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"This world has always belonged to men", writes Simone de Beauvoir [2]. This affirmation has a broad consensus, even amongst feminists and women writers. This can be explained by the fact that the oppression of women spans several millenia, and that women occupied an inferior position in all historical societies that have left written traces. Theories about the existence of a primitive matriarchy that appeared in the 19th century are regarded by contemporary anthropologists as outright digressions, or as assertions without scientific evidence. But if their thesis was accepted, we would be confronting in women the sole and unique group in history whose inferior condition is original, natural and does not result from a historical process.
This is not at all an academic debate. If we admit the 'always" of Simone de Beauvoir, if we justify the ongoing enslavement of women since the beginning of time through some wider hold arising from rules governing the species and the exhausting demands of reproduction — which is a natural parameter - then we refuse to consider women as historical products. That means that child-bearing is seen as a natural handicap which necessarily determines a social oppression. It then follows that women's oppression is natural, arising from their specificity as sexual beings, and also that men are spontaneously oppressors because of their own sexual specificity.
One can draw logical conclusions from this which are absolutely contradictory. Sexist theoreticians can see a justification for the natural and irremediable inferiority of women in this premise; while female theoreticians of radical feminism are inclined on the contrary to see the existence of a contradiction between men and women — not only a major one, but a primitive and natural one. They also tend to situate the liberation of women in test-tube babies, which would free them from child-bearing. These are in fact the conclusions drawn by Shulamith Firestone in her book The Dialectic of Sex, a book which is certainly the most representative and coherent expression of the radical feminist currents in the United States today.
We reject this thesis of the eternal enslavement of women in the name of the "laws of nature. Humanity from its beginnings, from the stage of the primitive horde, has been a historical reality which does not have natural parameters, but which transforms them in the praxis.
mona de Batukoir, The Second Ser (Pelican).
It is useful to recapitulate here, briefly, the evolution of anthropological thought as applied to the problems of the "feminine condition" [2]. Women were born as objects of science at the time of the epistemological revolution of the 19th century. This corresponded to the end of a type of history which was understood as a factual succession of events, regulated by very few people who were elevated to the rank of "subjects of history. It also corresponded to the project of a kind of science which would update the social facts in their totality and would acknowledge them. The investigating field of historians moved from the compilation of diplomatic documents to the study of economic mechanisms, and also to the family and institutions of daily life.
It marked the emergence of the 'woman question'. Eliminated from public life, from "the history that can be seen", women have been given a role by the historians: that of being the main agents for reproduction, in studies of marriage and fertility in past societies. They are sometimes economic subjects linked with a specific type of production, but above all women are seen as privileged elements in understanding the uses and values of daily life' (from cooking to emotional ties, and clothing).
But their recognition as objects for study by the historians did not imply the recognition of an autonomous role for women in history. Women are nothing more than the "symbols' of a social process. They "symbolise" the capacities for reproduction, the mode of life and also the collective unconsciousness of a society.
Women are the reproduction in a society, and not a social group defined by its relation to reproduction. The history of historians is fundamentally 'male', including even that of the "Marxist' historians, where classes and class struggle are often implicitly reduced to the masculine element. Arising from this is the absurdity of half of humanity floating on the margin through the course of the centuries. The historians don't even think that women's oppression and the struggle against this oppression might have a role in the historical process!
But there is a field, subsidiary to the development of historical science - though occupying a marginal position in its methods and its objects of investigation — in the heart of which women have found themselves. This is the study of archaic societies. The 2. For more detalla, see Ida Magli's La Donna, un problema aperto, Florence 1974.
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first books totally [3] or partially devoted to the feminine condition are anthropological books of the 19th century. Two reasons explain this. The birth of a feminist movement and the interest shown in the 'woran question' created a debate about the nature of the feminine condition. The new born anthropology provided information on socicties which supposedly corresponded to a stage of primitive development of humanity. It destroyed the image of the universal and ahistorical man coming from the philosophies of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. It distinguished between the natural and the cultural. But especially what became evident to the first anthropologists, even obscurely, was the importance of kinship structures in archaic societies.
