Feminism in debate, reform or revolution?

2019

Chapter I

Patriarchy and State: From Their Origins to Capitalism

Anciently, women were freer  (Karl Marx)

Marx comments the above on page 16 of Notebook 1 of his annotations of Ancient Society, American anthropologist and ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan´s outstanding work¹ .Between 1881 and 1882 Marx analyzed this work, along with other researchers´ texts, valuing its historical materialist method and its central conclusions.

Morgan first investigated Iroquois society², then the kinship systems of over one hundred societies in the world and, from the perspective of their productive and technical evolution, established the differences between societies before and after their division into classes. He argued that during the transition from savage life to civilization, the consanguineous tribe gave way to the monogamous (nuclear) and patriarchal family. Clashing with religious and other retrograde conceptions that considered it immutable, he showed that the family is a historical category that changes with social evolution.

But why were women freer in ancient times and, consequently, how and when did they cease to be so? Answering such questions is essential for every person or organization that seeks to achieve social and gender equality. In that sense, one of German revolutionary and philosopher Friedrich Engels´ main works, written 135 years ago, remains a valid and unavoidable reference:

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

This work was published in 1884. Every text has a context, and two quotes give account for the genesis and continuity of this one. In his preface to the first edition, Engels warns: "The following chapters are, in a sense, the execution of a bequest. No less a man than Karl Marx had made it one of his future tasks to present the results of Morgan’s researches in the light of the conclusions of his own – within certain limits, I may say our – materialistic examination of history, and thus to make clear their full significance." That is, he considers his work co-authored with Marx, his great comrade and friend, who had died the previous year.

And Chapter 1 begins by pointing out: "Morgan is the first man who, with expert knowledge, has attempted to introduce a definite order into the history of primitive man; so long as no important additional material makes changes necessary, his classification will undoubtedly remain in force." That is, as a good historical materialist with scientific rigor, Engels left his work open to the changes that future research and discoveries would bring.

Unlike reformist socialist leaders such as Karl Kautsky and August Bebel, who argued that there had always been patriarchy, Engels proved the opposite: "Before the beginning of the ’sixties, one cannot speak of a history of the family. In this field, the science of history was still completely under the influence of the five books of Moses. The patriarchal form of the family, which was there described in greater detail than anywhere else, was not only assumed without question to be the oldest form, but it was also identified – minus its polygamy – with the bourgeois family of today, so that the family had really experienced no historical development at all; at most it was admitted that in primitive times there might have been a period of sexual promiscuity."³

After "the primitive social stage of promiscuity, (without family)", Engels takes up the five successive types of family organization described by Morgan. Its development was not linear, but uneven and combined: there were also intermediate forms and some types of family coexisted in different regions of the world: 1) the consanguine family (between siblings, eg. Malayan and African tribes); 2) the punaluan family (between groups of siblings and cousins, eg. Polynesian peoples); 3) the pairing family (male and female without cohabitation, eg. American and ancient Greek peoples); 4) the patriarchal family (one male with one or more women, eg. Latin and Hebrew tribes), and 5) the monogamous family, which endures under the capitalist system.

Engels is devastating with the latter of these: "Thus when monogamous marriage first makes its appearance in history, it is not as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. Quite the contrary. Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other ... The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male."⁴ And later he adds: "Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social production."⁵

A century later, new archaeological and anthropological studies surpassed Engels´ view that limited the feminine role to the domestic sphere, demonstrating that women also contributed to the community´s subsistence by sharing with men the tasks of food collection and hunting of small animals.

The Reasons for the Changes

If we look for the etymology of family, any dictionary tells us something like this: "The word family comes from Latin. It is a word derived from famulus, which means servant or slave. The word family was equivalent to patrimony and included not only relatives but also the servants of the master´s house. Engels said: Famulus means domestic slave, and the family designates the set of slaves belonging to the same man." That is, it refers to the family group that existed in a specific social class system: slavery. But before slavery there were other forms of social organization.

