Engels & Gender — Last Installment
From “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State,” by Catharine MacKinnon, pages 29-36:
[MacKinnon is still describing Engels' theory of gender from "The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State." -SG] When the home was the center of productive activity, the fact that women labored in the home was superceded by the marketplace as a productive center, the fact that women labored in the home ensured male suprmeacy. This may describe the status of women once commodity production takes over social production, and women are excluded from it. But it explains neither that exclusion on the basis of sex nor its consequences for social power. How did the conception of domestic labor change from “productive” to “unproductive” wiht the rise of classes? At this point, ot the rise of commodity production, women were to have lost power. Apparently, the move to clan society, private property, and monogamy devalued housework, that is, women. As women’s work was devaluedin society, women were deprived of power within the home. Would ithave mattered for women’s power whether their work produced a surplus to be accumulated as private wealth if the work were seen as essential production? Engels dicusses the change as if work in the home were already trivialized as a result of bieng given the low value of women. The work itself changed little. Yet on ce the father had gained increased power through increased wealth in the society,
[excerpt from Engels] Mother right … had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was. This was by no means so difficult as it looks to us today [today being the latter 19th Century -SG]. For this revolution — one of the most decisive ever experiend=ced by mankind — could take place without disturbing one of the living members of a gens. All could remain as they were. The simple decree [sometimes translated "decision"] sufficed that in the future the offspring of the male members should remain within the gens, but that those of the female should be excluded by being transferred to the gens of their father. [end Engels excerpt]
Class power produces gender power [claims Engels -SG]. Marxists do no usually allow a “simple decision” to overturn historically based power relations. [READ THAT AGAIN... IT IS IMPORTANT! -SG] Seemingly men made this decision. Why did the women, who were supposedly supreme in the family at this time, accept it?
The answer appears to be that when the division of labor between menoutside the family changed, the domestic relation inside the family changed. The division of labor within the family before the rise of social classes gave man the important property (such as herds). When the division of labor outside the family became a class relation based on private property ownership, the domestic relation necessarily changed frome female to male supremacy. Leaving aside the questions of why and in what sense men could have “owned” property [which is a legal fiction requiring a state -SG] in the family before private property became the dominant mode of ownership, or why the women were all at home, the essence of the argument seems to be that the power of some m en to dominate other men in production gave all men power over all women in the home. Engels explains the distribution of power between men and women in the family as a function of the position of the family unit in social production, whichin turn expresses men’s relations with men.
From the proposition that class power is the source of male dominance [and Engels DOES make this his central claim -SG], it follows that only those men who possess class power can oppress women in the family. Engels divides his examination of women under capitalism into an exploration of “the bourgeois family” and the “proletarian family,” making clear that the class position of the family unit within which the women is subordinated defines his understanding of subordination. Since working-class men command no increased wealth, probably own little private property, and are exploited by the few (men) whodo, they lack Engels’ prerequisite for male supremacy. The proletarian family lacks property, “for the preservation andinheritance of which monogamy and male supremacy were establsihed; hence there is no incentive to make this male supremacy effetive.” Further, “now that large scale industry has taken the [proletarian] wife out of the home into the labor market and into the factory, and made her often the breadwinnerof the family, no basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian household, except perhaps for something of the brutality toward women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy.”
Proletarina and bourgeois women differ in the structure of their sexual relaitons with their husbands. Proletarians experience “sex love”; the bourgeoisie has monogamy. Sex love “assumes that the person loved returns the love; to the extent the woman is on an equal footing with the man.” Sex love is intense, possessive, and long-lasting. Its morality asks of a relaitonship: “Did it spring from love and reciprocated ove or not?” Individual marriage is the social form that corresponds to sex love, “as sexual love is by its nature exclusive — although at present this exclusiveness is fully realized only in the woman.” Sex love is possible only in proletarian relationships. [Are readers paying attention here? This is precisely the kind of preposterousness that leads any thinking woman who is interested in Marxism, and presented Engels as "our" first and last word on gender, to rightfully seek other comrades -- because in this day and age, trotting out this work as definitive on gender is worthy of ridicule. -SG] It “becomes and can only become the real rule among the oppressed classes, which means today among the proletariat … the eternal attendants of monogamy, hetaerism [A supposed primitive state of society, in which all the women of a tribe were held in common. -SG] and adultery, play only an almost vanishing part.” In its relationships, the proletariat, the revolutionary class, prefigures the post-revolutionary society.