Engels [4] correctly wrote: *The less developed the work, the smaller the mass of its products and consequently the wealth of society, and also the more the predominant influence of blood links seem to dominate the social order. * From that time on, the study of kinship relations which postulated the division of sexes in the reproduction of the species marked the appearance of kinship as an object for investigation. The sexual group with a particular relationship to reproduction, namely women, was called by the Italian woman anthropologist Ida Marli the anthropological discovery of the woman'.
Immediately research and debates turned to the scandalous problem of the primitive matriarchy. "Our' anthropologists (imagine them as learned members of the bourgeoisie, believing in the natural superiority of their class and sex had, in the warmth of their libraries, received a shock. It appeared more and more obvious that the majority of archaic societies For had experienced a matrilineal order of descent (consanguinity through the maternal line). Now contemporary society gave the image of patrilineal consanguinity, accompanied by an absolute pre-eminence of the male, the father. A similar logic led to the conclusion that matrilineal consanguinity was a criterion for the social domination of women: at the beginning there had been matriarchy.
The emotion caused by this discovery" went beyond scientific spheres. Feminists saw a confirmation of their struggle in this discovery: the inferiority of women was not natural, oppression had not always existed. Most anthropologists came to a decision: they were either in favour of or against the theory of the primitive Those in favour based themselves on the prior appearance, in societies, matrilineal consanguinity. This prior appearance was explained by the ignorance of primitive people about the role of the father in reproduction. Only the woman seemed to be the source of life to primitive people, and her power was based on her reproductive functions.
superiority of the man....
Morgan And Bachofen In 1871 the work Ancient Society was published by the American writer Morgan. Morgan had lived amongst Iroquois tribes. His work was the first attempt to develop a theory about the evolution of the structures of kinship: from the absolute sexual promiscuity without any prohibition of incest at the beginning, up to the monogamian family, through the consanguine family (union of all people of the same generation), punaluan family (prohibition of incest between brothers and sisters, group marriage), and the pairing family (birth of the couple). According to Morgan, the monogamian family started patrilineal consanguinity and with it ended the pre-eminence of women. In The Origin of the Family Engels draws the same conclusion as Morgan. Wewill deal with this later.
The legitimate theoretician of matriarchy was not Morgan but Bachofen, who was not, strictly speaking, an anthropologist, but rather a historian of religions. [S] Morgan started from the kinship structures in archaic societies of the time. Bachofen started from the analysis of the 'sacred' in archaic societies of the past. He 3. C. Letourneau, La condition de la femme dans les diverses races et Civilisations, Paris 1903; Evolution du mariage of de la famille, Paris 4. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 5. The main work: Das Mutterrecht, 1881.
discovered the cult of the Great Mother of Gods [6] and the symbolic structures that emphasised the feminine aspect of the "holy', the power of fertility of the Earth Mother, exaltation of the lunar principle, cults of vegetation.
From the primary role of the feminine element in the religious order, Bachofen draws the pre-eminence of women in the social order. Not that he was a feminist. The whole meaning of his thesis lies in the celebration of the passage from the female order to the male order, the former corresponding to the primitive and barbaric stage of society. According to Bachofen, what was for Engels 'the historical defcat of the feminine sex is in reality the beginning of civilisation: the passage from original chaos to an ordered social structure; the passage from instinct to reason; from submission to nature to its transformation; from passivity to activity; from nature to culture. The patriarchal order incarnates progress. According to this author of Das Muterrecht, *the overthrow of the matriarchy occurred when men realised their role in reproduction'. They then freed themselves from the Mother-goddesses of fertility that terrified them, to replace them by male gods that they promoted to the rank of supreme gods. [7] *The Origin Of The Family...
