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took part in the work. One resident of the village said: "Nearly all the women in Quarry used to take in laundry work... women had to do laundry work to keep the family going'.
Jennie Kitteringham and David Morgan both show how the sources of wom en's work in agriculture began to dwindle towards the end of the century. The depression in arable agriculture in the last twenty-five years of the century meant that many farmers dispensed with labour which was not absolutely necessary, and this caused women to be hired far less frequently since their jobs were often taken over by permanently employed reapers.
Although Jenne Kitteringham discusses the objections to women working at agricultural labour stemming from bourgeois morality, she does not tie the more widespread acceptance of these objections towards the end of the century to this changing economic situation.
Country girls who gradually attended school more regularly, came more and more under the sway of an ideology which exe. ded girls who worked ont he land from the more genteel domestic service, and even from suitability for marriage. It was argued that field work removed girls from the home in which they should reccive a suitable preparation for marriage and motherhood. A far more fitting job was held to be domestic service- a job which, as Jenme Kitteringham points out, imposed duties as exhausting as those carried out by female farm workers, but which was ideologically more in tune with the bourgeois ideal of womanhood.
A girl who worked on the land had a degree of freedom which was quite unacceptable to the Victorian middle class male whose vision of women was one of helpless dependency or unquestioning obedience.
Although the aim of the collection is to investigate the unorganised und less org anised nineteenth century workforce, a look at some aspects of unionisation would have been a useful addition. The growth ol unionisation in agriculture in the 1870s and again in the 1890s is not mentioned, ** *** Women's Evolution by Evelyn Reed.. Pathfinder Press, £2.05 *** In this book, Evelyn Reed, the American Trotskyist, attempts to reinvestigate anthropology a field which has been hardly touched from a Marxist viewpoint since Engels. In doing so, she has made a number of controversial assertions and has become something of a target not only for bourgeois academics (that was to be predicted) but also for a number of revolutionaries. Unfortunately most of these criticisms have contributed far less than the book itself has.
It is certainly true that there is dubious matenal in the book. For instance, Evelyn Reed asserts that women in priprimitive societies never take part in cannibalism and that is the first social distinction between women and men. However the evidence she uses for this assertion is in adequate and is not always well interpreted. However, although it is neoessary to make such criticisms of the book to stay at that level as so many reviews have done is to miss the essence and real value of Woman's Evolution.
The heart of the book is its restatement of the thesis of the matriarchy. This theory asserts that under savagery and barbarism (before the emergence of class society), tribes and clans (units of social organsiation) were organised as a from matriarchal clan to patriarchal tamily Or* **** the men.
****:
of the century thropology at once destroys the notion that the family has been with us since the carliest times and restablishes woman's place in the carly history of humanity thereby disposing of a great mass of reactionary nonsense about the hereditary weakness, helplessness and stupidity of However, the very advances made by women were to lead to their subsequent subordination. The development of aricultural technique led to the accumulation of a surplus of goods over and above her. But the social precondition for the sucoess of this enterprise is to break the hold of the matrlincal kinship arrangements. Thus in all the mythologies and semi-histories of ancient pooples we see the struggle? to establish a ruling class taking the form of struggle for the establishment of the patriarchial family. Or to put it another way, a pre-condition for the successful establishment of class society is the historic subordination of women.
The latter parts of Woman's Evolution explore that revolution. One would be tempted to say this is done one sidedly. with too much emphasis pureiv on the family explore that revolution. You would be tempted to say one-sidedly, with too much emphasis purely on the family if you were not aware of the crying need to emphasise the role of women in history. If Evelyn Reed had done no more than contribute to that re-emphasis her book would be well worth reading In fact, she has laid the groundwork for more thorough and rich restatement of our knowledge about the nature and evolution of human socicty. Many things said in Woman's Atolution may have to be discarded, but it makes possible a debate on the left that have been almost dormant since the turn Martin O'Leary
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Published by the International Marxist Group, 97 Caledonian Road, London N.1. Printed by Prestagate, Reading, Berkshire.
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societies" immediate needs. Inevitably there are attempts to seize this surplus, and such seizures are accomplished by those with arms one faction or other of The first ruling class and the first state (the first armed bodies of men for the pro- tection of property rights' emerge toget-
BETRAYAL! TIME NO NEXT