Subordination (RLE Feminist Theory)

Feminism and Social Theory

Clare Burton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415637022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136194405
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Subordination presents a survey of some of the most important ideas developed within feminism since the 1970s. Among the central themes addressed are: the origins of women's subordination; the private/public split; the nature and the role of domestic labour; the impact of psychoanalysis on feminist theory; the relationship between the State and women's subordination. One of the book's purposes is to draw together strands of thought and debate often kept separate.

Throughout, the major theoretical developments in Britain, the United States and Australia are reviewed within a comparative perspective. Consistently, the focus of attention is on how, and how far, theorists in these countries have been able to point to ways of explaining the changing but enduring nature of sexual inequalities.

1

Engels, the search for origins, and feminist theory

According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life. But this itself is of a two-fold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools requisite therefore; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. (Engels, 1970b:191).

Marxist thought has constantly been important to modern feminism, either because feminist theory has developed within a Marxist framework or because it has been responding to Marxist writings and the practice of political groups espousing Marxist ideas. Within that part of the feminist movement which arose in reaction to the ‘male-dominated left’, there was a reaction also to the supposed male bias of Marx's writings, and his own work was used to show how little Marxism dealt with the problems of women. For some, the exception was seen to be the work of Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State 1884 (1970b).¹

During the early period of the recent feminist movement, anything that Marx or Engels might have said about women, the family, or the sexual division of labour, was pounced upon and quoted by people of different persuasions to prove or disprove a particular point. The fact that this material was scarce simply lent credence to the view that Marxism should be discarded along with the male left, or at least substantially modified. It is only recently that feminists have been concerned to apply the principles of historical materialism to the question of the subordination of women, regardless of questions about the adequacy with which Marx and Engels dealt with it.

In fact both of Engels’ long works, written 40 years apart, deal in detail with the family and the position of women. Origin of the Family was written in 1884, after Marx's death, but was based on many notes Marx had written on the subject. Engels’ book, The Condition of the Working Class in England 1845 (1969) was written before Marx and Engels began collaborative work. This work details the changing conditions of working-class men and women with the advent of early industrial capitalism. In addition, the Manifesto of the Communist Party 1848 (1969b) analyses prostitution—‘public’ and ‘private’, as it is referred to there. The Grundrisse 1857–58 (1973), The German Ideology 1846 (1969a) and many parts of Capital 1887 (1971) also grapple with problems relating to the sexual division of labour and the relation of the family to other aspects of particular social formations. However, among all the works of Marx and Engels it is Engels’ book Origin of the Family that presents the most comprehensive theory of the development of women's subordination and it has received the most attention as a representative Marxist conception of the origins of sexual oppression.

Origin of the Family did not rely on contemporary empirical data in the way, for instance, that The Condition of the Working Class in England did. It was in part based instead on the ethnographic data collected by other people, such as Bachofen 1861 (1967) and Lewis Morgan 1877 (1963), since acknowledged to be inadequate or inaccurate in many important ways; it remains, however, the focus of much discussion. Origin of the Family and commentaries on it were central texts to the feminist movement in its early years because of the felt need to understand the origins and subsequent development of the subordination of the female sex. Origin of the Family attempted this specifically through tracing its connection to the development of private property and class society.

The following discussion is not concerned with Engels’ argument in itself—in its nineteenth-century context and in relation to the historical facts. It is concerned with what mid-twentieth-century feminists read in Engels, that is, those themes that were taken up in the body of thought this book is concerned with, and the way they served as a point of departure for theorists looking for the roots of female subordination. I will indicate here the problems which remain central to reformulations of the origins or causes of women's subordination. I refer to work done in the early years of the present phase of the feminist movement. Much of it has formed the basis for further theoretical work, and much of it has since been modified, but a reconstruction of past concerns and interpretations illuminates the contemporary issues.

Problems of historical reconstruction

The most obvious point that Engels makes, simply by trying it himself, is that one can try to reconstruct the past, and find the beginnings of women's subordination.

The ‘search for origins’ is still an acceptable way of achieving an understanding of women's position and it is a constant theme in the women's issue of Critique of Anthropology (1977). In an article entitled The search for origins: unravelling the threads of gender hierarchy’, Reiter says:

The search for origins is a theme which unites much of the recent wave of feminist scholarship … Before a structure of inequality can be dismantled, we must first know the base on which it rests. Thus our common search for origins is implicitly a search for a strategy with a politicised goal. (1977:5)

Similarly, in the same issue, Aaby writes:

It is, of course, always problematic to formulate theories about social processes such as the original subordination of women. However, I think it is necessary to try to do so because our ideas of the original character of the relation between the sexes will, consciously or unconsciously, influence the way we conceptualise the process of subordination of women. (1977:49)

We must be perfectly clear about the difficulties in such an endeavour. They are so great, and are there for so many reasons, that my position on this issue is unequivocal: we cannot reconstruct the past in such a way that we will find, in some prehistoric circumstances, the reasons why most women today live under conditions which exclude them from the power resources available to a minority of men.

