BY EVELYN REED
The section below is excerpted from "How women lost control of their destiny and how they can regain it" in Problems of Women's Liberation by Evelyn Reed. It is copyright 1969, 1970 by Pathfinder Press and reprinted by permission.

The problems of sex, marriage, and the family, which so profoundly affect the destiny of women, are of particular concern to women in the liberation movement. Are these purely private matters or public issues? This question may come as a surprise to many people who regard such intimate relations as their own personal affairs, which should be kept strictly private. They might even be dismayed at the notion that such matters, often involving painful personal experiences, stress, or distress, should even be thought of as public issues. But what is the real situation under present conditions of life in capitalist society?

In his book, The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills clarifies this point. Speaking of the distinction between "personal troubles" and "public issues" he says, "A trouble is a private matter involving only the individual and his small circle or milieu." But "issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual" and involve the whole social structure. He gives several illustrations to show the distinction between the two.

Take the question of unemployment. If in a city of 100,000, says Mills, only one man is unemployed, "that is his personal trouble." It may even be explained as due to the peculiar characteristics of the man, his lack of skills or immediate opportunities. "But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed," the matter takes on a quite different dimension. At the least, it represents a partial collapse of the social structure and thereby becomes an issue of public concern and of political life.

The second illustration he cites shows that the same transformation of quantity into quality holds true even in the most intimate relations between men and women:

Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the family and other institutions that bear upon them. (The Sociological Imagination)

In the ten years since the Columbia sociologist wrote his book, the breakdown of marriages has steadily increased. Today the rate of dissolution is one out of three, while in the state of California the ratio has gone even higher. There, one out of every two marriages ends in divorce. These figures alone testify that the disturbance of the closest personal relations of men and women has today passed beyond private affairs and represents a public issue of massive proportions. As Mills himself concluded, "The problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution."

There is another side to this problem. Since marriage is interlocked with the family into a single institution, what happens to the one vitally affects the other. Therefore the large-scale breakup of marriages implies a corresponding shake- up of the family. This upheaval runs counter to the age-old propaganda of church and state that the family is a stable, unbreakable unit constituting the very foundation of society, without which human life is unthinkable. Indeed, the corrosion of the family has awakened keen interest and theoretical inquiry into the history and role of the family by many women in the liberation movement. It has led them to question virtually all the old assumptions made about this institution...

The partisans of the women's liberation movement are seeking more scientific and relevant answers to replace old prejudices and propaganda on the problems of marriage and the family which have become such burning public issues.

How should such an inquiry begin? In my view it is first of all necessary to refute the widespread but false assumption that the family is a "natural" unit which has always existed and must persist to eternity because it is rooted in the basic biological needs of humans for sex and procreation. As the story goes, a male and a female are attracted to each other through their compelling natural need for sex and so they get married. This leads to procreation when the woman gives birth. The father goes out to work to provide for his dependents while the mother stays home to take care of the family.

This simplistic presentation asserts or implies that there is no other way to satisfy natural needs and functions than through marriage and the father-family. It is even claimed that since animals, like humans, mate and procreate, the roots of marriage and the family go back to the animal world. Thus, these relations are not only a permanent and irremovable fixture in all human life, but as time-tested relations they also represent the best and most desirable way of satisfying natural needs.

These assumptions, however, do not stand up under closer investigation. How, then, did they gain such currency? The central mistake consists in identifying the natural needs of sex and procreation, which humans share with the animals, with the social institution of marriage and the family, which is exclusive to mankind. The biological and social phenomena are far from identical. The biological is "nature-made," the social is "man-made."

Since only humans are capable of placing restrictions and enforcing controls upon natural needs, they alone can create an institution growing out of natural needs, but which governs and controls them. Sexual intercourse in society is governed by marriage laws and procreation by family laws. These human-made laws have no counterpart in the animal world where sexual intercourse proceeds without marriage and animal procreation does not result in the father-family unit.

While marriage and the family represent a fusion of natural needs with social factors, it is the social factors which are decisive in defining and determining its characteristics. Under the laws of monogamous marriage, for example, the husband is legally entitled to exclusive sexual rights over his wife and to her domestic services. Under the laws governing the family, the father is legally required to provide for his wife and children. As the principal provider in this system of family economics, the man occupies the central place in the family, endows it with his name, and determines its conditions of life according to his given occupation, class, and status.

Thus the family, like all other social institutions, is the product of human history and not of biology; it is made by man and not by nature. While it incorporates the biological needs of sex and procreation, these are shaped, dominated, restricted, and controlled by legal, economic, and cultural factors.

Secondly, it is not true that this institution has always existed even as the human or social means of governing natural needs. Marriage and the family did not exist in preclass or matriarchal society, which was organized not on the basis of the family unit but upon the basis of the maternal clan unit. Far from being primordial and imperishable, this institution has had a comparatively short life in the history of mankind-and it is already being shaken to its foundations.

Finally, it is not true that the institution of marriage and the family has produced the best of all possible ways for humans to satisfy their needs. As the statistics show, our present institutionalized sexual and family relations are dissolving and collapsing before our very eyes. It is absurd, therefore, to maintain that these relations have been ordained by nature or human nature, by God or by government, as the most satisfactory for all time. The sweep and scope of their breakdown demonstrate just the opposite-that this institution can no longer serve human needs. However necessary it may have been up to now, today it has clearly outlived its usefulness.  
 
 
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