“Whatever one can say about Marx’s treatment of women, his first failing and best defense are that the problems of women concerned him only in passing. Friedrich Engels can be neither so accused or excused. His Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State is the seminal marxist attempt to understand and explain women’s subordination. The work has been widely criticized, mostly for its data, but its approach has been influential. Often through Lenin, who adopted many of its essentials, the approach and direction of Engels’ reasoning, if not all of its specifics, have become orthodox marxism on ‘the woman question.’
“To Engels, women are oppressed as a group through the specific form of the family in class society. In pre-class sexuality egalitarian social orders, labor was divided by sex. Not until the rise of private property, and with it class society, did that division become hierarchical. Anthropological evidence is used to demonstrate this argument. Under capitalism, women divide into ‘the bourgeois family’ and ‘the proletarian family,’ as ‘personal life’ reflections of capitalism’s productive relations. Women’s economic dependence is a critical nexus between exploitative class relations and the nuclear family structure. Women are not socially subordinate because of biological dependence, but because of the place to which class society relegates their reproductive capacity. Engels applies this analysis to housework and childcare, women’s traditional work, and to monogamy and prostitution, issues of women’s sexuality. Socialism would end women’s oppression by integrating them into the workforce, transforming their isolated “private” work in the home into “public” social production. By eliminating the public/private split incident to divisions between classes under capitalism, socialism provides the essential conditions for women’s emancipation.
“Engels thus grants that women are specially oppressed, that they are second-class citizens compared with men, that this occurs structurally in the family, antedates the current economic order, and needs to be changed. Engels attempts to set women’s subjection within a totality of necessary but changeable social relations—as necessary and changeable as class society. His work holds out the promise that women’s situation has been grasped within a theory of social transformation that would also revolutionize class relations. He suggests, at least, that women’s equality, including their entry into the wage labor force on an equal basis with men, would do more to change capitalist society than simply advance women as a group within it.
“Engels’ work has had a continuing impact on contemporary theorists. Adaptations and extensions of his themes are often qualified by ritual disclaimers of his data while appropriating his ‘insights’ or ‘socio-historical approach,’ or claiming to reach his ‘conclusions … by a different route.’ Engels’ views are often most accurately reflected when he is not quoted. Zaretsky, for example, begins his analysis of the relation between socialism and feminism with: ‘To talk about ending male supremacy takes us right back to the dawn of history—to the creation of the family and class society.’ He argues that the personal is ‘a realm cut off from society’ under capitalism, developed in response to the socialization of commodity production, where woman is oppressed because she is isolated. Socialism is the solution. Many contemporary marxists also share a tendency, in which Engels and liberal theory are indistinguishable, to interpret the division between work and life under capitalism in terms of coincident divisions between market and home, public and private, male and female spheres. While Engels’ account is not universally accepted by marxists, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he is widely misinterpreted—a fate his account deserves—his general approach to women’s situation is sufficiently accepted among marxists and socialist-feminists as not even to be mentioned by name or footnoted. Or, one often suspects, read.
“Engels legitimates women’s interests within class analysis by subordinating those interests to his version of class analysis. His attempt to explain women’s situation fails less because of his sexism than because of the nature of his materialism; rather, the positivism—more specifically the objectivism—of his materialism requires his sexism. He not only does, but must, assume male dominance at the very points at which it is to be explained. His account works only if essential features of male ascendancy are given; it moves from one epoch to another only if sex-divided control of tasks, and the qualities of male and female sexuality under male dominance, are presupposed. His positivism makes the inaccuracy of his data fatal. He describes what he thinks, attributes it to what he sees, and then ascribes coherence and necessary dynamism to it. In his theory, if something exists, it is necessary that it exists; this does not explain why one thing exists instead of something else. What becomes of such a theory if the facts turn out not to exist, or—as with sex equality—never to have existed? Perhaps this is why Engels must believe that women were once supreme, despite data and suggestions to the contrary, for eventual equality of the sexes to be historically imaginable. He is dependent for explanation on a teleology of what is; he must explain what is in terms of what is, not in terms of what is not. Sex equality, unfortunately, is not.
Stop reblogging Catherine Mackinnon goddamnit, sex workers are proles ffs
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 