The proletarian women is not, then, oppressed as a woman. Sheis not dominated by a male in the family. She does not live in monogamy. She is neither socially isolated nor economically dependent, because she takes part in social production, as all women will under socialism. She is not jointly or doubly oppressed. Proletarian women are oppressed whn, in working outside the home, they come into contact with capital as workers, a condition they share with working-class men.
The differences between proletarian sexual relationships of sex love and bourgeois sexual relationships of monogamy are highly vaunted but obscure. Sex love in its origins, and even upon its abolition, is merged with monogamy. Individual marriage is the social form of both. Removal of the economic basis for monogamy, and consequent equalization of the sexes, will not free women to experience sex love, but will make men “really” monogamous: “If now the economic considerations also disappear which made women put up with the habitualinfidelity of their husbands — concern for their own means of existence and still more for their dchildren’s future — then, according to all previous experience, the equality of women thereby achieved will tend infinitely to make men really monogamous than to make women polyandrous.” The distinction between sex love and monogamy in Engels’ analysis serves to distinguish proletarian women’s situation from that of bourgeois women in order to idealize the proletariat. Women of both classes are the exclusive possessions of men. Under socialism, the position of allwomen changes because private housekeeping is removed into social industry. “The supremacy of the man in marriage is the simple consequence of his economic supremacy, and with the abolition of the latter will disappear of itself.” [Right! -SG] At most this explains why women must tolerate male supremacy; it does not explain why men want it. A clearer example of one-sided causality between material relaitons and social relations would be hard to find. [as would a clearer error -SG]
Putting housekeeping into social industry “removes all the anxiety about ‘con sequences’ which today is the most essentila social — moral as well as economic — factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves.” Knowing that communism willenable men more wholly to own women sexaully because women will “give [themselves] completely” — the major barrier to this being housework, which one infers is a euphemism for child care — does not make one particularly look forward to Engels’ millenium. He asks whether communism will not “suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more toleratn public opinion in regard to a maiden’s honor and a woman’s shame.” How unrestrained sexualintercourse went from being the reason women sought deliverance from group marriage under barbarism to that deliverance itself under communism, not to mention the transformation of the meaning of intercourse for women from transformation in property relaitons, is entirely unexplained, but must be what is meant by vulgar materialism.
Sex love occurs only in proletarian relations, so proletarian women are not oppressed as women; monogamy occurs only in the ruling classes, so only bourgeois women are oppressed as women. Can it be that the entire exploration of the origins of women’s oppression produces an explanation that excludes the majority of women? Onlythose women who benefit from class exploitation — are subordinated to men, and only to ruling-class men. It appears to come to this: women who are oppressed by their class position are not oppressed as women by men,but by capital, whileonly women who benefit from their class position, bourgeois women, are oppressed as women, and only by men of their class. But how would ruling-class men oppress ruling-class women, since class differential is the basis of sex oppression? And since working-class men cannot oppress ruling-class women, bourgeois women cannot be victims of male dominance either. Once working-class men are disqualified from engaging in male dominance, the oppression of women exists, but there is no account of who is oppressed by it, far less who is doing it.
Engels explains sexiam as a kind of inverse of class oppression, which correlates with no known data; it is consistent with one persistent view on the left that feminism is “bourgeois.” [which by the way also underwrote the left's terrible past homophobia -SG] It also substantiates a feminist view that much marxist theory, in interpreting gender through class, convolutes simple realities to comprehend gender derivatively if at all. [Bingo! -SG] A theory that exepts a foavored male group from the probelm of male dominance necessarily evades confronting male power over women as a distinctive formof power, interrelated with the class structure but neither derivative from nor a side effect of it.
Engels fails to grasp the impact across classes of women’s relaitonship to the class division itself. he dows not notice that the tension between women’s family duties and public production cuts across classes” “if she carries out her duties in the private service to her family, she remains excluded from public production and unable to earn; and if she wants to take part in public production and earnindependentoy; she cannot carry out family duties. And the wife’s position in the factory is the positin of women in all branches of business, right up to medicine and the law.” Engels does not develop his implicit awareness that the relaitonship of women to class, while often direct and long-lasting, can also be attenuated or crosscut because it is vicarious as well.