It was on the basis of this research of a new born anthropology (in the framework of a heated debate between supporters of whether the patriarchy or matriarchy came first) that Engels wrote the Origin of the Family.... The discoveries of Morgan and Bachofen had enthused him, as they had Marx. The monogamian family was no longer seen as a natural grouping but as the result of a long evolutionary process started at the beginning of humanity. Moreover, the comparative method used by Morgan confirmed Marx's intuitions abour the pre-history of Western civilisation. Morgan outlined how Indian archaic societies in America in the 19th century had the same kinship structure and the same evolutionary process as the archaic societies of the past (Greece, Far East). "Morgan spontaneously rediscovered, through the limits imposed by his subject, the materialist conception of history that had been discovered by Marx'. [8) Engels adopted the evolutionary schema provided by Morgan almost unreservedly, but added to it a materialist basis.
We are familiar with the thesis developed in the Origin of the Family on the birth of women's oppression. At the beginning, humanity knew a form of "primitive communism' probably corresponding to the Stone Age. The land was communal, a first division of labour appeared, rooted in the sexual division of reproduction. Women, less "mobile' because of child-bearing, were associated with husbandry, and tasks near the dwelling place: weaving. pottery.... Men devoted themselves to hunting and fishing. Only the mother's role was known in the reproductive process, and matrilineal consanguinity was natural in the kinship structures. This was reflected in marriage groups (a union of all the men in a clan of a given age group with the women of the same age in another clan). According to Engels, matrilineal consanguinity was, doubtlessly, accompanied by the social supremacy of women: "the domestic communist economy where women belong, for most of them if not all, to the same gens, while men were divided into different gens, is the most concrete basis of this predominance of women'. [9] But with the Iron Age and the appearance of the plough, husbandry was modified, and required more physical strength and a greater mobility. Above all, an accumulation of a social surplus product appeared. Now it was men - through their physical predispositions — who were more suited to this new husbandry and seized upon this surplus product. Private ownership of the means of production started to develop. Men were unable to make their offspring profit, since inheritance came through the mother only.
Men used their new economic superiority to reverse the family structure and to establish patrilineal consanguinity. Because women have a natural property relation with their body as a 6. Works on the Great Mother of Gods: Kereny, La Grande Mare: E.O James, The Cults of the Great Mother, London 1959; R. Briffault. The Mothers, London 1927: R. Pestalozza, L'Eternel feminin dans la religion mediterranéenne. 7. A rapid summary of this theory can be found in the "History' chapter of Simone de Beauvoir, op cit. 8. Engels, Letter to Kautsky, 16 February 1884. 9. Engels, Origin of the Family...
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means of reproduction, men depend on women to reproduce themselves. To overthrow this dependence, to ensure one's own descent, can only mean the appropriation of women's bodies by men, with the transformation of women into socially degraded beings.
Let's say from now on that this schema, whatever its weaknesses (attributable to the level of knowledge at that time).
continues to have decisive importance. For women's oppression to be acknowledged not as a natural, original fact, but as the result of a historical process, constitutes from the point of view of method an immense gain. To this, we can add intuitions - even if they are insufficiently explained - that the first class struggle was a struggle between the sexes, and that class oppression was made possible only by the appropriation of the female sex. It is necessary to quote again from the well known sentence: 'the first class opposition that manifests itself in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between men and women in the conjugal marriage, and the first class oppression with the oppression of the feminine sex by the masculine sex. [10].
Engels' thesis was attacked on several grounds: for example, the existence of a primitive matriarchy, the simultaneous birth of private property and women's oppression, the analogy made between the sexual group constituted by women and a social class. If criticisms have come from a range of scientific viewpoints, the most radical is undoubtedly that of the anthropological structuralist school of Levi-Strauss in particular.
It is necessary to study at some length the details Levi-Strauss's theses on women's oppression. First, because they are considered as the most systematic retutation of Engels theory. Secondly, because they have a certain authority and are taken up again by a section of the new feminist literature.
