The new evidence on women's oppression
The dispossession of women — A Marxist examination of new evidence on the origins of women's oppression
By Pat Bewer
Resistance Books, 2000
44 pp., $4.95
Available from all Resistance Bookshops
or send cheque/money order for $6.95 (includes postage) to PO Box 515, Broadway NSW 2007
Review by Kamala Emanuel
The Marxist analysis of women's oppression recognises the social origins of gender inequality. It thereby gives a rational basis to the political fight for the eradication of that oppression.
Works such as Frederick Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and Evelyn Reed's Woman's Evolution have made major contributions to our understanding of the transition from pre-class to class society, and from egalitarian sexual relations to the oppression of women through the development of the family institution. Pat Brewer's pamphlet The dispossession of women, helps fill in the gaps, correct some errors and further explain how women were marginalised from their role in economic production, and enslaved in the family system as the private possessions of their husbands and fathers. It also offers a valuable critique of unscientific explanations of women's oppression.
Brewer begins her analysis with an overview of contemporary theories of the "naturalness" of women's subordinate social status. Quasi-scientific theories locate the different social roles of women and men in their physical differences.
Sociobiology argues that genetic programming to maximise the chances of reproduction drives the different behaviour of men and women. Men, each producing millions of sperm, are driven to impregnate as many women as possible and are therefore prone to promiscuity and competition against other men for potential mates, says sociobiology. Women, who produce only one egg at a time and gestate foetuses within their bodies, are more discerning in their choice of partner (looking for quality genetic material) so are not naturally prone to promiscuity and, unlike men, are not too worried about infidelity. Men's need to compete for access to women results in women's selection of more aggressive men, which feeds into the dominance of men over women.
Less extreme biologically based theories allow for a social role in explaining the social differences between men and women. Such theories argue, for example, that men and women's different social roles are built on, but go beyond, the natural differences between men and women. Thus, gender roles are seen as complementing inherent traits.
Radical feminism and eco-feminism are also based on biological differences (sometimes explicitly, sometimes not) between women and men: male power, which is somehow inherent, is said to be at the root of social evils ranging from women's oppression to environmental destruction and war, while women are innately nurturing and creative, and therefore morally superior. Although purporting to challenge women's oppression, such theories reinforce its ideological justification by asserting universal, timeless qualities of men and women as the basis of women's oppression.
The Marxist position, as Brewer explains, is that "individuals are products of complex interactions between genetic heritage, environment and accidental events that are neither genetic nor environmental. Justifying differences in status, wealth and power by blaming obvious but superficial differences in skin colour or sex organs masks systemic social inequality."
Brewer provides a synopsis of Engels' pivotal contribution to the development of the historical materialist theory of the origin of women's oppression. Basing himself on the anthropological and archaeological evidence available, particularly the work of anthropologist L.H. Morgan, Engels outlined the development of human society through three epochs, referred to as savagery, barbarism and civilisation.
In the epoch of savagery, economic life was characterised by foraging and hunting, with the use of stone and later wooden tools. People lived a nomadic lifestyle in small groups, later settling in villages. Kinship was traced through the mother, the unit of social life was the clan or gens, and social and sexual relations were egalitarian, based on collective labour and communal ownership of property.
Barbarism refers to the epoch beginning with the development of pottery, and encompassing the development of cattle breeding and the cultivation of the land, allowing for population growth, the development of urban centres and the development of crafts and trades. This laid the basis for the development of commodity production, the separation of town and country, and the emergence of classes, private property, the monogamous father-headed family and the state; that is, the epoch of civilisation.
Gender inequality began to emerge during the period of barbarism, and was consolidated with "civilisation". The accumulation of wealth that was made possible by the increased productivity of labour with the development of the plough laid the basis for the emergence of classes.
The new wealth that was created (primarily cattle) was in the hands of men. Thus, the replacement of the old clan relations with exploitative class relations was accompanied by the subjugation of women by men.
What Engels, and later Reed, were unable to explain was why, if the old relations were egalitarian, men automatically became the owners of the new wealth and women were systematically excluded from their previously considerable role in social production, sidelined into private domestic production and servitude. Why did women, as producers of new human beings and, therefore, of new wealth, become men's property rather than gain more social prestige and power? Why, after experiencing the egalitarianism of the past, did they tolerate their subjugation in the new period?
The pamphlet outlines new evidence that was not available to the earlier scientists to begin to answer these questions. Engels had assumed that the development of herding had preceded that of agriculture, whereas it now appears that horticulture (i.e., agriculture based on the use of the hoe) preceded large-scale pastoral activities.
Women collectively engaged in horticulture on communally owned land during the first stage of barbarism. The introduction of the plough into agriculture was the pivotal change in production that led to the marginalisation of women from their previously key role in production. The heavy work of ploughing, using large animal traction, could not be easily combined with child-caring tasks (previously easily integrated on a collective basis with horticulture, and before that, food gathering).
The greater productivity that the plough made possible drew men out of hunting and into agriculture and herding, pushing women into responsibility for the secondary products (milk, wool, etc.). A re-division of labour across society, rather than anything innate in men (Engels had assumed that "gaining a livelihood had always been the business of the man") was responsible for the new wealth becoming the property of men.
This in turn laid the basis for the overthrow of the reckoning of descent through the mother's line, for the institution of patriliny (descent through the father line) and for compulsory monogamy for women (who were expected to produce legitimate heirs for men) — all essential features of the family in class society.
In her account, Reed presents evidence from Greek mythology to support the contention that what Engels called "the world historic defeat of the female sex" did not take place as seamlessly as Engels asserts. She says: "It was not so difficult to do this as it appears to us now. For this revolution — one of the most decisive ever experienced by mankind [sic] — need not have disturbed one single member of a gens". The Dispossession of Women does not directly address this issue, but nevertheless makes a much-needed contribution to understanding the process whereby women were sidelined from social production and transformed into unpaid domestic labourers.
The evidence Brewer presents supports the claim that women's oppression has not always existed and that it developed on the basis of changes in economic production. It thereby lends support to materialist feminists' arguments that women's oppression can be eradicated through the development of an economy in which women are not relegated to unpaid domestic work, in which domestic tasks that are now women's private responsibility are socialised, and in which women participate as equals in all spheres of social life.
The struggle for the emancipation of women, this pamphlet makes clearer, is fundamental to the struggle against class society. A must read!