From a fmeinist perspective, a woman’s class position, whether or not she works for wages, is as much or more set through her relation first to her father, then to her husband. It changes through changes in these relations, such as marriage, divorce, or aging. It is more open to change, both up and down, than is a man’s in similar material circumstances. Through relations with men, women have consierable class mobility, down as well as up. A favorable marriage can rocket a woman into the ruling class, while her own skills, training, work experience, wage scales, and attitudes, were she on her own, would command few requisites for economic independence or mobility. Divorce or aging can devalue a woman economically as her connections and attractiveness to men declines. Women’s relation to men’s relations to production fixes a woman’s class in a way that cuts acorss the class position of the work she herself does. If whe does exclusively housework, her class positin is determined by her husband’s work outside the home — in spite of the fact that housework is increasingly similar across classes and, when paid, is considered working-class work. This is not to suggest that women’s relaiton to class is less potent than men’s becasue it is vicarious, but to point out that women’s relation to class is mediated through their relations with men.
Engels presupposes throughout, as liberal theorists do, that the distinction between the realm inside the family and the realm outside the family is a distinction between public and private. “Private” means “inside the family.” “Public” means the rest of the world. That is, the family is considered to be a truly private space, private for everyone in it — and not just becasue there is an ideological functopm served by regarding it so. In analyzing women as a group in terms of their role in the family, and men in terms of their role in social production, Engels precludes seeing social relations, inside as well as outside the family, in terms of a sex-based social division. Are owmen really treated very differently by male employers in the marketplace from the way they are treated by husbands at home? in the work they do? in the personal and sexual services they perform? in the hierarchy between them? To consider the home “private” is to privatize women’s oppression and to render women’s status a question of domestic relations to be analyzed as a derivative of the public sphere, rather than setting the family within a totality characterized by a sexual division of power which divides both home and marketplace.
Engels private/public distinction parallels and reinforces Marx’s nature/history distinction be defining women’s issues in terms of one side of a descriptive dualism in which women’s status is the least subject to direct social change. For Marx, woman’s natrual role is morrored in her role as worker; for Engels, woman’s natrual role is mirrored in her role in the family. To identify women’s oppression with the private and the natural, on the left no less than in capitalist society itself, works to subordinate the problem of women’s status to the male and domnant spheres and to hide that relegation behind the appearance of addressing it.
Thekey dynamic assumption in Engels’ analysis of woman’s situation, that without which Engels’ history does not move, is (in a word) sexism. The values, division of labor, and power of male supremacy are presumed at each crucial juncture. The subject to be explained — the development of male supremacy — is effectively presumed. As as account of the “origins” of that development, the analysis dissolves into a mythic restatement devided into ascending periods of an essentially static state of women’s subordination, without which one can see grwoing inequalities but cannot figure out how they started or why they keep getting worse. If the intent was to give “the woman question” a place in marxist theory, it did: woman’s place.
Engels’ method made this inevitable. His approach to social explanation is rigidly causal, unidirectional, and one-sided. Material conditions alone create social relations; concsiousness and materiality do not interact. Thought contemplates things. Objects appear and relate to each other out there, back then. The dicourse is mythic in quality, passive in voice. “There arose” certain things; then something “came over” something; this “was bound to bring” that. Theory, for Engels, is far froma dialogue between observer and observed. he does not worry about his own historicity. He totally fails to grasp the subject side of the subject/object relation as socially dynamic. [This is why MacKinnon says, correctly, that Engels is hopelessly positivist. -SG] And he takes history as a fixed object within a teleology in which what came before necessarily led to what came after. This is to fail to take the object side of the subject/object relation as socially dynamic. One must understand that society could be other than it is in order to explain it, far less to change it. Perhaps one must even understand that society could be other thanit is inorder to understand why it necessarily is at it is. Engels’ empiricism can imagine only the reality he finds, and therefore he can find only the reality he imagines.
Stan:
For a revealing look at consumer culture constructions of gender, drop by http://www.genderads.com/ and check out the links.
1 January 2006, 8:01 pmYolanda Carrington:
This whole series on MacKinnon/Engels has been especially illuminating for me, as I have never read Catherine MacKinnon’s work on my own. Even other feminists (I’m thinking specifically of bell hooks in “Outlaw Culture”) have dismissed her work as anti-sex, liberal-reformist, bourgeois, and seeking of state legitimacy. I’ve now seen for myself that this is NOT the case.
