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Societies must reproduce
themselves year after year, or they would cease to exist. They do this not
simply by producing enough food, shelter, clothing, etc, for people to survive.
Just as importantly, there are particular relationships between the members of
that society determining how things are produced. [1]
Slave owners might force slaves to do all the work on pain of death. A class of
landlords might extract payments of rent from the tenants working on their
land. Capitalist employers will offer jobs to those whose work will make them a
profit. But could there also be something more fundamental than this division
of society into classes? Could it be that, despite the many ways in which
societies develop, there is always the same group of people that come
off worse, no matter to which economic class they might belong?
This,
basically, is the stance taken by much feminist literature that identifies men
as being the problem for women. In this view, men have a privileged
position in all kinds of society and use that position to oppress women, either
by force or by making sure that legal and other forms of discrimination keep
women ‘in their place’. Many examples back this view, and they appear all the
stronger as convincing evidence because only some have changed very much over
history. These include denying women the right to vote in elections, to own
property, to have the right to end a marriage or to get the same kinds of job
as men for equal pay, or where social rules are invented that allow women less
freedom than men. For example, still today in personal relationships, the
socially ‘correct’ procedure is usually one where the man makes advances to the
woman and invites her on a date, or proposes marriage.
What might
account for this? Evidence shows that, on average, men are stronger and bigger
than women. This might appear to back the idea of there being an innate male
ability to use force against weaker women since time immemorial. Hunting for
food and overpowering large animals is important in primitive societies. Yet,
it should not be ignored that this is usually done in a social way by many
hunters, even if they are men, who cooperate to capture the prey. It is not a
wrestling match between a beefy hunter and a wild animal. Physical strength
might be a key issue in hand-to-hand combat in a war, but even then it is a
question of what weapons are at the disposal of the warring parties. Weapons
are produced in a social division of labour, and do not occur naturally in the
hands of the male fighter. In a deadly confrontation, most people would prefer
to be a weakling with a gun than a muscle-bound fighter with a big fist. Still
less are these physical differences between men and women an issue in everyday
life now. How much physical strength is required to order groceries online or
to type on a keypad?
Nevertheless,
for the past several thousand years, the form taken by social organisation has
meant that women have usually been in a subordinate position to men. This fact
can make it seem valid to place the responsibility for women’s oppression at
the hands of men, as it would not seem to be determined by a particular kind of
society. However, that would be to miss out some important historical facts,
ones that show how women in earlier forms of society were not
subordinate to men.
1. The basis of social
equality and inequality
Historical evidence shows that
the social subordination of women has not always been the case. Even with no
such evidence, on reflection it is not clear why it would be true. Just
consider that the key to the maintenance of society depends upon there being
children of adults – or else the social system dies out – and that women are
the ones who bear the children. This makes one question why women would have
been subordinate in all history. In primitive societies, where economic life
was organised around kinship groups of people, not families as we know them
today, this meant that women played a huge part in running society. The role of
caring for, educating and socialising infants was specifically a woman’s task,
following on from childbirth. It was obviously a fundamental feature of social
reproduction. Often, in primitive society women had an equal, even higher
status compared to men. While the identity of a child’s father was unclear, or
at least not certain until recent DNA testing, it was obvious who the child’s
mother was. Descent could only be reckoned in the female line, from mother to
mother, and matrilineal custom prevailed in early societies.
A sign of
this is seen in the belief system of ancient Greece, 2000-3000 years ago. This
system included many female gods. Even though Zeus, a male, was the king of the
gods, the females did not just include Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Artemis
was a hunter goddess and Athena was the goddess of everything from wisdom and
courage to law, mathematics, war strategy and the arts. Notably, one of the
most important surviving relics of ancient Greece is the Parthenon, dedicated
to the goddess Athena, and after whom Athens is named. This suggests that women
had a significant social role in ancient society, although the evidence from
the Greece of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Archimedes is that this social
role had by their time already been undermined by the domination of males. As Engels
put it in his book, Origin of the Family:
‘In the heroic age a Greek woman is, indeed, more
respected than in the [later] period of civilization, but to her husband she is
after all nothing but the mother of his legitimate children and heirs, his chief
housekeeper and the supervisor of his female slaves, whom he can and does take
as concubines if he so fancies’.