Levi-Strauss And The 'Inequality Of The Sexes' We are familiar with the thesis which is defended in Levi-Strauss's major book, Structures elementaires de la parente (Elementary Structures of Kinship). He argues that every human society is founded on the laws of exchange. The first exchange, the fundamental one, is that of women. The passage from "nature to 'culture" starts with the prohibition of incest: that is. with the rule made by men involving the exchange of women of beings. No symmetry existed between the sexes: "The fundamental point is that it is men who exchange women, and not the contrary". The type of patrilineal ог matrilineal consanguinity does not matter for Levi-Strauss. For him matriarchy is a nonsense, contradicted by extensive evidence. *Political authority, or simply social authority, always belongs to men, and this male dominance is a constant'. [12] The only difference between patrilineal and matrilineal regimes for Levi. Strauss is that in the former the power belongs to the fathers and men in a masculine lineage; in the latter it belongs to brothers or uncles on the mothers' side.
In most societies with a matrilineal regime, the woman goes to live in her husband's clan (patrilocal dwelling). This single fact demonstrates for Levi-Strauss the supremacy of men. We are familiar with his conclusion: *Matrilineal consanguinity is the hand of the woman's father or brother that reaches up to the brother-in-law's village'. [/3] There is no system of relations between the sexes — men maintain their relationships between. themselves by means of women.
Levi-Strauss's analysis leads to an absolute reification of women. It is all the more absolute because this reification has neither an origin nor any apparent cause. It is not, after all, LeviStrauss's desire to explain why men exchange women and not vice versa. "Women readers can console themselves by thinking that the rules of the game would remain the same if it was decided to consider men as objects of exchange for groups of women". [14] 10. Ibid. 11. Levi-Strauss, •Structures elementaires de la parenté, Presses Universitaires de France, p. 147. 12. Ibid., p. 150. 13. Ibid., p. 149. 14. Levi-Strauss, The Family: Shapiro, Man, Culture and Society, London 1956.
Page 19. These are the words of a good structuralist for whom A is always - provided A and B occupy the same function in the same structural group. However, A and B don't occupy the same place. When Levi-Strauss takes the risk and develops a hypothesis to explain this, he needs Freud's help — with Freud's theory about the well-known sexual passivity of women. The superiority of the male libido, of the 'sexual instinct", Levi-Strauss says, is what ensured male supremacy in the active passage from nature to culture. This superiority represents the sexual relations: it corresponds to an 'instinct", but an instinct that needs another human being to satisfy itseif.
Levi-Strauss expresses, in a sophisticated way, the notion that inequality of the sexes is fundamental and natural. This uncon tested master of structuralist anthropology brings us back, through his analysis of the origins of women's oppression, to the good old naturalist explanations and to tautological reasoning: "Women are inferior because they are inferior". And after all. Levi-Strauss, caught in his own trap, doesn't hesitate to make his theory of the exchange of women a universal one. For him, the exchange draws its universality from Nature where it finds its basis. Thus, in our developed capitalist societies, a woman who gets married thinks she is signing a contract of legal equality with her husband. But just let her read Levi-Strauss and she will lose her illusions: in reality it is her father or brother who have merely exchanged her. This point of view (the exchange of women) must be maintained in all its rigour even with respect to our society; the link of reciprocity that makes the marriage is not established between men and women, but between men by means of women. [15] Thisisall evidently absurd, especially in a system with bourgeois law, and at a time when many women are totally independent economically. But to deprive this exchange of its universality would mean to deprive it of its "naturalness". And this would make women's position a historical product arising from a specific society.