I am completely confused as to why someone as respected and rigorous as bell hooks would misrepresent another feminist’s views. (See “Talking Sex,” pp. 75 and 80 for what I’m talking about.) Is this intentional, or not? Why would a radical Black feminist do this? Damn.
In my studies, I will have to add “Feminist Theory of the State” to my list. Seek and ye shall find.
Yolanda
2 January 2006, 10:59 pmCharles Brown:
Class power produces gender power [claims Engels -SG]. Marxists do no usually allow a “simple decision†to overturn historically based power relations. [READ THAT AGAIN… IT IS IMPORTANT! -SG] Seemingly men made this decision. Why did the women, who were supposedly supreme in the family at this time, accept it?
^^^^^
CB: I disagree. I’d say Engels approaches the complex gender, class, state not unidirectionally, but holistically with reciprocal causation. He is a dialectician, and he doesn’t forget it here.
You are reading into Engels positivism, onesideness etc. that he is very famous for not engaging in. He is one of the early teachers of dialectical, holistic, recipricol causationist approach. He doesn’t forget his own lessons here.
The origin of gender causes the origin of class, and the origin of class causes the origin of gender. And the origin of the state co-causes both of these. That’s the way _The Origin_ reads. The very paradigm of an multi-causal model. As a matter of fact, gender comes first in the title of the book : _The Origin of the FAMILY…_. That would imply gender gets first cause status, if anything.
3 January 2006, 1:13 pmStan:
Show us how he does that, then, Charles.
MacKinnon quotes Engels to show that he never asks the key questions, eg, “Mother right … had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was. This was by no means so difficult as it looks to us today. For this revolution — one of the most decisive ever experienced by mankind — could take place without disturbing one of the living members of a gens. All could remain as they were. The simple decree [sometimes translated “decisionâ€] sufficed that in the future the offspring of the male members should remain within the gens, but that those of the female should be excluded by being transferred to the gens of their father.”
He says this occurred by decree. MacKinnon didn’t say that; Engels did.
It is positivist precisely because it is written — however muliplicatively — as cause-and-effect; and Engels’ avoidance of this kind of vulgar materialism in other areas makes his error here more egregious; it doesn’t prove he can’t commit the error (as you suggest).
What have you to say about all the other preposterousness in Engels, ie, that proletarian women cannot suffer oppression, all the nonsense about women’s and men’s sexualities, etc.?
My whole point in posting this series is to convince Marxists that we should go outside the holy texts and the family to examine the work on gender that has been done elsewhere. Engels’ work on gender is an anachronism, and for me, as a Marxist who watches other Marxists continually demand reference to this dated, speculative, and SEXIST pamphlet as the last word on gender, it is deeply embarrassing.
3 January 2006, 4:03 pmJulian Real:
Hi Yolanda.
Black feminist Flo Kennedy’s term, “horizontal hostility” describes real politically and interpersonally destructive events that take many forms and have many patterns: all of them function to keep the focus off of those individuals and institutions who/which are most determining of the status quo. The tensions between Black and white women are many, and many of them are legitimate: you and I know race- and class-privileged women’s privilege is real.
If you haven’t yet, please see Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, for the best, most respectful confrontations of this on-going reality, that I have ever read. More than one essay in that book deals with this topic, and each one is incredibly valuable to this discussion.
I do consider some white feminists to be somewhat racist, but would not single them out, simply because the racism of white men (in power) renders what white women do “mild”, by comparison. What feminists do, generally, is seen as so much more powerful than what empowered white men do, and this, needless to say, is a gross distortion of reality, a distortion CRAP feeds off of endlessly: “feminazi” indeed. It’s absurd how much power men give to feminists: if only feminists had that sort of institutional power!! This is not to say that white women’s racism, and Black men’s sexism, for example, are not SERIOUS social-political problems. You and I know they both are as real as dirt. But if every Black men stopped being sexist, and every white woman stopped being racist, interpersonally, CRAP could and would still go on, and on, and on.
hooks participates in this racially complex “horizontal hostility”, this pro-CRAP tradition, in my view, in her incorrect assessments of Catharine A. MacKinnon’s work. MacKinnon, in my view, has done an extraordinary amount to help address, alleviate, and attempt to radically remedy the condition of many women of many Colours and cultures, within and beyond the shores of the U.S.
