To mark International Women’s Day March 8, Problems of Women’s Liberation by Evelyn Reed is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month. Reed was a member and leader of the Socialist Workers Party from 1940 until her death in 1979. She wrote and spoke about the social roots of women’s oppression, from the origins of class society to modern capitalism. The fight for women’s emancipation is an essential part of the working-class struggle for a socialist revolution, she explained. The excerpt is from a 1970 article, “Women: caste, class or oppressed sex?” Copyright © 1970 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
The new stage in the struggle for women’s liberation already stands on a higher ideological level than did the feminist movement of the last century. Many of the participants today respect the Marxist analysis of capitalism and subscribe to Engels’s classic explanation of the origins of women’s oppression. It came about through the development of class society, founded upon the family, private property, and the state.
But there still remain considerable misunderstandings and misinterpretations of Marxist positions, which have led some women who consider themselves radicals or socialists to go off course and become theoretically disoriented. Influenced by the myth that women have always been handicapped by their childbearing functions, they tend to attribute the roots of women’s oppression, at least in part, to biological sexual differences. In actuality its causes are exclusively historical and social in character.
Some of these theorists maintain that women constitute a special class or caste. Such definitions are not only alien to the views of Marxism but lead to the false conclusion that it is not the capitalist system but men who are the prime enemy of women. I propose to challenge this contention.
The findings of the Marxist method, which have laid the groundwork for explaining the genesis of woman’s degradation, can be summed up in the following propositions:
First, women were not always the oppressed or “second” sex. Anthropology, or the study of prehistory, tells us the contrary. Throughout primitive society, which was the epoch of tribal collectivism, women were the equals of men and recognized by man as such.
Second, the downfall of women coincided with the breakup of the matriarchal clan commune and its replacement by class-divided society with its institutions of the patriarchal family, private property, and state power.
The key factors which brought about this reversal in woman’s social status came out of the transition from a hunting and food-gathering economy to a far higher mode of production based upon agriculture, stock raising, and urban crafts. The primitive division of labor between the sexes was replaced by a more complex social division of labor. The greater efficiency of labor gave rise to a sizable surplus product, which led first to differentiations and then to deep-going divisions among the various segments of society.
By virtue of the directing roles played by men in large-scale agriculture, irrigation, and construction projects, as well as in stock raising, this surplus wealth was gradually appropriated by a hierarchy of men as their private property. This, in turn, required the institution of marriage and the family to fix the legal ownership and inheritance of a man’s property. Through monogamous marriage the wife was brought under the complete control of her husband who was thereby assured of legitimate sons to inherit his wealth.
As men took over most of the activities of social production, and with the rise of the family institution, women became relegated to the home to serve their husbands and families. The state apparatus came into existence to fortify and legalize the institutions of private property, male dominion, and the father-family, which later were sanctified by religion.
This, briefly, is the Marxist approach to the origins of woman’s oppression. Her subordination did not come about through any biological deficiency as a sex. It was the result of the revolutionary social changes which destroyed the equalitarian society of the matriarchal gens or clan and replaced it with a patriarchal class society which, from its birth, was stamped with discriminations and inequalities of many kinds, including the inequality of the sexes. The growth of this inherently oppressive type of socioeconomic organization was responsible for the historic downfall of women.
But the downfall of women cannot be fully understood, nor can a correct social and political solution be worked out for their liberation, without seeing what happened at the same time to men. It is too often overlooked that the patriarchal class system which crushed the matriarchy and its communal social relations also shattered its male counterpart, the fratriarchy — or tribal brotherhood of men. Woman’s overthrow went hand in hand with the subjugation of the mass of toiling men to the master class of men. …
What is the most instructive lesson to be drawn from this highly condensed survey of the long imprisonment of womankind in the home and family of class society — which stands in such marked contrast to their stronger, more independent position in preclass society? It shows that the inferior status of the female sex is not the result of their biological makeup or the fact that they are the childbearers. Childbearing was no handicap in the primitive commune; it became a handicap, above all, in the nuclear family of our times. Poor women are torn apart by the conflicting obligations of taking care of their children at home while at the same time working outside to help sustain the family.
Women, then, have been condemned to their oppressed status by the same social forces and relations which have brought about the oppression of one class by another, one race by another, and one nation by another. It is the capitalist system — the ultimate stage in the development of class society — which is the fundamental source of the degradation and oppression of women.