In a class society, based as it is on the private ownership of the means of production, women's status is necessarily low. Engels points out:
"The division of labour between [the] sexes is determined by causes entirely [illegible] from those that determine the status of women in society." (Origin of the Family).
Thus, in primitive society where property was held in common, the [illegible] was between the women, bearing [illegible] spinning and working in the field, and the men who hunted for food. The bearing of children, necessitating such a division of work, did not entail the subjection of women.
On the contrary, in the earlier 'group family' and the later 'pairing family' (to use Engels' terms), women were very much respected because it was they that had the children. In [primitive soci]ety there was no reason for the paternity of the mother's children to be established; maternity alone was certain. Descent was reckoned through the female line.
It is the development of private property in the means of wealth that brought about the crucial change. [illegible] the men that were the hunters of cattle, it [was] they who later moved to herding. [illegible] the man a more important status in the family than the woman, [illegible] the strengthened position in order to overthrow [the] traditional order of inheritance [illegible] his children. This was "the world-historic defeat of the female sex." (Engels)
From the previous free pairing marriages there developed male dominated marriages - monogamy. The woman had to become a breeder of her husband's children - and no-one else's! [illegible] the property of her man, in much the same way as his cattle were. Virginity was her burden before marriage and chastity ever after. [illegible] examination of the divorce [laws] of this [country] up until as recently as 1925 exemplify [that a] woman who committed adultery could be divorce[d] but for a wife to get a divorce she had to prove cruelty as well). The fiction of marital [unity] is still operative, although in 1885 the wife was given rights over her own person and by 1925 wives could be treated as individual persons in property transactions. Similar examples could be found in the marriage laws of most lands.
If Engels is correct in linking women's status with the existence of private ownership of the means of production, then it puts the whole issue of women's rights and abilities in a different perspective. It may be today that anthropologists could argue that Engels' account does not take into account this detail or that it is simplistic, but, to my knowledge, there is no better hypothesis for the development of monogamy.
So, for socialists to argue that woman's status is decided by her role, productive or not, and that since the industrial revolution she has developed a low status as factory production has taken over many of her functions is as much of a mystification of the real relations as it is for journalists, etc., to say that it is her "illogicality" and more emotional approach that prevents her from fully participating in the "logical" male world.
This basic inequality [is] traceable to the very roots of class [illegible].
Psychologists [illegible] men are outward looking, actively involved in the world - [illegible] their nature. Woman's [nature], however, is more bound up with her body, her glandular variations. She finds fulfilment in motherhood; she operates on a more intuitive basic level. It could only be in a male dominated society that Freud could discover not that men suffered from envy of the [female's] child-bearing [illegible] that women suffered from "penis envy" [complexes]!
[illegible] "purity" [illegible] the sanctity of marriage" and the family [illegible] monogamy [illegible] "chastity" [illegible] an ideal which [finds] its expression in the Virgin Mary [illegible] the Church is none too clear [illegible] regarded women as [the personi]fication of evil and the "flesh" [illegible] designed to tempt the ascetic from [his] path - a [senti]ment only too obvious in the form of [the marriage service].
At a time when the Pill [illegible] educational opportunity are presenting [women] with more freedom [illegible].
The various ideological justification for women's secondary status serve as a continuous reinforcement of that status, especially as many of them are accepted by women themselves - often with pride - her femininity, her special relationships with children and her thought and bodily processes so different from those of men bestow on her a uniqueness which affects her relationships with both sexes.
But accepted by women or not, all such arguments can only serve to disguise the real relationship.
The inequality of women stems from the monogamous marriage system - born not of the free desire of two people to live together - but of the need to subjugate woman and deny her desires in the interests of the inheritance of private property. It also ensures that children are brought up within their own class with all the limitations that that may place upon them.
[If we changed the ideolog]ical belie[fs about] women, the whole notion of family organisation in society would have to be changed. It has long been recognised that the prevailing ideology about the home and family bears little relationship to the actual family. The Hammonds' books, "The Town Labourer 1760-1832" and "The Village Labourer 1760-1832" paint a grim picture of the conditions of life at the time of the industrial revolution. Especially for the cottage women who took in work mainly spinning, for the developing factories. They had to work all the hours of the day, feeding opium to their children to keep them quiet. The middle class Victorian women, better off in many ways, was still a very frustrated being - [sexually] and intellectually. She was part of her husband's property and useless except as an example of his wealth. The [illegible] the slums and poverty in London in the 1930's has well been documented in "Metropolitan Man" by Robert Sinclair. He shows what a travesty overcrowding, with its concomitant incest, made of the ideals of family life. But the family as an institution has its weaknesses even in the epitome of all a family should be - the white, middle-class American household, with its limited well-fed children and all its modern equipment as Betty Freidan in her book "The Feminine Mystique" concluded. She points to the complete frustration of the "dream life" in her house - the alcoholism; the drug-taking and the neuroses. The only "fulfilled" women she found on one particular estate were all working in interesting careers.
We must not confuse women's role as mother with the monogamous marriage system and the restrictions of family life. It is obvious that women are the biological mothers - they have the babies - and as such they should demand full rights over their own body, including free, immediate abortion, access to free contraceptives, and as Leonora Lloyd says in her article on "Women as Mothers"*, research into congenital abnormalities. It does not follow logically from this biological fact that each mother will have to look after her own infants in her own home for ten years or so. This is a social question, not a biological one.
The image of the little woman in the home is so pervasive, that even when mothers go out to work their job is considered to be secondary to the childrens needs - a factor which does not apply equally to the father. Women have two roles, the sociologists tell us, and furthermore, these roles are conflicting. If she stays at home she is a "cabbage" - if she gets a job, she is depriving her infants. It is true of course. In our society women are faced with these conflicts [illegible].
It [illegible] motherhood. The only [illegible] their job as mothers is to abolish fulltime motherhood. It is only when children are seen [as] the responsibility of society and not the sole responsibility of the individual parents; when creches are provided for all children, from the age of three months onwards at the place of [work]; when canteens provide meals communally (which [illegible] required); when time off is [illegible] babies without consequent loss of seniority - and perhaps most importantly, when women are involved as people in building a society - only then will women be freed, both as second class citizens and as workers. A sense of the possibilities of this freedom can be seen in Felix Greene's moving book "The Wall Has Two Sides", where he describes the effect of the Chinese revolution on the women.
The question is, can any, or all, of these demands be met in a capitalist system? It is possible under capitalism to have a system of creches to enable the women to work - if the employers need the labour as they did in wartime Britain - but women would always have to face the possibility that in times of recession they would be the first to go (suddenly the sociologists would discover that healthy children need their mother at home).
Even supposing that women had equal conditions [illegible] men and women as workers face the problem of the nature of work in capitalist society. In such a system, the worker does not see himself as being involved in building a society by his productive effort. Women are not going to free themselves simply be escaping from the home in order to work for an employer and his profits.
* See INTERNATIONAL Vol. 1, Number 5.