MacKinnon responds to such critiques of her (as, somehow, racist) in her newest book, Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws.
I am not completely thrilled with how MacKinnon deals with race, but am not sure I can easily articulate my discomfort. I do not, however, think MacKinnon is, in any meaningful, real way, racist. Far from it. She is white, and has class privilege, but DOES MORE for women, all women, than any other white, Gentile, class-privileged woman I know of. I would no sooner condemn her than I would condemn our friend Stan. Props to both, and certainly to bell hooks too, for the work they have all done and do, for women. It disheartens me to see the way hooks has discussed MacKinnon publicly and/or in print, and I do not know why she has done this.
So, I think hooks is wrong on MacKinnon, but I still deeply value bell’s work, and will continue to do so. I hope to read every one of her books. (I have attempted to contact her, but I do not have an effective way to email her. There is a thoroughly racist, misogynist website about a fake, new book “of hers” that I wanted to warn bell about and recommend she sue over, for slander, defamation of character, etc. If the Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Ordinance were law in every U.S. city, hooks could use it, specifically, to go after that anti-hooks misogynist.)
I have gained deep insight into the human condition by reading hooks’ work–insights not found in the work of MacKinnon. And there is something in MacKinnon’s work that I have not seen in any other feminist’s writings, except for Andrea Dworkin’s. (MacKinnon has consistently given ample praise to Andrea for her unique contributions to (radical) feminism. Please also read Only Words, by MacKinnon, especially, perhaps, the middle essay (of three wonderful, amazing essays contained in that small, miraculous book) on racial and sexual harassment.
More power to both of them, as they keep their eyes on the prize of real freedom for all women!
Julian
3 January 2006, 5:28 pmCharles Brown:
Show us how he does that, then, Charles.
^^^
CB: How about this quote to show what I mean ?
“The establishment of the exclusive supremacy of the man shows its effects first in the patriarchal family, which now emerges as an intermediate form.” – Engels
I believe that is a statement that the _family_ changed first. Engels’ analysis is not positivistic, but dialectical. It deals with the interconnections of a complex change.
Yea, I’m re-reading my copy. For starters I looked at the table of cotents. There is a chapter titled “The Family”. None titled “Private Property”. Right away that suggests he develops his analyse of the origin of class out of his analysis of the change in the family, which would suggest “origin of gender” causes origin of class. Not the other way around.
Introduction
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Fourth Edition
Stages of Prehistoric Culture
The Family
The Consanguine Family (The First Stage of the Family)
The Punaluan Family
The Pairing Family
The Monogamous Family
The Iroquois Gens
The Greek Gens [The Rise of Private Property]
The Rise of the Athenian State
The Gens and the State in Rome
The Gens Among Celts and Germans
The Formation of the State Among the Germans
Barbarism and Civilization
Appendix: A Recently Discovered Case of Group Marriage
What about this from Engels; this follows the passage quoted below:
“The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. This degraded position of the woman, especially conspicuous among the Greeks of the heroic and still more of the classical age, has gradually been palliated and glozed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished.
The establishment of the exclusive supremacy of the man shows its effects first in the patriarchal family, which now emerges as an intermediate form. Its essential characteristic is not polygyny, of which more later, but “the organization of a number of persons, bond and free, into a family, under paternal power, for the purpose of holding lands, and for the care of flocks and herds…. (In the Semitic form) the chiefs, at least, lived in polygamy…. Those held to servitude, and those employed as servants, lived in the marriage relation.”
^^^^^
MacKinnon quotes Engels to show that he never asks the key questions, eg, “Mother right … had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was. This was by no means so difficult as it looks to us today. For this revolution — one of the most decisive ever experienced by mankind — could take place without disturbing one of the living members of a gens. All could remain as they were. The simple decree [sometimes translated “decisionâ€] sufficed that in the future the offspring of the male members should remain within the gens, but that those of the female should be excluded by being transferred to the gens of their father.â€
He says this occurred by decree. MacKinnon didn’t say that; Engels did.
^^^^
CB: You’ll have to tell me why saying that is so off the wall.
Are you claiming that the women fought back physically and so it was “difficult” ? What are you saying ?
(((((((
It is positivist precisely because it is written — however muliplicatively — as cause-and-effect; and Engels’ avoidance of this kind of vulgar materialism in other areas makes his error here more egregious; it doesn’t prove he can’t commit the error (as you suggest).
