BY EVELYN REED  
Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, published almost a hundred years ago, is today enjoying a resurgence of popularity. This came about with the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the United States and Canada during the late 1960s. Along with organizing and acting to end the deep-rooted discrimination against the female sex, women today want to know how their oppression originated and whether it has always existed. That is why so many feminists are turning to Engels’s classic work, a book that can not only arm the movement theoretically but inspire it with con?dence that liberation can be won.

This study was based upon the ?ndings set forth by Lewis H. Morgan, founder of American anthropology, in his Ancient Society, published in 1877. Engels’s book appeared in 1884 in Zurich in an edition of 5,000 copies. For its fourth printing in 1891 he prepared a revised version with a new preface which took into account additional data on the subject….

Morgan’s data confirmed the Marxist principle that social institutions are not unchanging or eternal but come into existence at certain periods of history as a result of speci?c socioeconomic conditions. Engels gave unstinting praise to Morgan’s thesis that the maternal gens or clan preceded the father-family in history, proving that even the family institution is no exception to that rule. This discovery, he said, held the same importance for anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution had for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy. “Since its discovery,” he wrote, “we know in which direction to conduct our researches, what to investigate, and how to classify the results of our investigations….”

Morgan and his school wrote during the time of Darwin when the theory of evolution was first enunciated and its fresh breezes were sweeping the western world. Just as Darwin had sought to uncover the processes of organic evolution, the pioneer anthropologists searched for the origin and evolution of social life. They paid considerable attention to the activities of human beings in procuring the necessities of life, and by studying the advances made in the productive forces, sought to chart the successive stages of social development. By these means Morgan delineated the three main epochs of human history: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. (Morgan derived these terms from earlier scholars and did not give them any pejorative sense. He had the highest regard for the achievements of precivilized peoples.)

In savagery, the economy was founded upon food-gathering and hunting, although simple garden-culture made its appearance toward the end of this period. Barbarism began with the introduction of agriculture and stock-raising, which provided a surplus of food for larger populations, greater productivity, and a higher culture. Civilization was ushered in with the development of metallurgy, trade, and other major advances.

Although some uncertainty remains on the exact time scale of these three epochs, they can be approximately measured as follows: Savagery began with the emergence of the ?rst humans (or hominids) from our ancestral branch of the anthropoids about a million years ago. Barbarism came in about eight thousand years ago, and gave way to the ?rst urban populations from Egypt through Mesopotamia and India to China. The Greek and Roman city-states of some three thousand years ago represent the beginning of Western civilization. The period of savagery, therefore, was by far the longest epoch, lasting for more than 99 percent of human existence on earth, while the two later periods of barbarism and civilization together cover less than one percent.

But the pioneer anthropologists did more than disclose this uneven tempo of progress. They discovered that primitive society was different from civilized society in every major respect. Engels shows in his book how and why they were opposite socioeconomic systems. Civilized society is founded on the private ownership of property; it is class divided, with a wealthy possessing class exploiting the working mass. A state apparatus enforces this rule of the rich. It is characterized by inequalities of all kinds, economic, social, and sexual. Male supremacy and female inferiority are integral features of this patriarchal class system.

Savage society, on the other hand, was based upon the collective ownership of the means of production, cooperative social relations, and complete equality in all spheres of life, including sexual equality. Due to the absence of private property, such key institutions of the private-property system as the state and the patriarchal family were nonexistent. Tribal society was a self-governing community in which the elected chiefs claimed no superiority to any other members.

There was no compulsory family institution with the father in command, exacting subservience, obedience, and conformity from wife and children, any more than there was a coercive state apparatus. Savage society was founded upon the cardinal principles of liberty and equality for all; it was a sisterhood of women and a brotherhood of men in a tribal commune which Morgan and his cothinkers called a system of “primitive communism.” One of its most striking features was the in?uential and esteemed position of women. Whether savage society is called a clan commune, a tribal commune, or a matriarchal commune, it stands in the sharpest contrast to civilized patriarchal class society which supplanted it.

These disclosures indicate that a drastic social change occurred in the transition from savagery to civilization, that is, in the period of barbarism. Although this process has yet to be studied in depth, it is clear that hidden in the period of barbarism a major social and sexual changeover took place. The structure of society became transformed from an equalitarian commune to an oppressive class system serving the interests of private property; and women fell from their former high position in the primitive commune to a degraded status in civilized patriarchal society.

This momentous transformation did not occur in one stride but gradually, over some five thousand years of the barbaric period….  
 
 
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