Between the
time of the primitive societies in which women had an equal, even higher,
status than men and that of the ‘heroic’ age of the Greeks, something had
happened to change the social status of women. There was a shift away from more
communal relations between groups of people, ones that included group marriage.
In the place of such communal relationships, there was a shift towards monogamy,
a single pairing of a woman and man, but one in which the male was dominant,
and in which he also had more sexual freedom. The key factor prompting this
major social development was the growth of private property at the expense of
the resources available to the social group as a whole.
In the
earlier forms of society, there were few resources available in excess of those
needed to survive, and communal relationships between people, in economic as
well as personal terms, tended to dominate. But as the productivity of
agricultural production rose, and as surplus products came to be traded between
different groups of people, this formed the basis upon which property also came
to be owned by some individuals and groups more than others. Slowly, over
centuries, and at a different pace in different areas of the world, individual
property became a more important factor in social organisation, and class
divisions developed within society.
If there was
a move away from communal property, why was the focus on the man as the
individual who owned private property and not the woman? The reason was
that the surplus of resources that became this property arose outside of
the domestic sphere that was the realm of the woman. So, from being at the
heart of the community and society, the woman’s domestic role made her
relatively isolated from the accumulation of wealth. Men had more direct
command of tools and agricultural output, from crops to cattle, and more access
to markets in which to sell these products. This led to a diminution of women’s
social status, and, eventually, also to monogamy.
As Engels
puts it: monogamy ‘was the first form of the family to be based, not on
natural, but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over
primitive, natural communal property’. The institution of monogamy had nothing
whatever to do with a man and woman wanting to raise children on their own. It
had everything to do with the man being in control and having superior
social rights, as made clear from the ability of the man to have affairs, etc,
something which in the case of the woman was liable to be met with punishment.
Monogamy as a social institution came about essentially as the ‘marriage
version’ of the ownership of and control over property.
Some later
forms of society were not as harsh on women as the classical Greek one.
Furthermore, because relationships between people will always vary according to
circumstance, there is no strict model that is followed by all societies at a
particular stage of economic development. Even a society with a male-dominated
monogamy can be more or less restrictive for women. Solid evidence about the
social relations between men and women also gets patchier the further back in
history one goes. Nevertheless, the historical evidence available to make
inferences about these relationships backs up these points, especially the
information about legal systems relating to property rights.
Another
important point is that the property aspects of marriage and monogamy were of
far more concern to the upper, richer strata of society. These strata had
wealth to pass on to their offspring, while ordinary people had little or no
wealth, and, for them, passing on small items of property to descendants would
have been a very minor concern. But as social productivity developed to allow a
surplus of goods well beyond what was needed simply to subsist, this was also
the basis for a class society. The economically richer, more powerful minority
of families had the means to control the labour of, or to buy the products
from, the majority. Over time, these groups became a class of people ruling
over all society, and the social system they put in place, along with laws and
rules for morality, applied to everyone.
Women’s
social status has been subordinate to that of men for a very long time, but not
for all time, nor in all kinds of society. In his book, Origin of the Family,
Engels gives examples up to as late as the 11th century in which there was far
more freedom for women in pairing forms of marriage in Wales – and in which
women could even divorce men on the grounds of bad breath! – than there was in
much of the rest of Europe. What drove the subordination of women was the way
that all developed societies eventually adapted to the growth of the economy,
especially in commerce and commodity exchange. This occurred at the expense, in
terms of social importance, of the social realm that women occupied.