^^^^
CB: Use of cause and effect does not define positivisitic , does it ? Anyway , as I read Engels, he’s doing all this talk about the family. His “cause and effect” claims are not really that suspect. The domestication of plants and animals, creates surpluses of wealth , etc….
What is Mackinnon’s theory on the origin of classes ? IIt is really not possible to improve on this theory by only theorizing the family and the state and no having a theory of classes. I’d have more problems with that epistemologically than Engels’ positivism.
^^^^^^
What have you to say about all the other preposterousness in Engels, ie, that proletarian women cannot suffer oppression, all the nonsense about women’s and men’s sexualities, etc.?
^^^^^
CB: You’ll have to specify more. Saying proletarian women cannot suffor oppression doesn’t sound like Engels to me. Where is it ? What nonsense about women and men’s sexualtities, etc. ?
^^^^^^
My whole point in posting this series is to convince Marxists that we should go outside the holy texts and the family to examine the work on gender that has been done elsewhere. Engels’ work on gender is an anachronism, and for me, as a Marxist who watches other Marxists continually demand reference to this dated, speculative, and SEXIST pamphlet as the last word on gender, it is deeply embarrassing.
^^^^^
CB: I don’t consider the classics of Marxism “holy texts”. I consider them scientific essays or whatever you want to call them – like essays by Darwin in biology. We don’t call Darwin’s writing “holy text” because its materialism is the anti-thesis of religion. Similarly, as to these texts. The fact that it has been over 100 years that Marx and Engels made these scientific findings.
Science does not equal positivism. Marx explicitly reject positivism. He and Engels knew what it is.
Engels work on gender is not an anachronism as far as the origin of gender is concerned. Clara Zetkin’s work on gender is not an anachronism in 2005, because there are feminists who fall back behind Zetkin , et al by not taking a working class perspective. It is not possible to have an up to date feminist view that falls back behind Zetkin, Evelyn Reed. Evelyn Reed is not an anachronism on feminist issues.
Issues of gender and class cannot be disconnected. Thus, books like _Women, Race and Class_.
Evidently, bel hooks critiqued Mackinnon along the lines I am raising here ?
3 January 2006, 7:49 pmCharles Brown:
Eleanor Burke Leacock wrote the introduction to the International Publishers edition of _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_. As I have been reviewing that intro and book, I read her intro, and it addresses many of the issues in dispute here. I might copy some of it, if people want. It is a good response to many of the criticisms that are made here. The below is from the net. Leacock was a professor of anthropology. The overwhelming weight of evidence on socieity supports Leacock’s position on the issue in dispute: Male supremecism is not orginal with human species, just like classes and the state are not. Engels’ fundemental thesis is supported by the evidence on the issues.
Eleanor Burke Leacock
Born: July 2, 1922
1944: Barnard College, BA
1952: Columbia University, Ph.D.
1963 – 1972: Professor, Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute
1972 – 1987: Professor, Chair, City College of New York
Died: April 2, 1987
Kristin Alten
May 7, 1998
Eleanor Burke Leacock
Eminent American cultural anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock is recognized primarily for her enthohistorical studies of changing social and gender relations of the subarctic Innu, her contributions to feminist anthropology, her examination of racism in US school systems and her reconsideration of the work of Lewis Henry Morgan and Fredrick Engels. Her prolific career, which spanned four decades, was marked not only by a long list of academic accomplishments, but also by her intense activism to fight race, sex and class discrimination.
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It was during this time that Leacock honed her focus as a Marxist feminist, studying the relationship between gender and class in society. She took up Morgan’s hypothesis that an association existed between the development of patriarchy and the processes of class and state configuration.(Leacock, 1963, IIxvi) In doing this, Leacock was one of the first modern feminist anthropologists to reevaluate the connection between the development of the state and women’s loss of authority and sovereignty and provided inspiration for fledgling feminist scholars. However, she did not support the assumption made by some feminists that all social systems, the family unit in particular, were systems of gender inequality. Rather, she argued that egalitarian societies do exist where men and women can do different jobs and remain separate but equal. It was not until the advent of capitalism, according the Leacock, that the family was privatized and separated from the public world of work and the state. When this happened what had once been mere differences in gender, class and race were metamorphosed into inequalities between the colonized and colonizer as women’s work at home became marginalized and depreciated.
