FEMINIST ACCOUNT OF A FAMILY

Feminist Account of a Family



A Feminist account of the Family

Introduction

From the perspective of feminists in the 1960s, it was Marx's collaborator, Frederick Engels, who made the major contribution to understanding women's historic subordination. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State [1884] (1948), he argued that early humans lived in a state of primitive communism: Everyone had to labor to survive and, therefore, all that was available was shared. With the invention of cultivation and animal husbandry, people created the possibility of accumulating surplus. This development was of monumental importance in human history, opening up the possibility of longer and more secure lives (Dua, 2006, 57).

But the underside was that this surplus could be controlled by some and used in the interests of the few against the many. Ever since, various private property regimes have codified these oppressive and exploitative social relationships. Those men with a surplus, Engels argued, wanted their own children to inherit the wealth they had amassed. But how would men know who were their own children? The solution historically and in most known cultures was to turn women themselves into property. If a man owned a woman, she would labor for him, and she would be permitted to have sexual relations only with him. All children born to a man's wife would be, legally speaking, his children, because he owned their mother; unmarried women would give birth to “illegitimate” children. This is the patriarchal basis of marriage, contested by feminists, gradually eroded in law, but retaining formidable social and legal underpinnings today.

In this interpretation, class society and male dominance entered onto the world stage together: for (Delmar, 2006, 87) these developments constituted the “world historic defeat of the female sex”. It followed, then, that with the abolition of private property (under communism), women would be emancipated. Under capitalism, Engels detected a first step toward women's emancipation, as economic desperation forced working-class women to become wage laborers, and hence propelled them into de facto equality with their husbands.

Concept of Family in Feminist Theory

With the development of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s, Engels's theory became subject to feminist critique: Notably, he failed to offer an explanation for why, after a promising start for sexual equality among our early ancestors, it was apparently so easy for men to take women as their property (Blumberg, 2006, 91) while his prediction about working-class marriage turned out to be, for the most part, a pipe dream. Feminists have been more inclined to believe that sexual inequality—in many forms, and some far more pronounced than others—predated class society and, if left to its own devices, would certainly outlive it, a position now supported by the histories of socialism in many countries. Radical feminist sociologist (Barrett, 2006, 30) argued that Engels should have looked more closely at the mode of reproduction, the consequences of men's alienation from “their seed,” and hence from posterity and—what she argued was—their long compensatory patriarchal gesture to take control ...