We reject Levi-Strauss's conclusion because we reject his method. We have not got the means (research is not that extensive) to criticise his analysis tribe by tribe. However. an ethnologist — whatever his intellectual honesty interprets facts also as a member of his own sex, and through what his sex supposes through the structuring of consciousness and of the unconscious. Levi-Strauss's choice of words is remarkable in this respect. His use of "we" 'one'. "mankind", "man", appear exclusively in the masculine gender of the French language. This overtly helps to convince the reader of the fundamental asymmetry between the sexes"
But even if we take it for granted that the information provided by Levi-Strauss about the kinship structures is correct, the problem still remains. What is the value of his schema of interpretation of these phenomena? He would defend himself against charges of "interpretation'. His intention is to enable us to see the social mechanisms of kinship structures, by cracking them open. However, his "cracking open' occurs in the abstract, cut off from any other social reality (the structure functions in autarchy). implicitly stressing the quasi-natural inferiority Undoubtedly, conclusions would be different if Levi-Strauss cared to link his analysis of kinship structures with the more fully understood praxis of the groups being examined. There is no precise evidence from Levi-Strauss about thetribes he has studied in depth — about the kinship systems, about the historical evolution of the tribe, this exogenous influence it had, and about the type of political power which was exercised. We are aware of the love "cold societies" - those where historical movement seems to be absent. It is in this kind of society that Levi-Strauss finds his examples of kinship structures.
Appropriation By Men Only Levi-Strauss's restrictive method is concerned only with the mechanisms of kinship. This makes him neglect almost entirely the fact that there is only appropriation on the side of men. This is male appropriation of women's capacity to reproduce, as well as their labour power.
Marx noted that the first division of labour is situated at the level of the reproduction of the species [/6]. Engels saw that this division for reproduction purposes implied a division of labour at 15. Levi-Strauss, Structures elementalres de la parentá, Pp. 148-9. 16. Marx, The German Ideology.
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the level of production. And, as Levi-Strauss himself writes: "Satisfaction of economic needs entirely rests on conjugal society and on the division of labour between the sexes. [17] The societies studied by Levi-Strauss rest, at their level of development, on the appropriation — by a group of men — of the labour power of women. 'Such pygmies consider that the more women there are, the more there is to eat.
Engels was reproached because he linked the birth of women's oppression to that of private property in a situation where collective societies existed and communal property was evident, but women still had an obviously inferior status. The first form of property was in fact the appropriation by a group of men of the labour power and the reproductive capacities of a group of women. Marx had an intuition of this when he wrote: The first form, the germ of property is the family where the woman and children are the man's slaves'. [18) This appropriation is in no way original. Humanity seems to have known a stage (one which has been left behind by almost all the primitive societies of today which are studied by anthropologists) where the natural division of labour was reflected in exchanges between the group of men and the group of women. Two examples to illustrate different extremes of the ancient world include the studies of Louis Cernet Exchange Between The Sexes After examining the survival in ancient Greek law of the rituals of exchange, Louis Cernet writes: 'One can risk saying that in the oldest system of exchange, the exchange between the sexes plays a central role'. [19] Marcel Granet comments on ancient China: In ancient China, men and women competed with each other like two rival corporations. Ploughmen and women weavers formed groups with different ways of living, different interests, and different riches. Although rivals, they were also interdependent. These complementary groups divided the work between themselves. The hours and places of the work were also shared. Each group had a pattern of life. Social life was the result of the interaction between the two. [20] The idea of exchanges between the sexes, similar to rivalry between corporations, is a long way from Levi-Strauss's notion of exchange through the means of women. This stage of sexual division of labour corresponds to a kinship system based on matrilineal consanguinity. But does this period correspond to a matriarchy? This is pretty improbable. The collective property and the communal aspect of the social organisation did not provide a basis for the domination of women over men.