Leacock’s views, that gender subordination was linked to the hierarchical nature of society, differentiated her from radical feminists who believed that patriarchy and reproductive relations rooted in the family were the main source of woman’s subjugation. Her concern with these issues, and her historical approach to better understanding them, preceded the first feminist anthologies by two years, putting her at the forefront of feminist anthropology. (Sutton, ed., 1993, 68)
In the 1960’s and 70’s, Leacock’s work in applied urban anthropology disputed the both the intellectual notion of a set culture of poverty, its political implications and how it is reinforced in institutional structures. She observed that the role that poverty plays in urban settings is much like the role that “traditionalism” plays in rural environments. In both situations, the difficulties of reforming poverty and oppression are seen the fault of the poor rather than looking more closely at the existing configuration of inequality. During this period of time she used her interdisciplinary background to look at how concepts of mental illness, housing and education give rise to inequality. In Teaching and Learning in City Schools, Leacock disproved the notion that education levels the class, gender and racial differences inherent to any community. Instead, She shows that schools track students which have the effect of reinforcing these societal divisions. “[T]he tracking system in education guarantees that economic and racial status, rather than ability, will determine who will be able to utilize the educational structure to gain jobs with economic security and prestige.”(Sutton, ed., 1993, 81)
In 1972, she was brought in as chair by the City College of New York to rebuild the Department of Anthropology, which had recently split from sociology and remained there until her death in 1987. Among the many honors given to Leacock during this time was the New York Academy Sciences Award for the Behavioral Sciences in 1983, making her the first woman to receive this distinction. As she gained stature as an academic, she continued to speak out as both a feminist and in opposition to racial and class discrimination, never sacrificing her strong political beliefs for her career. She used her personal experiences with such prejudice to support marginally employed junior colleagues and diversify the academy.
In both her academic and personal life, Eleanor Burke Leacock practiced the theories she developed and espoused with the ultimate objective being human liberation. She wrote about these matters in a language accessible to both academics and non-academics alike, deliberately rejecting the scholarly prose she considered elitist. Her research “trac[ed] the simultaneous emergence of gender and class oppression, as processes linked to commodity production, the formation of state institutions, or colonialism, and related models of development….Her critiques of the ‘culture of poverty’ thesis, male bias in anthropology in general, structuralism and sociobiology in particular, and racism and class bias in education influenced national and international constituencies far beyond anthropologists and the academy. “(Gailey, 1988, 219)
Bibliography
Gacs, Ute, et al, eds.
1988 Woman Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Greenwood Press.
Leacock, Eleanor B., ed.
1963. Introduction. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society. Pp. I-xx. New York: Meridian Books
Sutton, Constance R., ed.
1993. From Labrador to Samoa: The Theory and Practice of Eleanor Burke Leacock. Association for Feminist Anthropology/American Anthropological Association.
Selected Works by Eleanor Burke Leacock
1954. The Montagnais “Hunting Territory” and the Fur Trade. American Anthropologist Memoir 78.
1963. Introduction. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society. E. B. Leacock, ed. Pp. I-xx. New York: Meridian Books
1969. Teaching and Learning in City Schools. New York: Basic Books.
1971. Culture of Poverty: A Critique. New York: Simon and Schuster.
1972 Introduction. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Frederick Engels. Pp. 7-67. New York: International.
1977 Women in Egalitarian Society. In Becoming Visible: Women in European History. R. Bridenthal and C. Koontz, eds. Pp. 11-35. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
1981. Myths of Male Dominance. New York: Monthly Review.
1982. Interpreting the Origins of Gender Inequality: Conceptual and Historical Problems. Dialectical Anthropology 7:263-84.
Selected Co-authored Works
Leacock, Eleanor, Helen Safa, et al.
1986. Women’s Work: Development and the Division of Labor by Gender. S. Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey.
Leacock, Eleanor, and Mona Etienne, eds.
1980. Women and Colonization. New York: Bergin and Garvey/Praeger.
Leacock, Eleanor, and Richard Lee, eds.
1981. Politics and History in Band Societies. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Leacock, Eleanor, and Nancy Lurie, eds.
1969. North American Indians in Historical Perspective. New York: Random House.
4 January 2006, 12:33 pmCharles Brown:
Here are some challenges to Engels’ approach from Diane Monaco, back on the Marxist-Feminist list in 2000.
