Vol. 77/No. 24       June 24, 2013

Below is an excerpt from Problems of Women’s Liberation, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for June. Author Evelyn Reed (1905-1979), a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party, explores the economic and social roots of women’s oppression as an integral part of class-divided society. Copyright © 1969 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY EVELYN REED  
The very term “family,” which came into existence along with the system of private property, originally signified this domestic slavery. As Engels says:

Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the aggregate number of slaves belonging to one man…. The expression was invented by the Romans to designate a new social organism, the head of which had a wife, children, and a number of slaves under his authority and according to Roman law the right of life and death over all of them. (Origin of the Family)

It is not generally known that legal marriage was originally instituted for the propertied classes alone. The working people, sustained by their agricultural labor, simply mated as they had in the past, since in primitive society legal marriage was neither necessary nor desirable. But with the rise of urban life and the church, marriage was gradually extended to the industrial population so that working men would be legally obliged to support wives and children who had no other means of support. …

At this present stage in the evolution of marriage and the family the original propertied basis of the institution is obscured by the fact that the poor and propertyless are just as much obliged to enter into the state of legal wedlock as the rich. Marriage had now become mandatory upon all classes. Failure to comply resulted in legal penalties of various kinds, not the least of which was branding the unmarried wife as a “prostitute” and her children as illegitimate. The unmarried mother and her children were treated as social outcasts, a fate that was regarded as worse than death.

This raises the question: How and why did an institution created by the wealthy class to serve its propertied interests become extended to the working masses which have little or no property? How did a class institution in its inception become a mass institution in its subsequent development? The answer to this must be sought in the capitalist mode of class exploitation.

Capitalism brought into being large-scale industry and along with it masses of the proletariat packed into factory towns and cities. This brought about a change in the economic position of women. So long as agriculture and household crafts remained dominant in production, all the members of the family, women and children included, helped in the work that sustained the family and the community. Cooperative labor within the family framework was the characteristic mode of life on the farms, in the small shops, and in the home enterprises.

But with the rise of industrial capitalism, these productive families of the preindustrial era were displaced by the nonproductive consumer families of urban life. With the dispossession of masses of men from farms and small businesses, and their relocation as wage workers in industrial cities, women were stripped of their former place in productive work and relegated to breeding and housekeeping. They became consumers totally dependent upon a breadwinner for their support.

Under these circumstances somebody had to be saddled with the lifetime responsibility for taking care of dependent women and children. This was fixed, through universal marriage, upon the husbands and fathers, although no guarantees whatever were given to these wage earners that they would always have jobs or sufficient pay to fulfill their family obligations.

To conceal this economic exploitation a new myth was invented. Under church doctrine marriages were “made in heaven” and had a divine sanction. But now there arose the propaganda that the family was a “natural” unit without which humans cannot satisfy their normal needs for love and children. Hence it became the “natural” obligation of the father and/or mother to provide for their loved ones—regardless of whether they were unemployed or incapacitated or even dead.

Here, then, is the answer to our first question, what kind of society requires the institution of marriage and the family and for what purposes. It is class society that needs it, to serve the purposes of the rich. In the beginning the institution served a single purpose, that connected with the ownership and inheritance of private property. But today the family serves a double purpose; it has become a supplementary instrument in the hands of the exploiting class to rob the working masses. Universal, state-imposed marriage became advantageous to the profiteers with the rise of the industrial wage-slave system. It relieved the capitalists of all social responsibility for the welfare of the workers and dumped heavy economic burdens upon the poor in the form of family obligations. Each tiny “nuclear” family must live or perish through its own efforts, with little or no assistance from outside.

One difference between factory exploitation and family exploitation is that the former is easily recognizable for what it is, while the other is not. You cannot convince wage workers that their economic dependence upon the bosses is either sacred or natural; on the contrary, they know they are being put upon, sweated, and exploited. But in the case of the family, Mother Nature and the Divinity are both conjured up to disguise its economic basis by declaring it to be both “sacred” and “natural.” In truth, the only thing sacred to the capitalist ruling class is the almighty dollar and the rights of private property. Under these conditions, the human needs for love, whether sexual or parental, are not benefited but twisted and thwarted by an institution which was not founded upon love but upon economic considerations.
 
 
Related articles:
Henry Morgentaler, champion for rights of women in Canada
Pressed successful fight to decriminalize abortion
El Salvador law threatens woman’s life, spurs protests
 
 
 
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