WOMEN QUESTION & MARXISM (2)

[Luis Quispe <lquispe@xxxxxxxxxx>]

       3. MARXISM AND THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN

Marxism, the ideology of the working class, conceives the human being as
a set of social relations that change as a function of the social
process. Thus, Marxism is absolutely opposed to the thesis of "human
nature" as an eternal, immutable reality outside the frame of social
conditions; this thesis belongs to idealism and reaction. The Marxist
position also implies the overcoming of mechanical materialism (of the
old materialists, before Marx and Engels) who were incapable of
understanding the historical social character of the human being as a
transformer of reality, so irrationally it had to rely on metaphysical or
spiritual conditions, such as the case of Feuerbach.
Just as Marxism considers the human being as a concrete reality
historically generated by society, it does not accept either the thesis
of "feminine nature," which is but a complement of the so-called "human
nature" and therefore a reiteration that woman has an eternal and
unchanging nature; aggravated, as we saw, because what idealism and
reaction understand by "feminine nature" is a "deficient and inferior
nature" compared to man.
For Marxism, women, as much as men, are but a set of social relations,
historically adapted and changing as a function of the changes of society
in its development process. Woman then is a social product, and her
transformation demands the transformation of society.
When Marxism focuses on the woman question, therefore, it does so from a
materialist and dialectical viewpoint, from a scientific conception which
indeed allows a complete understanding. In the study, research and
understanding of women and their condition, Marxism treats the woman
question with respect to property, family and State, since throughout
history the condition and historical place of women is intimately linked
to those three factors.
An extraordinary example of concrete analysis of the woman question, from
this viewpoint, is seen in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State, by F. Engels, who, pointing to the substitution of mother right by
father right as the start of the submission of women, wrote:
"Thus, the riches, as they went on increasing, on one hand provided man
with a more important position than woman in the family, and on the other
planted in him the idea of taking advantage of this importance to modify
the established order of inheritance for the benefit of his children ....
That revolution--one of the most profound humanity has known--had no need
to touch even one of the living members of the gens. All its members
could go on being what they had been up to then. It merely sufficed to
say that in the future the descendants of the male line would remain in
the gens, but those of the female line would leave it, going to the gens
of their father. That way maternal affiliation and inheritance by mother
right were abolished, replaced by masculine affiliation and inheritance
by father right. We know nothing of how this revolution took place in the
cultured peoples, since it took place in prehistoric times .... The
overthrowing of mother right was THE GREAT HISTORIC DEFEAT OF THE FEMALE
SEX THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. Man also grabbed the reigns of the house; woman
saw herself degraded, turned into a servant, into the slave of man's
lasciviousness, in a mere instrument of reproduction." (Our emphasis.)
This paragraph by Engels sets the fundamental thesis of Marxism about the
woman question: the condition of women is sustained in property
relations, in the form of ownership exercised over the means of
production and in the productive relations arising from them. This thesis
of Marxism is extremely important because it establishes that the
oppression attached to the female condition has as its roots the
formation, appearance and development of the right to ownership over the
means of production, and therefore that its emancipation is linked to the
destruction of said right. It is indispensable, in order to have a
Marxist understanding of the woman question, to start from this great
thesis, and more than ever today when supposed revolutionaries and even
self-proclaimed Marxists pretend to have feminine oppression arising not
>from the formation and appearance of private property but from the simple
division of labor as a function of sex which had attributed less
important chores to women than those of men, reducing her to the sphere
of the home. This proposal, despite all the propaganda and efforts to
present it as revolutionary, is but the substitution for the Marxist
position on the emancipation of women, with bourgeois proposals which in
essence are but variations of the supposed immutable "feminine nature."
Developing this materialist dialectical starting point, Engels teaches
how on this basis the monogamous family was instituted, about which he
says: "It was the first form of family not based on natural but on
economic conditions, and concretely on the triumph of private property
over spontaneously originated, common primitive property." And:
"Therefore, monogamy in no way appears in history as a reconciliation
between man and woman, and even less as a higher form of marriage. Quite
the contrary, it enters the scene under the form of the enslavement of
one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a war between the sexes, up
to then unknown in prehistory." (Origin .... Our emphasis.)
After establishing that private property sustains the monogamous family