There has been a great deal of investigation and conjecture about the relationships that held between men and women in prehistoric times. The material ranges from the work of Ardrey (1961,1966), Tiger (1969), and Morris (1968) on the one hand, to that of Reed (1969), Elaine Morgan (1972), Firestone (1972) and Davis (1972), on the other. A more informed approach has been presented by Kathleen Gough (1972, 1975) who is at neither of these extremes of speculation and attempts to marshall evidence for her contentions from three main sources. On the grounds that ‘it is better to speculate with than without evidence’ (Gough, 1975:51) she draws on studies of primate behaviour and social organisation, prehistoric archaeology, and ethnographic data from contemporary hunting and gathering societies. Although she recognises the inadequacies of all three kinds of evidence, she believes that, in combination, they may lead to better understanding.

It is necessary to remind ourselves that the results of this sort of reconstruction can only be as sound as the archaeology, primatology and ethnography from which its data derive. Gough herself acknowledges the flimsiness of her sources and the unavoidably speculative character of her interpretations. The most obvious pitfall of writers using these sources of evidence is that they become persuaded of the value and validity of their synthesis; through the force of the combined evidence, they slip into argument from the evidence of the sources taken separately.

For example, after an account of chimpanzee social organisation, Gough says: ‘Morgan and Engels were probably right in concluding we came from a state of “original promiscuity” before we were fully human’ (1975:59). This is despite her own warning that we should not confuse contemporary chimpanzees with our primate ancestors and despite the contrary evidence she provides from other non-human primates, such as the monogamous gibbon. All primates, she asserts, share characteristics without which the family could not have developed, notably protracted infant dependency which in turn gives rise to a stable mother-child unit. But this says nothing of the other two types of dyadic relationship which would be necessary to constitute the familial form for which she is arguing—that is, relationships between mother and father and between father and child. Male chimpanzees, as she points out, will defend nearby young from danger, but this testifies to some sense of loose community rather than the existence of a family group. To identify the dependency of the chimpanzee infant on its mother with the dependency of human infants on their mothers is to ignore a great deal of empirical evidence and to confuse a known biological link with a supposed social ‘fact’. There are widely observed instances in human societies of infants routinely cared for by older siblings or other adults while mothers pursue subsistence activities. (See, for instance, Erikson, 1950; Friedl, 1975; and for European countries, de Mause, 1976; Dunn, 1976.) Moreover, a wide range of primate social organisations exist; the supposedly biologically rooted social-organisational features can simply disappear with ecological variations, and other principles can take their place (Maccoby and Jacklin, 1974; Lancaster, 1976; Crook, 1977).

We do not yet know how much light archaeological evidence can throw on the interpretation of the nature of male-female relationships in the past. The available material can also be misinterpreted. As with the study of contemporary societies, ethnocentric, androcentric and other biases can intrude, for instance, proposing matriarchal theses out of evidence of the existence of female goddesses (Childe, 1963:67). Similarly, Gough's use of the existence of hearths and the use of fire to indicate that there may have been a ‘General Headquarters’ to which men returned and around which women spent their lives (1975:60) is not a thesis which can be sustained; it is necessarily already based on an assumption of a sexual division of labour and female immobility (the result of women's childbearing and childrearing tasks). Archaeological evidence will perhaps never be enough to provide answers about the position of women in prehistoric times, but it has a great deal more to offer than has usually been acknowledged. Unfortunately, what there is of it has often been harnessed to speculative theories as evidence for already formulated assumptions.

There are similar problems in using contemporary hunting and gathering societies as evidence of our past. As Harris (1968:156) says,

It is a serious error to suppose that contemporary band-organised hunting and gathering societies are representative of the great bulk of paleolithic hunting and gathering groups. Almost all of the ethnographically classic cases of band-organised hunters and gatherers are marginal or refugee peoples driven into, or confined to, unfavourable environments by surrounding groups of more advanced societies.

Such societies give Valuable clues’, as Gough (1975:52) puts it, but not to the history of women's position so much as to the ways in which this position is variable. Leacock (1972:66), who relies on a particular form of evolutionary theory for her attempt at historical reconstruction, acknowledges the oversimplification involved in retrospective evolutionary theory:

By hindsight, mechanical materialism seems to work. The objective conditions—technological, economic, environmental—that preceded—hence ‘caused’—later developments can necessarily and inevitably be located. The more remote the period studied the more the role of internal stresses, alternative choices, and revolutionary versus conservative ideologies that defined precisely how, when, and where major changes were initiated are lost in the ambiguities and spottiness of archaeological and historical data.