Nevertheless, the primary role of reproduction in these societies gave women an eminent religious power. Great goddesses began to reign in the religious world who were not indifferent to the fate of women on carth. Simone de Beauvoir [211 only sees the religious transposition of the male view of women in the image of these great goddesses. For her, the woman -although an almighty goddess - is nevertheless the 'Other'. There is no possibility of any reciprocal relations between men and This hypothesis is gratuitous: the notion of the great goddess reflects the image of women with their own power. The group of men which de Beauvoir describes — in line with Levi-Strauss -are the original and uncontested owners of their sons. Political power is seen to be assumed by an act of creative liberty because, according to the existentialists, men are naturally the ones able to transcend their situation. The picture painted is one of a cruel, domineering, terrifying woman with many lovers - either humans or animals - who kills or castrates them when they betray her or no longer satisfy her. What an act of masochism this is! But if the same group of men described by de Beauvoir worshipped divinities such as the minor goddesses from Crete who were devoted to alleviating the sufferings of women arising from menstruation and child birth, what a rare generosity in history that would be....
In reality, in a type of society where private appropriation did not yet exist, the specific relation of women to reproduction is far 17. Levi-Strauss, Structures elementaires de la parenté. p. 148, 18. Marx, The German Ideology. 19. L. Cernet, Anthropologie de la Grece antique. 20. M. Granet, La penade chinoise. 21. Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit. from being a handicap. It gives rise to some privileges, in fact: the woman is mistress of life, her fertility is seen to be part of the vital fertility of the earth. This is the root of women's predominance in ancient religions.
The 'enslavement" of women to reproduction of the species did not in itself allow the historical defcat of the feminine sex. It was rooted in the consequences of the sexual division of labour when the progress of technical development made the accumulation of a social surplus possible. In the most primitive tribes, women generally did the weaving, pottery and husbandry when the cultivated soil was near the dwelling place. Men would hunt and make tools for production. Women's role was, indeed, a result of their poorer mobility. But this did not in any way reflect women's inferiority. On the contrary, women controlled most of the economy of the group at the beginnings of husbandry.
The discovery of bronze and iron made it possible to cultivate larger surfaces. This resulted in the accumulation of cattle. Breeding, a substitute for hunting, was the occupation of the men. Moreover, the muscular strength of the man became an advantage as the rewards reaped with the help of bronze implements increased. It is the determining role of women in the primitive economy which seems to have acted against their interests At this time, women's activities ceased to be the pivot of the life of the group. Women continued to weave. But men profited from the accumulation of cattle and agricultural products. It was the men who saw the beginnings of a surplus product from their work. With the appearance of a substantial surplus product, it was possible for one part of the group to appropriate the labour power of the other part. At the primitive stage, even before the appearance of slavery, the sexual division of work resulted in the appropriation by men of the labour power of women. The relation of women to reproduction and the nature of the kinship structures made it necessary to take possession of the bodies of women — as tools of reproduction — as well.
Engels rightly saw that the transmission of private property -in the hands of men - required a kinship system to ensure its maintenance. At this time the couple appeared as a social entity, leading to the existence of 'legitimate' children to whom property could be handed down.
Struggle Between The Sexes In the following stage, with the appearance of slavery, women were expelled from production and relegated to domestic tasks. This was more profitable than exploiting women's labour power. With the monogamian family, women's tasks were excluded from the realm of exchange and directed to consumption within the This revolution" was long and progressive. It resulted in the social integration of the religious values of the past. From this it is possible to understand the few survivals of an epoch when women were not yet enslaved. One example: in Crete, after the Minoan society, at a time of the triumph of patriarchal social relations, the laws of Gortyne made the wife the exclusive proprietor. Even in the case of divorce, women owned all that was spun and woven in the house.
