Vol. 73/No. 38      October 5, 2009

Problems of Women’s Liberation by Evelyn Reed, 129 pages. Pathfinder. $15.

BY BRIAN WILLIAMS  
Problems of Women’s Liberation by Evelyn Reed is essential reading for those seeking to advance the fight for women’s rights. Its materialist analysis of the roots of women’s oppression and how to end it is especially important for the new generation of women and men joining the fight to defend abortion rights.

The book is one of several offered at a 50 percent discount to those purchasing subscriptions to the Militant during the fall circulation campaign.

In a compilation of six articles and speeches, Reed refutes the myth of women’s inferiority. She explores the economic and social causes of women’s oppression from prehistoric society to modern capitalism. Reed explains why the oppression of women is a product of specific property relations, not relations between men and women.

Women’s oppression arose with the emergence of class society several thousand years ago. The development of new productive forces destroyed the collectivist relations that existed in primitive society, replacing them with a system founded on private property, the family, and the state.

“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,” states Reed in a chapter titled “The Myth of Women’s Inferiority.”

Primitive society was organized as a matriarchy where women played the leading roles. This included food gathering and preservation, leather-making, the transport of heavy loads, and scientific advances. Women discovered agriculture and domestication of cattle and other large animals, emancipating men from their hunting life.

“We can only regard the labor and social contribution of the women as decisive,” wrote Reed. “It was their achievements in the fields of production, cultural, and intellectual life that made civilization possible.”

With the development of productive forces and emergence of class society, the matriarchal system was replaced by a patriarchal one. The role of women was degraded with their worth sinking to its lowest point under capitalism, Reed writes.

She draws upon the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, founders of the modern communist movement, as well as numerous anthropological studies about the social relations that existed in matriarchal society. When European conquerors came in contact with the Iroquois Indian tribe, for example, they were astonished to find that their approach to children was not based upon family units. Asked by a missionary how he could be so fond of children who were not “his,” a tribe member replied, “Thou has no sense. You love only your own children; We love all the children of the tribe… . We are all father and mother to them,” the book recounts.

Marriage and the family, institutions so prominent in capitalist society, did not exist in pre-class society. Marriage first emerged as a class institution solely for the wealthy, to protect their propertied interests and pass them on to their children. It was extended to a section of the lower classes under feudalism and became a mass institution with the rise of the industrial wage-slave system, explains Reed. Legal marriage relieved the capitalists of all social responsibility for the welfare of the workers and dumped heavy economic burdens upon the individual family instead of society as a whole.

Reed’s explanation of pre-class society is not aimed at glorifying the epoch of savagery, the lowliest stage of human development, where the economy was based on hunting and food-gathering. But it’s important to recognize that male and female relations in that society were fundamentally different from today. What has existed for several thousand years of class society is not permanent or unchangeable.

In a chapter titled “Women: Caste, Class, or Oppressed Sex?” Reed makes clear that women are oppressed as a sex that transcends class lines. However, the source of women’s oppression, which is class society, “cannot be abolished by women alone, nor by a coalition of women drawn from all classes. It will require a worldwide struggle for socialism by the working masses, female and male alike, together with every other section of the oppressed, to overthrow the power of capitalism,” she emphasizes.  
 
 
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