1. The oppression of women is not determined by their biology, as many
contend. Its origins are economic and social in character. Throughout the
evolution of pre-class and class society, women’s childbearing function has
always been the same. But their social status has not always been that of a
degraded domestic servant, subject to man’s control and command.
2. Before the development of class society, during the historical period that
Marxists have traditionally referred to as primitive communism (subsistence
societies), social production was organized communally and its product shared
equally. There was therefore no exploitation or oppression of one group by
another because no material basis for such social relations existed. Both sexes
participated in social production, helping to ensure the sustenance and survival
of all. The social status of both women and men reflected the indispensable
roles that each of them played in this productive process.
3. The origin of women’s oppression is intertwined with the transition from
pre-class to class society. The exact process by which this complex transition
took place is a continuing subject of research and discussion even among those
who subscribe to a historical materialist view. However, the fundamental lines
along which women’s oppression emerged are clear. The change in women’s
status developed along with the growing productivity of human labor based on
agriculture, the domestication of animals, and stock raising; the rise of new
divisions of labor, craftsmanship, and commerce; the private appropriation of an
increasing social surplus; and the development of the possibility for some
humans to prosper from the exploitation of the labor of others.
In these specific socio-economic conditions, as the exploitation of human beings
became profitable for a privileged few, women, because of their biological role
in production, became valuable property. Like slaves and cattle, they were a
source of wealth. They alone could produce new human beings whose labor power
could be exploited. Thus the purchase of women by men, along with all the rights
to their future offspring, arose as one of the economic and social institutions
of the new order based on private property. Women’s primary social role was
increasingly defined as domestic servant and child-bearer.
Along with the private accumulation of wealth, the patriarchal family developed
as the institution by which responsibility for the unproductive members of
society – especially the young – was transferred from society as a whole to
an identifiable individual or small group of individuals. It was the primary
socio-economic institution for perpetuating from one generation to the next the
class divisions of society – divisions between those who possessed property
and lived off the wealth produced by the labor of others, and those who, owning
no property, had to work for others to live. The destruction of the egalitarian
and communal traditions and structures of primitive communism was essential for
the rise of an exploiting class and its accelerated private accumulation of
wealth.
This was the origin of the patriarchal family. In fact, the word family itself,
which is still used in the Latin-based languages today, comes from the original
Latin famulus, which means household slave, and familia, the totality of slaves
belonging to one man.
Women ceased to have an independent place in social production. Their productive
role was determined by the family to which they belonged, by the man to whom
they were subordinate. This economic dependence determined the second-class
status of women, on which the cohesiveness and continuity of the patriarchal
family has always depended. If women could simply take their children and leave,
without suffering any hardship, the patriarchal family would not have survived
through the millennia.
The patriarchal family and the subjugation of women thus came into existence
along with the other institutions of emerging class society in order to buttress
nascent class divisions and perpetuate the private accumulation of wealth. The
state, with its police and armies, laws and courts, enforced this relationship.
Ruling-class ideology, including religion, arose on this basis and played a
vital role in justifying the degradation of the female sex.
Women, it was said, were physically and mentally inferior to men and therefore
were ‘naturally’ or biologically the second sex. While the subjugation of
women has always had different consequences for women of distinct classes, all
women, regardless of class were and are oppressed as part of the female sex.
4. The family system is the fundamental institution of class society that
determines and maintains the specific character of oppression of the female sex.
Throughout the history of class society, the family system has proved its value
as an institution of class rule. The form of the family has evolved and adapted
itself to the changing needs of the ruling class as the modes of production and
forms of private property have gone through different stages of development. The
family system under classical slavery [pre-feudal times] was different from the
family system during feudalism (there was no real slave family). Both were quite
different from what is often called the urban ‘nuclear family’ of today.
Moreover, the family system simultaneously fulfills different social and
economic requirements in reference to classes with different productive roles
and property rights whose interests are diametrically opposed. For example, the
‘family’ of the serf and the ‘family’ of the nobleman were quite
different socio-economic formations. However they were both part of the family
system, an institution of class rule that has played an indispensable role at
each stage in the history of class society.
In class society the family is the only place most people can turn to try to
satisfy some basic human needs, such as love and companionship. However poorly
the family may meet these needs for many, there is no real alternative as long
as private property exists. The disintegration of the family under capitalism
brings with it much misery and suffering precisely because no superior framework
for human relations can yet emerge.
