MARIAN BRAIN reviews Women's Work: the first 20,000 years Barber. Published Norton, New York. $13 AS A feminist active from the late sixties onwards, I found uncovering me role wat our gender played in pre-history one of the most powerful aspects of the early women's liberation movement.
Unveiling a past in which women played different roles is a crucial weapon in challenging biologica determinism WaCI underpins and justifies women's UDUICSsIUlI, It is remarkable that such a progressive and enjoyable book should come out of the American unvers svsten aven the backlash against analysing women's role in pre-class societies. Books like this are important in fighting against this backlash.
Marx and Engels drew on the work of early such as Louis Morgan and Edward B Tyler. Through their research. conducted over 20 to 30 years, they found remnants of societies in different parts of the Its system world where equality existea be tween women and men. Through reading this material, the early founders of the communist movement saw that what was being uncovered were pre-class soCenes. unese socienes were based on subsistence economies and they classified them as primitive communism.
Early developing capitalism was often accompanied by the development of progressive and scientific ideas-classically the development of the Enlightenment which proceeded the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. Such ideas were in the "Women's work consisted largely of making perishables" interests of the emerging bourgeoisie in the battle to overthrow decaying feudal societies. weaving patterns.
Capitalism ceased to have any progressive dynamic once the material basis had been laid for the development of socialism-a stage that was reached in the woven so carly. 1880's. From this time scientific ideas which describe the laws of progress in history became a major threat to the ruling class and In anthropology this was reflected in the ideological ideas of Morgan and Tyler which started in the 1920s. This had three strands: the denial of pro- the first 20.000 vears': gress in history, the denial that there were any general patterns in relationships between the genders ano the denial. trom the functionalists, that geitder had anv 'function' in society.
When Wayland Barber was a student of Classical and Bronze their makers. Age Mediterranean archaeology she became fascinated by the fact especianv that manv decorations on durahle vignettes, materials such as wall decoravears ago. Thev urged me to write a second book on the economic and social history of ancient textiles in effect on the women who made the cloth and the clothing." I nis book brings to ignt new material on the role that textile production played in pre-class society and women's role as the producers of this important resource. close to Marxism. that inventions are dependent on the productivity of labour and technology existing within a particular society. She shows that 20,000 years ago women were making and wearing the first clothing, crearea trom spun tibres. ribre AMs were an enormous economic force right up to the Industrial Revolution—in women's hands. But despite the technological tions and pottery looked as if they had been copied from typical challenges, and economic significance this When she story is absent from most texts on questioned experienced archae ologists, they responded that it ancical astory and ccononics.
In her postscript, was impossible that such compli- Invisible, Wayland Barber concated textiles could have been cludes. "Past scholars have generally Dissatisfied by this response, dismissed the history of early she began a iournev of discovery perishable commodities like which was first to lead to the cloth as unreconstructable, on publication of another book : the grounds that there was no University Press 1991). Prenistorie textes irrinceton Then evidence. great deal of evidence from unshe realised that it was women usual sources, we have reconwno developea clom and texties. structed much about ancient This is how she explains it in textiles, and the people and sothe preface to 'Women's Work - cieties that made them."
"Along the way I kept run- largely of making perishables— ning across wonderful bits of in- especially food and clothing. So formation about the women - if we are to retrieve significant virtually always women - who amounts of women's history, and produced these textiles and about I am thinking of such things as The dirterent values that citterent music and dance as well as clothsocieties put on the products and ing, we need better evidence than When I talked that which just falls into our laps. about my work, people seemed We need the skill to glean all the eager for tnese stories that told of surviving evidence and wring out of it every last drop of informawomen's lives thousands of tion and useful analysis. The conclusions come failure of its official leadership. She argues arustic excerence Finding the By tracking down a work consisted and establish its own class rule. worldwide. Ing inco rignt wing nanas.
Socialist Outlook's politics • AGAINST mass unemployment, rampant emhard-won public services, the working class in Britain faces a real crisis - an avoidable crisis created by the historic Socialist Outlook exists to build a new type of working class leadership, based on the class struggle and revolutionary socialism. The capitalist class, driven by its own crisis, and politically united by its need to maximise profits at the expense of the workers. has had determined. vanguard leadership by a brutal Tory high command. The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions, and to fragment and weaken the resistance, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time. In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the politics of "new realism", effectively total surrender, while ditching any pretence of being a socialist alternative. Every retreat encouraged the offen. sive against jobs, wages, conditions and union rights.
New realism is the latest form of reformism, seeking only improved conditions within capitalism. We reject reformism, not because we are against reforms, but because we know that full employment, decent living standards, a clean environment, peace and democracy can never be achieved under capitalism. Nor, as we argued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these demands ever be achieved under the bureaucratically deformed workers states and degenerated USSR, whose regimes survived only by repressing the working class. We are a marxist current, based not on the brutish totalitarian parodies of state marxism nor on the tame, toothless version of "marxism" beloved by armchair academics, but on the revolutionary tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legislative change. We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working class to topple the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, to unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of women, of pensioners, of the black communities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises in over 40 countries. Unlike some other groups on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming ourselves to be one. This degenerates into sectarian posturing and abstention from struggles in the labour movement, play.
Nor do we believe that the demands of women, black