in bourgeois mentality. One cannot speak at all of the family " as such ". Historically the bourgeois gives the family the character of the bourgeois family, in which boredom and money are the binding link, in which also includes the bourgeois dissolution of the family, which does not prevent the family itself from always continuing to exist. It's dirty existence as its counterpart in the holy concept of it in official phraseology and universal hypocrisy.
Where the family is actually abolished, as with the proletariat, just the opposite of what "Stirner" thinks takes place. Then the concept of the family does not exist at all, but here and there family affection based on extremely real relations is certainly to be found.
In the 18th-century the concept of the [feudal] family was abolished by the philosophers, because the actual family was already in the process of dissolution at the highest pinnacles of civilization. The internal family bond, the separate components constituting the concept of the family were dissolved, for example, obedience, piety, fidelity in marriage, etc.; but the real body the family, the property relation, the exclusive attitude in relation to their families, forced cohabitation — relations determined by the existence of children, the structure of modern towns, the formation of capital, etc. — all these were preserved, along with numerous violations, because the existence of the family is made necessary by its connection with the mode of production, which exists independently of the will of bourgeois society.
That it was impossible to do without it was demonstrated in the most striking way during the French Revolution, when for a moment the family was as good as legally abolished. The family continues to exist even in the 19th-century, only the process of its dissolution has become more general, not on account of the concept, but because of the higher development of industry and competition; the family still exists although its dissolution was long ago proclaimed by French and English Socialists and this has at last penetrated also to the German church fathers, by way of French novels.[A]
p. 194-5 [MECW p. 180]
[A] The sarcasm of Marx and Engels may not be retained in this shortened form; this statement is saracastic. Marx and Engels are explaining that ideas and novels alone cannot change the fact; only real changes in the relations of production, i.e. only through the establishment of communism, will the family actually be abolished."