But providing for affection and companionship is not what defines the nature of
the family system. It is an economic and social institution whose functions can
be summarized as follows:
a) The family is the basic mechanism through which the ruling classes abrogate
social responsibility for the economic well being of those whose labor power
they exploit – the masses of humanity. The ruling class tries, to the degree
possible, to force each family to be responsible for its own, thus
institutionalizing the unequal distribution of income, status and wealth.
b) The family system provides the means for passing on property ownership from
one generation to the next. It is the basic social mechanism for perpetuating
the division of society into classes.
c) For the ruling class, the family system provides the most inexpensive and
ideological acceptable mechanism for reproducing human labor. Making the family
responsible for care of the young means that the portion of society’s
accumulated wealth – appropriated as private property – this is utilized to
assure reproduction of the laboring classes is minimized. Furthermore, the fact
that each family is an atomized unit, fighting to assure the survival of its
own, hinders the most exploited and oppressed from uniting in common action.
d) The family system enforces a social division of labor in which women are
fundamentally defined by their childbearing role and assigned tasks immediately
associated with this reproductive function: care of the other family members.
Thus the family institution rests on and reinforces a social division of labor
involving the domestic subjugation and economic dependence of women.
e) The family system is a repressive and conservatising institution that
reproduces within itself the hierarchical, authoritarian relationships necessary
to the maintenance of class society as a whole. It fosters the possessive,
competitive, and aggressive attitudes necessary to the perpetuation of class
divisions.
It molds the behavior and character structure of children from infancy through
adolescence. It trains, disciplines, and polices them, teaching submission to
established authority. It then curbs rebellious, non-conformist impulses. It
represses and distorts all sexuality, forcing it into socially acceptable
channels of male and female sexual activity for reproductive purposes and
socio-economic roles. It inoculates all the social values and behavioral norms
that individuals must acquire in order to survive in class society and submit to
its domination. It distorts all human relationships by imposing on them the
framework of economic dependence, and sexual repression.
5. Under capitalism, as in previous historical epochs, the family has evolved.
But the family system continues to be an indispensable institution of class
rule, fulfilling all the economic and social functions outlined.
Among the bourgeoisie, the family provides for the transmission of private
property from generation to generation. Marriages often assure profitable
alliances or mergers of large blocs of capital, especially in the early stages
of capital accumulation.
Among the classical petty bourgeoisie, such as farmers, craftsmen or small
shopkeepers, the family is also a unit of production based on the labor of
family members.
For the working class, while the family provides some degree of mutual
protection for its own members, in the most basic sense it is an alien class
institution, one that is imposed on the working class, and serves the economic
interests of the bourgeoisie not the workers. Yet working people are
indoctrinated from childhood to regard it (like wage labor, private property and
the state) as the most natural and imperishable of human relations.
a) With the rise of capitalism and the growth of the working class, the family
unit among the workers ceases to be a petty-bourgeois unit of production
although it remains the basic unit through which consumption and reproduction of
labor power are organized. Each member of the family sells his or her labor
power individually on the labor market. The basic economic bond that previously
held together the family of the exploited and oppressed – i.e. the fact that
they had to work together cooperatively in order to survive – begins to
dissolve. As women are drawn into the labor market they achieve some degree of
economic independence for the first time since the rise of class society. This
begins to undermine the acceptance by women of their domestic subjugation. As a
result, the family system in undermined.
b) Thus there is a contradiction between the increasing integration of women in
the labor market and the survival of the family. As women achieve greater
economic independence and more equality, the family institution begins to
disintegrate. But the family system is an indispensable pillar of class rule. It
must be preserved if capitalism is to survive.
c) The growing number of women in the labor market creates a deep contradiction
for the capitalist class, especially during periods of accelerated expansion.
They must employ more women to profit from their super-exploitation. Yet the
employment of women cuts across their ability to carry out the basic unpaid
domestic labor of child rearing for which women are responsible. So the state
must begin to buttress the family, helping to assure and subsidize some of the
economic and social functions it used to fulfill, such as education, child care,
etc.
But such social services are more costly than the unpaid domestic labor of
women. They absorb some of the surplus value that would otherwise be
appropriated by the owners of capital. They cut into profits. Moreover, social
programs of this kind foster the idea that society, not the family, should be
responsible for the welfare of its nonproductive members. They raise the social
expectations of the working class.
d) Unpaid work by women in the home, if women did not perform unpaid labor
inside the families of the working class, the general wage level would have to
rise. Real wages would have to be high enough to purchase goods and services
which are now produced within the family. (Of course, the general standard of
living necessary for the reproduction of labor power is a historically
determined given at any time in any country. It cannot be drastically reduced
without a crushing defeat of the working class.) Any general decrease of unpaid
domestic labor by women would thus cut into total profits, changing the
proportion between profits and wages in favor of the proletariat.