CB
^^^^^
Creation of Patriarchy
——————————————————————————–
To: M-Fem@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Creation of Patriarchy
From: Diane Monaco
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 23:39:31 -0400
——————————————————————————–
Charles Brown wrote:
>>> Diane Monaco 08/19/00 02:35CHAPTER 4
Men learned to institute dominance and hierarchy over other people by their
earlier practice of dominance over the women of their own group. This
found expression in the institutionalization of slavery, which began with
the enslavement of women of conquered groups.
((((((((((((((((
CB: The question is are you and Lerner saying that from the beginning of the species homo sapiens sapiens , men practiced dominance over women in their group ? Engels and I answer that ,”no”. That there was an egalitarian relationship between women and men, but with a division of labor, a social equivalence of status , but not an identity. This was for the whole stone age, which is most of the time of the species’ existence.
The Engels thesis is that with the surpluses that arose with agriculture , a revolution in the organization of production, there also arose a division of labor between predominantly mental and predominantly physical labor. This would be within “one” society, and benevolent at first but later was distorted such that the predominantly mental laborers ( priests or the like) founded private property.
This in turn gave rise to the motive of passing private property on to offspring, which in turn gave rise to the overthrow of motheright and matrinomy, the rise of monogamy, so as to assure that one’s children were one’s own.
Do you say male dominance arose in the course of human history , or was there from the beginning ? If the former, what “triggered” male dominance , in your theory ?
Charles,
I read Engels’ work when I was an undergraduate student and at the time I thought it explained everything. But later upon closer examination, I found illogical transitions that made very little sense to me. Furthermore, these transitional stages only seemed to make sense if women were presumed to already be subordinate. I see three illogical transitions – there may be more:
TRANSITION FROM GROUP MARRIAGE TO PAIRING MARRIAGE
Why did this transition occur? Engels says that the sexual demands from so many men in the clan was too much for the women and pairing marriage provided some sort of relief. Why was there an over-abundance of men in the clan? This makes no sense. If there was equality between the sexes and a fairly equal number of men and women in the clan, what was the incentive for either men or women to move from group marriage to pairing marriage? Love perhaps? Or perhaps women were already subordinate and were forced to make the transition. What happened during this transition is really a mystery. I would hate to think that the subjugation of women began with love.
The next two transitions more clearly suggest that women were already subordinate.
ACCUMULATED WEALTH GOING TO MEN
If there was equality between the sexes in the clan why did the wealth (surpluses in agriculture in your summary) that accumulated end up in the hands of the men? This makes no sense, but if women were already subordinate it makes perfect sense.
TRANSITION FROM PAIRING MARRIAGE TO MONOGAMOUS MARRIAGE
If there was equality between the sexes during this time as Engels suggests, why would a woman want to go from a situation where there was mother-right to a situation where there was father-right. This makes no sense, but if women were already subordinate it makes perfect sense.
Charles I don’t think within the animal kingdom there is oppression. As I said before, I think there is bullying and cheating among individual animals but I don’t think it is oppression. Oppression is a group related phenomenon. I believe oppression originated with humans – homo sapiens sapiens or just homo sapiens, I don’t know. Yours and Engels’ theory says that homo sapiens sapiens have existed throughout the entire stone age and there was equality between the sexes during this time. I take issue with this for the above inconsistencies. I haven’t finished Lerner’s volume, but it may provide some insights. I’ll let you know. Take care.
Diane
4 January 2006, 1:05 pmRequired:
“This may describe the status of women once commodity production takes over social production, and women are excluded from it.”
I’m nearly done bumbling my way through the Drop Engels articles. I find them difficult to understand for 2 reasons. One I’m not so good with Marxist economics. Two, there are so many grammatical errors. My suggestion to Stan for his next compilation of essays as a book is to get some one to go through these essays and properly proof read them and publish them as compilation. Perhaps with some extra foot notes (like in sex & war) to explain to the beginner people some more of the basics.
But my main question is, is the sentence I quoted above supposed to read “and the fact that women are excluded from it.”
29 March 2007, 5:30 pmRequired:
generally formating it a bit better would help. Making sure it’s obvious when quotes from one person ends and your comment or another persons begin.
29 March 2007, 5:35 pmRequired:
for instance above you’ve got [engel's end excerpt] but then it appears as though the next words are a quote from engels.
29 March 2007, 5:38 pm