“I read the article in the June 16, 2003, issue about Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,” Lobello said. “In Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society there are mentioned the three ages of humankind: savagery, barbarism, and civilization, and how women were treated equally on account of the fact that there was no dominant patriarchy.

“But I was watching a documentary on the History Channel which claimed there was archaeological evidence in Neanderthal burial sites that males were buried upright with pottery, food, and other artifacts for the afterlife, but that females were not buried this way. The conclusion was that, contrary to modern-day assertions that Neanderthal women were treated equally, such was not the case and they were treated poorly, on account of the fact that one could conclude that how a society buries its members also directly represents how that same society treats its living.

“So, who is right? Lewis Morgan or the History Channel? Also, in the age of barbarism, Egyptian society was male-dominated, because the Pharaohs were all men.”  
 
Lewis Morgan, Frederick Engels, and Evelyn Reed are right
I am convinced Morgan is right, along with Frederick Engels and Evelyn Reed. But let’s step back a moment and review some important facts.

Lewis Morgan propounded the theory, based in part on his lifelong study of the North American Iroquois communities, that prehistoric matriarchal societies where women were respected predate the later male-dominated societies. He, along with other early anthropologists, sought to understand the social origins of the family. He noted that matrilineal kinship— tracing family lines through the mother —or its vestiges existed among primitive peoples. Engels, who along with Karl Marx founded the modern communist movement, drew on Morgan’s work and supported his thesis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Lobello cites Evelyn Reed’s introduction to that book, which the Militant excerpted.  
 
Neanderthal people did not place women in lower status
Did the Neanderthal people place women in a lower status? Definitely not. I didn’t see the History Channel program Lobello refers to, but I would caution him to avoid giving credence to such “scientific” assertions that try to impose the social relations of modern, class-divided society on prehistoric people. Many pseudoscientific articles, books, and radio or TV programs have appeared in recent years about prehistoric humans. Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, part of her Earth’s Children series novels, is among the most notable. It presents Neanderthal society as more “sexist” than the modern humans who came to dominate in prehistoric times.

The hominids classified as Homo neandertalensis were an early form of human being. Archeological research in the Neanderthal valley, east of Dusseldorf, Germany, shows that this branch of the human family developed in Europe more than 100,000 years ago, and evolved as hunters and gatherers until they became extinct some 28,000 years ago. The Neanderthal people lived in the middle stage of the Paleolithic or stone age, which corresponds with the period of savagery Morgan and Engels describe.

I did some reading about Neanderthal burial practices. Evidence is spotty, and conclusions are contradictory. Desolate Landscapes, a thorough study of ice-age settlement in eastern Europe by John Hoffecker, notes that evidence of burials in open sites of that region are scant, and more poorly preserved than cave burials further west.

While some archeologists state that most of the individuals buried in Neanderthal sites were male, others report different findings. A University of Leicester professor notes that most Neanderthal skeletons are in a crouched position, contradicting the idea that men were buried upright and females otherwise. Israeli archeologists report that a cave in Tabun, Israel, “contains a Neanderthal-type burial of a female, dated to about 120,000 years ago.” Another archeologist reports that in a cave in Iraq, “archaeologists uncovered skeletons of a man, two women and an infant buried together.” Female remains were also discovered at the La Ferassie site in France. I found no evidence to back up History Channel’s assertion that females were buried in a way demonstrating inferior social status.  
 
Differences do not equal oppression
Pseudoscientific claptrap aside, the level of social development of the Neanderthal people could not have provided the material foundation for class society and male domination. That doesn’t mean there were no differences in how men and women lived, died, and were buried. But these differences do not equal oppression of one sex.

As Engels explained, “The division of labor between the two sexes is determined by causes entirely different from those that determine the status of women in society. Peoples whose women work much harder than we would consider proper often have far more real respect for women than our Europeans have for theirs.”

In primitive society, before the development of a social surplus that enabled class society to be born, the fact that women were child-bearers and gatherers, while men were hunters, did not prevent women from actively participating in society. In fact, as Reed states, “It was the mothers who first took the road of labor, and by the same token blazed the trail toward humanity. It was the mothers who became the chief producers; the workers and farmers; the leaders in scientific, intellectual, and cultural life. And they became all this precisely because they were the mothers, and in the beginning maternity was fused with labor.”  
 
Rise of property resulted in ‘world-historic defeat of female sex’
Engels explained that with the advance of humanity through the development of agriculture, leading to a surplus, the societies that began to dominate were those in which some of the hunters, who were male, were becoming owners of herds and land. Full-blown class society developed when the surplus product of the labor of all was expropriated and controlled by a tiny ruling class, which was patriarchal. The ideological rationalization of the “superiority” of men was developed to justify the oppression of this class against t he rest of society and the abolition of the status of women under the matriarchy. “Mother right”—where kinship relations passed through the women, not the men—had to be done away with.

“The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex,” Engels said. “The ‘savage’ warrior and hunter,” he explained, “had been content to occupy second place in the house and give precedence to the woman. The ‘gentler’ shepherd, presuming upon his wealth, pushed forward to first place and forced the woman into second place” because the division of labor outside the family had changed with the development o f class society.

Or, as Reed outlined in Problems of Women’s Liberation, “It is not nature, but class society which robbed women of their right to participate in the higher functions of

society and placed the primary emphasis upon their animal functions of maternity.”

As for the pharaohs in ancient Egypt, the fact that they were male doesn’t disprove the existence of social relations in which women were not oppressed in the earlier, prehistoric period of savagery and early barbarism.

Barbarism was the middle period between classless and class society, when the transition that resulted in the oppression of women took place.

Reed makes the point in the introduction Lobello refers to that “Barbarism came in about 8,000 years ago, and gave way to the first urban populations from Egypt through Mesopotamia and India to China.” This was precisely the period when the development of agriculture, a social surplus, and the concomitant development of a ruling class, began. By 3000 B.C.—the time of the unification of Egypt by the pharaoh Menes—not only agriculture and property, but substantial trade had developed. This was a society in which the respected status of women had long before been shattered.

Why is this debate on prehistory so important to class-conscious working people today? In her 1954 article “Anthropology: Marxist or Bourgeois?” Evelyn Reed explained, “To declare oneself on the side of the matriarchy as the earlier form of social organization, therefore, is to openly or implicitly declare oneself in agreement with the theory that primitive socialism or communism preceded class society. And that is the rub. To declare that primitive communism preceded class society is to admit that class society did not always exist and by the same token will not always exist. It is, in effect, to support the Marxist position and theory.”

I hope this exchange will kindle in Tom Lobello and other Militant readers a desire to study or reread Engels’ work, which takes up not only the origins of women’s oppression, but of private property and the state, and the domination of society by ruling classes representing a tiny minority of the population. Understanding the material origin of these phenomena is central to advancing the struggle to rid humanity of class exploitation and oppression of any kind—especially women’s oppression.  
 
 
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