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.”

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

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.

-clip-

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.

^^^
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 “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.”

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 ?

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

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 “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.”

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.

^^^^^
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.

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