Uncovering women’s real history advances fight for rights

Below is an excerpt from Sexism and Science by Evelyn Reed, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for November. Socialist Workers Party leader Reed (1905-79) wrote Woman’s Evolution, Problems of Women’s Liberation, Is Biology Woman’s Destiny? and other titles. During the 1960s and ’70s she was an active participant in the fight for women’s right to abortion. Here Reed responds to an article by State University of New York professor Howard Haymes criticizing the views on the origins of women’s oppression expressed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of the communist movement. Copyright © 1978 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY EVELYN REED

Liberals and other fair-minded men do not object to the feminist movement — providing women restrict themselves to activities on such practical issues as equal rights, conduct themselves in a ladylike manner, and above all avoid controversial theorizing on the source of female oppression and its solution. Howard Haymes is one of these well-intentioned men who has the best interests of the women’s movement at heart and gives his advice accordingly.

He surveys the galaxy of feminist writers who have articulated the problems and prospects for liberation over the past few years and finds cause for dissatisfaction. … But he is most distressed by the widespread influence of Engels and his Marxist followers upon the thinking of the movement. …

The sharpest dividing line between the contending schools of anthropology is over the question of method. [Lewis] Morgan, [Edward] Tylor, and other nineteenth-century scholars regarded their science as a study of prehistoric society from its beginnings up to the civilized period. Whatever their shortcomings and mistakes, which are inevitable in any new science, they made brilliant beginnings in reconstructing our most ancient history through their application of the evolutionary method.

Their twentieth-century successors, however, rejected the evolutionary method and changed the definition and goal of anthropology. Separate studies of diverse primitive cultures and peoples became an end in themselves, without reference to the clues they provided for reconstructing a connected chain of human development from one social level to the next. …

The repudiation of the Morgan-Tylor school was provoked by their discomfiting discoveries that primitive society was a matriarchal, collectivist organization, featuring economic, social, and sexual equality. These findings exposed the myths that private property, the rule of the rich, and male supremacy had always existed, and that women were “by nature” the eternally inferior sex. As Engels pointed out, the downfall of women occurred when the primitive egalitarian society was overthrown by patriarchal class society a few thousand years ago. But this was not the end of the historical process. This degrading and oppressive society would in its turn be abolished and replaced by a higher form of egalitarian organization — socialism. Women, so long reduced to the second sex, would rise again to their rightful place in society.

These revolutionary conclusions were unacceptable to the new academic schools of anthropologists who took command of the science. …

A graphic example is the matrilineal kinship system, which still survives in many primitive regions even though the rest of the world is overwhelmingly patriarchal. In most such instances today the paternal relationship between a woman’s husband and her child is recognized, but in a weak, underdeveloped form. All the decisive kinship ties — descent, succession, and inheritance — pass through the maternal line in a matrilineal region. This matrilineal kinship represents a survival from the former matriarchal epoch. To toss out these vestiges of the past as irrelevant and useless can only serve to block off the way back to the matriarchy and an understanding of the place of women in that period.

Yet the modern descriptionist and functionalist schools refuse to recognize the role survivals can play in reconstructing social evolution. …

Having disposed of theory and science in a rather superficial manner, Haymes gets down to the practical activities for women. They should concentrate on the three remaining areas of work: educational, artistic, and legal. His suggestions for dramatizing the injustices of women who are denied equality — pressuring departments of education into nonsexist education and demanding legislation such as the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] to fight against job discrimination — are acceptable and already being done. But Haymes goes wrong when he advises women to confine themselves to these activities, and he has illusions that these will suffice to give women all that they need and want.

Over the past six years the women in the liberation movement have made considerable gains in their practical activities. But Haymes is naive if he thinks that “a stroke of the pen” such as passage of the ERA — or any other legal or constitutional amendment — will “erase” discrimination against women. Such legislative and judicial strokes of the pen did not bring full freedom to Blacks, nor will they to women. Even now, women are obliged to defend the legal right to abortion — a right they won through unremitting struggle — against the powerful clerical forces campaigning to rob them of their victory.

Women know that they have to struggle to make practical gains here and now, and must also fight to retain them. Their accomplishments thus far testify to their capabilities in these areas. But this does not end the matter for growing numbers of feminists. They are determined to find out how women became the oppressed sex and whether, as they are constantly told, there is “no exit” out of an eternally inferior status. Women have a healthy suspicion that they will learn something different from their own history — once it is brought out of hiding. …

They will pursue their own intellectual course and will not cease their explorations until they find what they are looking for — the truth about woman’s evolution.

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