2. Women and capitalism
Capitalism as a form of social
production has existed for around three hundred years, developing initially in
Europe and then throughout the world. Capitalism is a peculiar form of society,
one that depends upon a division between workers, who own no means of producing
what they need by themselves, and capitalists, to whom workers must sell their
ability to work on the market. Capitalists are the owners of the means of
production, and they will employ workers if they can profit from what they have
produced. This is a different form of social production from earlier ones. It
is not slavery, in which slaves are actually owned by the slave owners. It is
not feudalism, where serfs must work part of the week for their landlord and
hope to produce what they need to live by working for the remainder. In these
pre-capitalist societies, despite the class distinctions, there was
nevertheless usually some obligation of the rich to the poor, as much as there
was one of the poor to work for the rich.
For example,
the feudal lord had a duty to protect his tenants and manage disputes between
them. In return, the tenants were usually under obligation to support the lord
in any military campaign. Despite outrageous things like the droit de
seigneur, which meant that the feudal lord had the right to have sex with a
peasant bride on her wedding night, this did not prevent feudalism lasting for
five or six hundred years in Europe. After feudalism, which ended in Europe
around 1500, came the beginnings of a more commercial society, and also the
beginnings of capitalism. This was a form of society where economic dealings
between people, groups and countries were much more based upon market exchange,
although that overlapped very much with earlier forms, depending upon the
degree of economic development in each area. The big social change that
signified the beginnings of capitalism was where a worker’s ability to work was
also sold on the market. Workers became ‘independent’ wage labourers, often by
being driven from the land, as with the enclosures in England, especially from
the 1600s. Of course, this meant that workers also had a problem if they were
not able to find work with an employer in the market. A ‘free’ labour market
also meant the worker was free to starve.
What does
this all mean for women’s position in society today? Engels makes important
points on this question, stressing how the role of women changed as society
developed economically:
‘In the old communistic household, which comprised
many couples and their children, the task entrusted to the women of managing
the household was as much a public and socially necessary industry as the
procuring of food by the men. With the patriarchal family, and still more with
the single monogamous family, a change came. Household management lost its
public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service;
the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social
production.’
This change in the status of
women predated capitalism, and so it cannot be blamed upon capitalism
alone. But within capitalism the subordination of women takes a new form. The
new form of capitalist organisation of society meant that while some things
became worse for women, others improved. For a working class woman, the
downside remained that she was the person in the family who had most
responsibility for looking after children and maintaining the household. The
upside, given by the growth of industrial capitalism from the 19th century, was
that she could again take part in social production, could earn a living and be
a part of the broader society. The latter positive aspects nevertheless had,
and still have, many negative features.
Female
workers have consistently been paid less than their male counterparts for the
same work. Partly, this was based upon the capitalist employer calculating that
working women needed less of a wage on which to live since they were likely to
be married to a man who also earned a wage that would support a household or
family. It was also based upon the actions of established (male) workers’ trade
unions that collaborated with employers to keep such wage differentials in
place – a disgraceful anti-working class activity from the very institutions
supposedly defending the working class. For example, during the First and
Second World Wars, when principally men in the UK had been ‘called up’ to
fight, women were introduced into the factories as much-needed labour. But the
women were dismissed again, with unions often driving this move, once the war
was over and were replaced by men.
Even in
recent decades, when there have been laws to prevent discrimination and for
equal pay for equal work, the social factors that determine employment usually
mean that far fewer women than men get the better paying jobs. With a woman’s
role being signified by capitalism, as in earlier societies, as being one where
they have the principal, or full, responsibility for looking after the family,
and where this role is considered to be outside what capitalist society
will take into account, this remains the basic problem for women in society
today. Even when a woman is not married and has no children, and so has none of
these burdens, she is defined and valued according to social type. Something
that is as basic and necessary for any society as looking after children lies
outside what capitalist society is prepared to allow for, and so is an economic
disadvantage for all women in this kind of social organisation. It is only the
so-called ‘superwomen’ of the privileged sections of the middle class who can
gain highly paid jobs and successfully ‘juggle’ the responsibilities of work
and childcare, usually helped by poorly paid female housekeepers, nannies and
childminders taking on the domestic burden for them (and their husbands/partners).
3. Gender, class and society
By developing society’s ability
to produce more things in a given time with less effort, capitalism appears to
offer economic freedom. Historically, capitalism has been the form of society
that has most increased productivity, so that the necessaries of life, and much
more, can be afforded in richer countries by anyone with a job. But this has
been a very uneven development. Not only because of rich capitalist countries’
plunder of weaker societies, with slavery, colonialism and later forms of
domination, but also because of the contradictions that exist even within the
richer countries, including unemployment and poverty, and, of more specific
interest for this article, the oppression of women.
Domestic work
remains outside the social sphere of capitalist production and it is a private
matter, even if some people are able to buy things, or buy help from other
people, to do it. Household appliances, bought by most families, from washing
machines to vacuum cleaners, also help to reduce the burden of domestic work.
This burden, and the related responsibility of bringing up children,
nevertheless almost exclusively remains that of women. It continues to affect
the position of women in the capitalist jobs market, even if it has sometimes
given them some ‘advantages’ over men in getting a job because they are more
favoured by employers as cheaper forms of labour. The result is that social
differences based upon gender are overlaid onto class relations between workers
and employers in capitalist society.
As Engels
put it: ‘The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take
part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims
anything but an insignificant amount of her time’. This, however, cannot
occur within capitalist society based upon production for the market, because
the domestic sphere of work lies outside the capitalist labour market and
employers have no reason to take this important sphere of social activity into
account. They are concerned only with their profits, and this will also have a
major impact on the policies of any capitalist government. Only a form of
society where all kinds of activity that are socially useful are valued, and
given resources so that they can function, will lead to the emancipation of
women. That will not happen under capitalism, where market production is the
way in which the owners of society’s productive resources determine what will
make them a profit and what will not.
4. Feminism or a theory of
society
The term feminist indicates
someone who supports women’s rights, but it is lacking in many respects. To
understand the social forces that oppress half of humanity in particular, and
humanity in general, including males, means that one has to go further than feminism. The dysfunctional capitalist social system ruins everyone,
including men – even including those who benefit from that system, although
they would be the last to admit it, and would fight violently to keep it in
place (actually, they would provide money for others to fight violently for
them).
Gender,
sexuality, disability, etc, are all forms of potential and actual social
discrimination, in addition to the disadvantages that might come from someone’s
economic position in society. But an upper class woman or homosexual, or a
black capitalist, or a rich, disabled person will have better life chances than
a poor, white, able-bodied, working class man. People are unequal in many ways.
I am taller, stronger and faster than some, shorter, weaker and slower than
others. I know more or fewer languages, and I am better or worse in playing a
musical instrument, swimming or calculating, or even in finding my way out of a
revolving door. But the thing that would probably make me better than most
other people – no matter how stupid or incompetent I may be – is if I belong to
a superior economic class. Just ask George W Bush. This argues against focusing
on the way that society may ‘identify’ different groups of people, and instead
to look at where people actually stand in the economic hierarchy. That is what
really determines their circumstances.
The
oppression of women under capitalism goes beyond that of working class women
alone. But all these ways of restricting rights and opportunities are still
based upon capitalism, its social mores and its form of economic regulation.
Fighting for the rights of women under capitalism means fighting against
capitalism. Any effective action to improve the position of women must be taken
in the clear knowledge that this will also challenge the economics of this
moribund system. Real opposition to women’s oppression does not start by taking
into account what the capitalist system can afford to concede. The starting
point is what society, not what capitalism, needs.
Tony Norfield, 27 August 2015
[1] This article
is based partly upon the 1884 book by Friedrich Engels, Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State, available here. It is also
based upon other readings and observation of contemporary capitalism. My aim is
to clarify some important points about how the role of women in society has
been determined, and what this implies for women today.