In the most primitive societies that relied on hunting, fishing and gathering, women worked on a level of equality with men, without a sexual division of labor, in order to guarantee survival. Moreover, because of their reproductive role, they were considered creators of life and, because sexuality was free, the only certainty in defining kinship ties was the maternal line. Children belonged to the community, which took care of rearing them. In short, mother-right predominated.⁶

As Engels explains, tribal societies later passed from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle and agriculture and animal husbandry emerged, which implied a huge productive leap. In general, research agrees that women assumed more agricultural tasks and, men, livestock. It was an incipient sexual division of labor, which did not entail relations of oppression.

Once the community´s needs were met, the surplus of that production led to exchange and trade on an increasing scale. That is why the heads of family, mostly men, turned the herds and then the tools and land into private property. This long process generated profound changes, such as the division of society into classes (a working majority and a proprietor minority), and changes in the family.

The heads of the families sought to maintain that property for themselves and their heirs, which led to the institutionalization of the monogamous family and its complements, adultery and prostitution. To guarantee the legitimacy of their offspring and their proprietary interest, men began to restrict and control female sexuality: they imposed premarital chastity and marital fidelity. This patriarchal change, which spanned about 2,500 years in total, meant a rupture with the previous kinship ties based on communal property and thus the economic-social unit became the nuclear family: "According to Morgan, paternal authority was developed when the family became monogamous; the rise of property, together with the need to keep it in the family, caused the passage from the female line to the male line; thus power acquired a real base."⁷

Marx coincides with this criterion in his ethnological notebooks on Morgan: "The driving force which brought in monogamy was the growth of property and the desire for its transmission to children - legitimate heirs; the actual progeny of the married pair appeared in the Upper Status of Barbarism as a protection against the survival of some portion of the ancient jura conjugalia - the new usage: the seclusion of wives; plan of life among the civilized Greeks - a system of female confinement and restraint."⁸ And also: "As finally constituted, this family assured the paternity of children, substituted the individual ownership of real as well as personal property for joint ownership, and an exclusive inheritance by children in the place of agnatic⁹ inheritance. Modern society reposes upon the Monogamous family."¹⁰

As for the social transformations that have occurred since the emergence of private property, the possessing minority accumulated livestock and land, the force of arms and the exercise of political power, all legitimized by a religious caste. This is how the first forms of State appear, which eventually consolidated its nature as an institutional apparatus of coercion at the service of protecting the private property of the ruling classes.

State and Patriarchy Go Hand in Hand

In The Origin of the Family..., Engels states: "The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. This degraded position of the woman, especially conspicuous among the Greeks of the heroic and still more of the classical age, has gradually been palliated and glozed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished."

However, American feminist historian Gerda Lerner, for example, does not credit evidence of that specific defeat and questions the idea of ​​a unidirectional passage from matriarchy to patriarchy: "Undoubtedly there were many different ways in which men and women organized society and distributed power and resources."¹¹

According to her and other specialists, male dominance over women preceded private property and class divisions.¹² Agricultural tribes, who depended on female labor, fought with other groups to obtain more women. The advance of agriculture required greater group stability, which reinforced the family order. And since children constituted a labor force, dominant sectors appropriated women´s reproductive capacity. Within that framework, the matrimony resided with the husband's family (patrilocal) and non-heterosexual orientation was penalized for not being reproductive.

Other modern studies, such as that of British anthropologist Mark Dyble, confirm Engels´ theses: "There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged."¹³  The same is held by Spanish feminist archaeologist Francisca Martín-Cano Abreu: "In both Paleolithic and Neolithic families, women enjoyed great social and economic power, given that it they who contributed two thirds of the calories needed for the group´s survival ... it is easy to assume that women enjoyed freedom of movement and that their confinement to the domestic sphere, according to Engels, would appear with private property and the transmission of heritage."¹⁴

Though single-cause outlooks on patriarchy are dismissed today, Engels explained the determining factor: private ownership of the means of production, the state and its institutions, including the family. Lerner, who defended Engels' contribution to the historicity of the family and women´s oppression, said that "the most complex societies presented a division of labor that was not only based on biological differences, but also on hierarchical differences in the power of some men over other men and all women. Several specialists have concluded that the change described here coincides with the formation of archaic states." Spanish feminist philosopher Celia Amorós, while