However useful it may be, a woman’s household work produces no commodities for
the market and thus produces no value or surplus value. Nor does it directly
enter into the process of capitalist exploitation. In value terms, unpaid
domestic work in the family affects the rate of surplus value. Indirectly it
increases the total mass of social surplus value.
e) The indispensable role of the family and the dilemma that the growing
employment of women creates for the ruling class becomes clearest in periods of
economic crisis. The rulers must accomplish two goals.
They must drive a significant number of women from the workforce to re-establish
the reserve labor pool and lower wage levels.
They must cut the growing costs of social services provided by the state and
transfer the economic burden and responsibility for these services back onto the
individual family of the worker.
In order to accomplish both of these objectives, they must launch an ideological
offensive against the very concept of women’s equality and independence, and
reinforce the responsibility of the individual family for its own children, its
elderly, its sick. They must reinforce the image of the family as the only
‘natural’ form of human relations, and convince women who have begun to
rebel against their subordinate status that true happiness comes only through
fulfilling their ‘natural’ primary role as wife-mother-housekeeper. To their
dismay, the capitalists are now discovering that despite appeals to austerity
and dire warnings of crisis, the more thoroughly women are integrated into the
work force, the more difficult it is to push sufficient numbers back into the
home.
f) In the early stages of industrialization the unregulated, unbridled, brutal
exploitation of women and children often goes so far as to seriously erode the
family structure in the working class and threaten its usefulness as a system
for organizing, controlling, and reproducing the work force.
This was the trend that Marx and Engels drew attention to in nineteenth century
England. They predicted the rapid disappearance of the family in the working
class. They were correct in their basic insight and understanding of the role of
the family in the capitalist society, but they mis-estimated the latent capacity
of capitalism to slow down the pace of development of its inherent
contradictions. They underestimated the ability of the ruling class to step in
to regulate and shore up the family in order to preserve the capitalist system
itself. Under strong pressure from the labor movement to ameliorate the brutal
exploitation of women and children the state intervened in the long term
interests of the capitalist class – even though this cut across the aim of
individual capitalists to squeeze every drop of blood out of each worker for
sixteen hours a day and let them die at thirty.
g) Capitalist politicians responsible for shaping policies to protect and defend
the interests of the ruling class are extremely conscious of the indispensable
economic, social and political role of the family and the need to maintain it as
the basic social nucleus under capitalism. ‘Defense of the family’ is not
only some peculiar demagogic shibboleth of the ultra-right. Maintenance of the
family system is the basic political policy of every capitalist state, dictated
by the social and economic needs of capitalism itself.
6.) Under capitalism, the family system also provides the mechanism for the
super-exploitation of women as wage workers.
a) It provides capitalism with an exceptionally flexible reservoir of labor
power that can be drawn into the labor force or sent back home with fewer social
consequences than any other component of the reserve army of labor.
Because the entire ideological super-structure reinforces the fiction that
women’s place is in the home, high unemployment rates for women cause
relatively less social protest. After all, its is said, women work only to
supplement an already existing source of income for the family. When they are
unemployed, they are occupied with their household chores and are not so
obviously ‘out of work’. The anger and resentment they feel is often
dissipated as a serious social threat by the general isolation and atomization
of women in separate, individual households. Thus in any period of economic
crisis, the austerity measures of the ruling class always include attacks on
women’s right to work, including increased pressure on women to accept
part-time employment, cut-backs in unemployment benefits for ‘housewives’,
and the reduction of social services such a child-care facilities.
b) Because women’s ‘natural’ place is in the home, capitalism has a widely
accepted rationalization for perpetuating:
i) the employment of women in low-paying, unskilled jobs. “They aren’t worth
training because they’ll only get pregnant or married and quit.”
ii) unequal pay rates and low pay. “They’re only working to buy gadgets and
luxuries anyway.”
iii) deep divisions within the working class itself. “She’s taking a job a
man should have had.”
iv) the fact that women workers are not proportionally integrated in the trade
unions and other organizations of the working class. “She shouldn’t be
running around going to meetings. She should be home taking care of the kids.”
c) Since all wage structures are built from the bottom up, this
super-exploitation of women as a reserve work force plays an irreplaceable role
in holding down men’s wages as well.
d) The subjugation of women within the family system provides the economic,
social and ideological foundations that make their super-exploitation possible.
Women workers are exploited not only as wage labor but also as a pariah labor
pool defined by sex.
7.) Because the oppression of women is historically intertwined with the
division of society into classes and with the role of the family as the basic
unit of class society, this oppression can only be eradicated with the abolition
of private ownership of the means of production. Today it is these class
relations of production – not the productive capacities of humanity – which
constitute the obstacle to transferring to society as a whole the social and
economic functions borne under capitalism by the individual family.
