A new year and it’s time to get back into the book reviews. And today I want to start with a classic. Written almost 150 years ago, today I am writing part one of a review of Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (The Origin for short).
The Origin is Friedrich Engels most well-known and important solo piece of writing. Engels is probably best known for co-writing The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx. Engels wrote The Origin shortly after Marx died, in turn outlining a very important space for himself, which has had a long impact in both political economy and the areas of sociology and anthropology.
I’m going to split this review in half (because the book is so dense with ideas); today looking at Engels ideas on the family, and next investigating how this links with private property and the state.
The Origin is based on a mixture of notes from Karl Marx, the work of Lewis Morgan in the book Ancient Society and Engels’ own work. The thesis Engels develops is simple. Looking back at the evolution of family units, he argues that the traditional monogamous family unit that we see today is in fact a relatively recent human construction. Pre the development of capitalism, Engels argues, humans lived in a range of different forms of relationship structures. It was only through the development of capitalism and private property that we saw the development of the monogamous family, and importantly the subjugation of women.
Let’s have a look at this argument in full.
So what is the issue that Engels is tackling? I think we all know the history and the story particularly well. It is one of a history of male oppression of women, one that historically many have argued is inherently based in evolution – or at least is based in the very early stages of human development. Whilst not part of the dominant narrative today (although an underlying element of it), the story is one in which the pairing of men and women in monogamous relationships largely because of the inherent need of the woman to have a man’s support – particularly in the process of child rearing. Chris Knight explains it like this:
The idea is that since the human female produces such unusually helpless and dependent offspring, she needs a man to provide long-term pair-bonding commitment and support. The catch is that no man should enter such a contract unless confident that his partner will be faithful to him in return.
This story makes monogamy an evolutionary trait within humans. In early human history women were unable to look after their young by themselves and therefore needed a man/husband to provide for them. Monogamy was therefore required to ensure the man’s confidence that the children were his. Secondly, as the ‘breadwinners’ of the family, families were designed around ‘patrilinial descent’ – family names passed down via the male line. This is a historical exertion of control by the male of the family line – a historical control that we now call the patriarchy.Whilst Engels does not deny the existence of a historical subjugation of women, he does argue however that the story of how it was develop – the story of the growth of the patriarchy – is very different to that.
As discussed, Engels bases his work on the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. In 1877 Morgan published his research Ancient Society, in which he presented studies he completed through extensive contact with the Iroquois Indians in upstate New York. Morgan showed that the Iroquois Indians, as well as other Native American Societies located thousands of miles from them, had kinship systems which took completely different forms that the modern nuclear family. Importantly, within the Iroquois, people lived in relative equality and women had a high level of authority.
This led Morgan to argue that human society has evolved through successive stages of ‘development’. These stages he (and Engels) calls savagery, which refers to the hunter-gatherer or foraging societies, barbarism, which developed when agriculture became prominent, and civilisation, which refers to the development of industrial and urban society.
Morgan continues, and Engels builds on this work to argue that as society developed, so did the shape of the family. There is significant detail provided here, but a few key elements are important. Engels argued that Morgan’s research showed the existence of “primitive communism”, which preceded class society. There are a few key elements of this society. First, Morgan showed that in this society women and men had a strict division of labor – women as gatherers and cares, men as hunters. Importantly however, this strict division did not mean inequality. Rather women were the equals of men, with complete autonomy over their decision making power within society as a whole.
In fact, it goes beyond that. Morgan and Engels both argued that prior to civilisation, human kinship was matrilineal. A key element here in primitive communism women and men did not live in monogamous relationships. Instead a range of different forms of relationships existed – with large group marriages being the dominant form of relationship in early society – a dominant form that was broken down as ideas of incest in particular developed. In these forms of societies however, mother-right – or matrilineal society was essential, as it was only through the mother that the descent of a child could be proven. This in turn gave the mother extra authority and power in society as the ‘head of the family’. Women were also given extra authority through being the managers of the home and the family – a management that unlike in today’s society was given a similar level of prominence of the work of men. So yes, there was a division of labour, but that, argued Engels, did not automatically mean a division of power.
This all changed however with the development of the class society. Engels pointed in particular to the growth of cattle-rearing as a key shift in social practices. Karen Sacks explains:
Private property transformed the relations between men and women within the household only because it also radically changed the political and economic relations in the larger society. For Engels the new wealth in domesticated animals meant that there was a surplus of goods available for exchange between productive units. With time, production by men specifically for exchange purposes developed, expanded, and came to overshadow the household’s production for use… As production of exchange eclipsed production for use, it changed the nature of the household, the significance of women’s work within it, and consequently women’s position in society.
This led to the defeat of the matrilineal society. As male roles became more influential, so did the male role in the family. In turn, patrilineal descent was introduced, what Engels described as the major shift in gender relations:
“The overthrow of mother right was the world historic defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. . . . In order to make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore the paternity of his children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights.”
The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State therefore does not challenge the existence of a history of patriarchy. It does not challenge the realities of the male dominance in modern society. What it does do however is question the ‘natural’ nature of this dominance, and more importantly it challenges whether it has actually been the historical account.
For many, this sort of analysis denies a history of patriarchy before capitalism. In fact it could be read as arguing that women were the dominant force in our society before the growth of capitalism. Many, potentially rightfully, criticise this as an ignorance of the historical reality. I think there is a more nuanced approach possible however. Engels certainly does claim that our history of the family is far more complex than the stories we are told today – a claim that is more and more being backed up by anthropological researchers. Despite these claims however, Engels does not deny a historical split in work and functions between men and women. He acknowledges that women and men have played different roles in our society – men as the hunters, and women as the gatherers. It is not these roles that has changed, but rather the importance placed on them.
And that is where Engels’ historical economic analysis is extremely useful. And that’s what I want to explore next.
In The Origin Engels made a convincing argument that the subjugation of women through the monogamous nuclear family is not a natural of everlasting problem. Instead it is a recent development through the development of capitalism. The question is therefore how has economic circumstances changed the relationships between the genders, and does that mean a shift in economics is needed to change it back?