Vol. 79/No. 38      October 26, 2015

Problems of Women’s Liberation by Evelyn Reed is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for October. In her writings Reed explores the economic and social roots of women’s oppression from prehistoric society to modern capitalism. An active participant in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s, she spoke and debated on this topic in cities throughout the world. This piece is from the chapter, “How Women Lost Control of Their Destiny and How They Can Regain It,” a talk given to some 250 participants at the Southern Female Liberation Conference held at Mt. Beulah, Mississippi, in May 1970. Reed joined the socialist movement in 1940 and remained a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party until her death in 1979. Copyright © 1969 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY EVELYN REED 
Universal marriage, covering all classes, became prevalent in Western civilization along with the rise of bourgeois relations. Even then it took some time to mature as a legal mandate. The poor and propertyless passed through a period of “common law” marriage before they achieved the same kind of legal marriage ties, sanctioned by the state, as did the wealthy classes. Today, with or without a church wedding, all classes of married couples receive the same state-authenticated marriage certificates which make them officially and legally married.

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.  
 
 
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