This statement recognises the dialectical, contradictory nature of the processes of transformation, of which Engels was so concerned in his theory (if not consistently in his own historical reconstruction).

One cannot dispute that there have been changes in the constitution of some societies from simpler to more complex:

Archaeological researches have yielded an undeniable picture of mankind's development from ‘savage’ hunters to ‘barbarian’ agriculturalists and finally to the ‘civilizations’ of the Ancient East … Meanwhile, ethnographic data have made it increasingly clear that fundamental distinctions among societies at different productive levels underlie the variations among individual cultures. (Leacock, 1972:17)

But here is the crux of the issue. Despite any intention to the contrary, the evolutionary approach to the position of women tends to present a thesis of linear causality—one which can be typified as an economically-determinist position. It relies, through the notion of ‘stages’, on the development of the productive forces of a society. It cannot consider the organisation of the social relations of production, which does not automatically follow from the nature of the productive forces and about which we do not have the same material evidence. Not only are ideological processes and political arrangements important here, but they play a part in the direction of the development of the productive forces to which is attributed so much importance.

Some of the same problems obviously apply to analyses based upon other people's field work. The use of secondary material is a particularly common practice (and, more recently, a very common practice among Marxist anthropologists and feminists). The work of Meillassoux (1975) is a case in point. His work has been extensively criticised, reworked and reinterpreted. (See, for instance, Terray, 1972; Aaby, 1977; Edholm et al., 1977; Mackintosh, 1977; O'Laughlin, 1977). Other instances of this sort of work have been more solidly based. I will, for example, have occasion to refer to Gough's re-examination of Evans-Pritchard's work on the Nuer (Gough, 1973). This is a careful reappraisal of a kinship system by an anthropologist who is familiar with the intricacies of such systems through field work of her own. However, I also refer to Sacks’ work, which uses material from four East and South African societies, drawing on the work of Turnbull (1965), Krige and Krige (1943), Hunter (1936) and Roscoe (1965).² Her use of secondary material was very select and in accord with her theoretical orientation. This prevents her from paying sufficient attention to either the ideological or the political mechanisms that mediate contradictions in the relationships between people. I will have occasion to refer to ethnographic material relating to the societies Sacks discusses, and to indicate that more attention needs to be given to the ways in which social formations are reproduced or transformed.

It is interesting to note that those writers who believe that the search for origins is a worthwhile project are not necessarily those who maintain the universality of patriarchy, and vice versa.³ Mackintosh (1977) assumes that patriarchy has been universal, but rejects a search for its origins. Arguing against Meillassoux's (1975) historical reconstruction, she says, ‘we should seek rather to grasp the way in which specific forms of these oppressions operate, how they are maintained and reinforced, how they are overthrown or why they are not overthrown. This is the level at which we should seek to construct theory’ (Mackintosh, 1977:121). The more recent writers who posit a universal subordination of women, based on men's control of women's reproductive labour, agree with Mackintosh's view (Bland et al., 1978; McDonough and Harrison, 1978). The opposite position—that women have not always been subordinated to men, but that it is worthwhile trying to trace the origins of the subordination—is an equally respectable position.

Reiter (1977) argues that a search for origins must be carried out, that in fact it is a task all feminists share. While I disagree with her here, her approach allows her to go beyond some of the rudimentary dichotomies that characterise other theories: class/pre-class, state/non-state, and public/private. Her way of reconstructing the past begins with the present.⁴ She believes that ‘critical junctures’ can be identified, in which ‘gender relations have changed qualitatively’ (1977:6). She discusses the origins and effects of modern capitalism, the origins and processes of ‘pristine’ state formation and the characteristics of gender organisation in ‘original human society’ itself. Clearly there are problems here, particularly as the last two steps must rely either on speculative data or on evolutionary assumptions. Reiter does, however, make the important point that state development is not linear:

A plethora of ranked chiefdoms, proto-states, city-states, feudal domains, empires and even national states have perished over a span of millennia during which the political apparatus we now identify as ‘the state’ evolved. In over-generalising, we ignore history, and the context in which political formations change. (1977:9)

She also looks at non-human primates and contemporary hunting and gathering societies, not in order to generalise but for evidence of the flexibility of gender roles and their variability in different contexts (1977:14). Though Reiter's approach acknowledges such a variability, it does sometimes assume the existence of cultural constraints that make the allocation of gender roles universal and social organisation along gender lines inevitable. Further, this form of reconstruction may leave us with ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• TECHNICAL NOTE
• Dedication
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 ENGELS, THE SEARCH FOR ORIGINS, AND FEMINIST THEORY
• 2 ENGELS, CLASS AND WOMEN
• 3 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WORLDS
• 4 DOMESTIC LABOUR AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WOMEN
• 5 PSYCHOANALYSIS, MASCULINITY/FEMININITY AND THE FAMILY
• 6 AN EXTENDED THEORY OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX