Engels updated JUDITH ARKWRIGHT Review: Women's Work, Men's Property. Eds. Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson. Published by Verso TO MOST PEOPLE male domination of society seems inevitable and universa ven feminists and socialists have hac difficulties in tracing the origins of women's oppression.
The essays in this volume attempt to offer, sometimes differing, perspectives on the development of sexual inequality and in so doing make one of the most important contributions to the debate in recent years.
For Marxist feminists the reference point for the discussion has often been Engels' Origins of the family, private property and the state. Yet it is now widely acknowledged that the book has many flaws both on the level of anthropological data and on certain theoretical issues. All eight authors in the volume place themselves within Engels' general framework, rejecting the notion that biology is destiny or that women's oppression is not intimately bound up with class society. However, they all also criticise and in some cases develop the Marxist perspective, drawing on impressive anthropological evidence from slave society, ancient Greece to modern day societies in West Africa and elsewhere.
In their essay, 'Property forms, political power and female labour in the origins of class and state societies', Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson take on the criticism of Engels. They explain that, contrary to his contention, male dominance has been shown to exist in some pre-class societies. The process whereby male domination arose is uneven, they explain, and in fact in some more developed societies, for example, In parts of West Africa, women actually appear to be more in control than in some more primitive societies, depending on the particular developments.
Engels, they claim, states in rather too sweeping a way that women's oppression developed from private property, class society and the state. In fact all these three developed at different times and different paces and the growth of women's oppression also therefore had a different relation to these processes. For Henderson and Coontz, Engels left questions either open or confused. Why,
Tif we do not assume innate biological differences between men and women did men gain control? What is the 32 role of the division of labour between
Editedby Stephanie Coontz & Peta Henderson WOMEN'S WORK. !!! Dallassit MENS PROPERTY
The Origins of Women's Oppression men and women (a division which Engels appeared to accept as 'natural')
All the authors in this volume are addressing similar questions and in general they agree on certain basic issues which help to codify many of the discussions of the women's movement in recent years. First they all acknowledge that the division of labour between men and women is a social construct and whilst it may not be automatically unequal it became so because it coincided
developments in different societies. They reject the notion that the origins of women's inequality lie in women's role in reproduction, claiming instead, as Engels did, that it was bound up with the struggle to control women's labour and products. Control of women's reproductive powers followed from this.
Although male domination does not appear to have been present in the carliest communal societies it was already present in the earliest class societies. The authors reject the idea of a move from communal societies to advanced societies with no intervening social formation or mode of production. While disagreeing on the precise forms they agree that such a formation was based on some kind of collective or group property. They call such societies lineage or kin corporate societies in which ties of kinship determined the organisation of work and the appropriation of goods. It
was in these societies that male domination was first identified
The authors show how the system of patrilocality - whereby women had to move to the husbands' kin group at marriage — played a key role in this. In other words, since Engels, new research and development of the women's movement has show that female subordination preceded and even laid the basis for, the emergence of private property state. In the words of the introduction: 'The oppression of women provided
accumulation among men, which in turn gave some men special access to the labour and reproductive powers of women, as well as to the services of other men.'
The immense value of the book is that it both codifies these basic tenets of a Marxist feminist analysis, but also takes the discussion on and develops a debate among the contributors.
The main differences occur over the precise origin of male domination and its evolution, as well as the exact form of the pre-class society lineage or kin corporate social formations. Coontz and Henderson agree with another contributor, Leibowitz, that male domination emerged within these societies because of changes in production techniques which in turn gave rise to an informal division of labour. This division of labour gradually became institutionalised as surplus and exchange developed. Leibowitz gives the example of the introduction of projectile hunting which changed the organisation of hunting in a way which gradually excluded women.
Nicolle Chevillard and Sébastien Leconte, in their contribution, judge this too deterministic. They see the of male domination as the result of a conscious effort by men in these societies to control women's production and the surplus that it engendered.
Coontz and Henderson argue, on the •other hand, that there were features of the system of parrilocality which allowed the potential inequalities of the 'kin corporate mode of production to develop. The mode of production that emerged was based on kin corporate property and the circulation of labour through marriage. Male domination thus developed in a more gradual way.
These last points begin to touch on the nature of women's struggle against op. pression and on the common interests or otherwise between lower class men and women as a group The collection's fundamental contribution, however, is in pointing the way to a more thoroughgoing debate in the women's movement where a Marxist view can be verified. It is an excellent riposte to those in the women's movement who have tried to refute a Marxist analysis
INTERNATIONAl No S july August 1985
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