This revolution' was the fruit of a struggle between the sexes. Numerous testimonies exist confirming this struggle. It continued even after the solid establishment of the patriarchy. When Levi-Strauss writes about the social and uncontested superiority of men in primitive societies, he forgets to report the existence of a widespread institution — the House of Men. This was a place apart from the village where only men met. Women had no rights to venture near the House. Ceremonies of initiation were carried out there, as well as the preparation of expeditions to punish women of the tribe. Many institutions and rituals developed which excluded women: masks were worn by men only, and they alone had access to rituals surrounding the reincarnation of ancestors. According to Genevieve Calame-Griaule, masked men of the Dogons "could really exercise a terrible vengeance on a woman guilty of a grave disagreement with a man from the village .... They would invade her hut, demolish the roof, take her goods and pursue her in order to kill her.* [22] But she points out later that some old women would hide themselves to spy on the men and steal the masks....!
22. G. Calame-Griaule, Ethnologie et lengage.
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The institution of the House of Men is incomprehensible in the framework defined by Levi-Strauss, which is premised on the uncontested superiority of men. The need for men to organise themselves, to celebrate phallic cults and to plot against the group of women doesn't express his notion of the cloudless triumph of patriarchal domination. The House of Men rather reflects the terror of men who were confronted with the uncontested magic of the woman's body, It is the concrete expression of the struggle of the sexes and the organisation of men as males to deal with the domination of women In a tension-filled supremacy of men is accomplished through their organisation as a sex, exercising the most open forms of violence.
The literature of ancient and classical Greece provides many examples of the existence of a struggle between the sexes. One only has to read the Greek tragedies. [23] Here women belong to the past. Their preference for archaic and irrational religions, and for political systems which existed before the City system, is constantly noted in this literature. From Orestes to Penthee to Creon, the (male) hero in these tragedies proclaims that women won't have any power in the City. And, as Bachofen saw, Orestes by Aeschylus strikes the last blows consanguinity: the young gods of the patriarchal era descend from Olympus to proclaim that women have no role in reproduction. Children are seen as the fruit of a single active principle - the male principle. The Eryneas, the goddesses of vengeance, of blood, of darkness and the depths of the earth, bow before the will of the voung gods.
At the end of this briel study we would like to underline several points. In primitive societies, the first appropriation 23. J.P. Vincent, Mythe et tragedie: The tragic moment is the one when a gap opens at the heart of social experlence, wide enough so that in between Juridical and political thought on the one hand, mythical and heroic tradition on the other, the oppositions clearly appear, yet narrow enough for the conflicts of value to be still felt painfully and the confrontation to continue to occur."
situation. The remains.
against matrilineal struggle at the level of everyday life. production. occurred when men appropriated woman's labour power and her power to reproduce the species. This implies that the first class struggle definitely was the struggle of the sexes, and that the main force of history, at that stage, was the struggle between the sexes. With slavery there was a differentiation of social classes in the usual meaning of the word. Women, as an autonomous group, were excluded from production. Then the essential contradictions shifted and history became the history of class struggle.
This fundamental transformation upset the status of men in relation to women: it was then no longer the case that men exercised an oppression over women as males, but rather as individuals situated in the process of production. Women's oppression then becomes related to the dictates of the mode of domination of the ruling class, not to the specific interests of men as a group. Men as a group ceased to exist as a socio-economic unit, even if maintained as an ideological entity.
Thus a specific oppression exercised over women as women The struggle of women develops, rather than the struggle of the sexes — which is a restrictive and archaic concept. It nevertheless played an undeniable role in history: especially in the evolution of the family, on the ideological terrain, and in the However, contrary to the ideas from the radical feminist current of the women's movement, the struggle between the sexes is not the main contradiction in history, even if it pre-dates the class struggle and even if class exploitation arises as a result of the domination of women by men. Each mode of production develops its own contradictions, and uses and modifies for itself the unresolved contradictions of the previous modes of production. Women's oppression aids the reproduction of capitalism, it does not engender it. Examining the roots of women's oppression allows one to define it as a historical product. But this analysis cannot substitute itself in any way for a study of the function of this oppression in the mode of capitalist
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their own blood relations with foreign women. It is this exchange which makes social life possible. In the beginning, women were the mediation through which men affirmed themselves as social