form, which sanctions the oppression of women, Engels establishes the
correspondence of the three fundamental forms of marriage with the three
great stages of human evolution: savagery and marriage by groups;
barbarism and pairing marriage; civilization and monogamy, "with its
complements, adultery and prostitution." That way the Marxist classics
developed the thesis about the historically variable social condition of
woman and her place in society; pointing out how the feminine condition
is intimately linked with private property, the family and the State,
which is the apparatus that legalizes such relations and imposes and
sustains them by force.
This scientific proposition systematized by Engels is a product of the
Marxist analysis of the condition of women throughout history, and the
most elementary study fully corroborates the accuracy and actuality of
these proposals, which are the foundation and starting point of the
working class for the understanding of the woman question. Let's make an
historical recount allowing us to illustrate what Engels and the classics
set forth.
In the primitive community, with a natural division of labor based on age
and sex, men and women developed their lives on a spontaneous equality
and participation of women in the social group decisions; later on women
were surrounded with respect and consideration, a deferential and even
privileged treatment. Once riches began to grow, which heightened the
position of men in the family, pushing forward the substitution of father
right for mother right, women began to move to the background and their
position deteriorated; echoes of this reach the times of the great Greek
tragic Aeschillus, who in his work Eumenida, wrote "It is not mother who
engenders that which is called her son; she is only the nurse of the
embryo deposited in her womb. Who engenders is the father. The woman
receives the seed as a foreign depository, and she preserves it if so
pleases the gods."
Thus, in Greek slave society the condition of women is that of
submission, social inferiority and object of contempt. Of them it is
said: "The slave absolutely lacks of the freedom to deliberate; woman has
it but in a weak and inefficient manner" (Aristotle); "The best woman is
that of whom men speak the least" (Pericles); and the answer by the
husband who investigates public affairs "it's not your thing. Shut up
lest I hit you... Keep on weaving" (Aristophanes, Lysistrata) What
reality is entailed by these words? Women in Greece were kept as
perpetual minor; under the power of their tutor, whether the father, the
husband, the husband's heir or the State, their lives passed under
constant tutelage. They were provided a marriage dowry so they had
something on which to live and did not go hungry, and in some cases they
were authorized to divorce; for the rest, they were reduced to misogynism
in the home and in society under the control of specialized authorities.
Women could inherit when there was no direct male heir, in which case she
had to marry the oldest relative within the paternal gens; that way she
would not inherit directly but was merely a transferrer of inheritance;
all to preserve the family property.
The condition of women in Rome, also a slave society, allows a better
understanding of it as derived from property, the family and the State.
After the reign of Tarquinius and once patriarchal right was set up,
private property and therefore the family (gens), became the basis of
society: women will remain subject to patrimony and the family. She was
excluded from every "virile job," and in public affairs she was "a civil
minor"; she is not directly denied inheritance, but is subject to
tutelage. On this point said Gaius, the Roman jurist: "Tutelage was
established in the interest of the tutors themselves, so the woman of
whom they are supposed heirs cannot wrest their willed inheritance from
them, nor impoverish it by alienation or debts." The patrimonial root of
the tutelage imposed upon women was therefore clearly exposed and
established.
After the Twelve Tables, the fact that women belonged to the paternal
gens and to the conjugal gens (also strictly for reasons of safeguarding
property) generated conflicts which were the basis for the advancement of
the Roman "legal emancipation."  The "sine manu" marriage appears: her
goods remain dependent on her tutors and her husband only acquires rights
over her person, and at that shared with the "pater familias," who
retains an absolute authority over his daughter. And the domestic
tribunal appears, to resolve discrepancies which may arise between father
and husband; that way the woman can appeal to her father for
disagreements with her husband, and vice versa: "it no longer is the
matter of the individual."
On this economic basis (her participation in the inheritance even if
tutored), and the conflict between the rights of the paternal and
conjugal gens for the woman and her goods, a major participation of Roman
women in their society develops, despite the legal restrictions: the
"atrium" is set up, the center of the house, which governs work by the
slaves, conducts education of the children and influences them until a
rather advanced age. She shares the works and problems of her spouse and
is considered co-proprietor of his goods. She attends parties and on the
street she is given preferential crossing, even by consuls and
magistrates. The weight of Roman women in their society is reflected by
the figure of Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi.
With Roman social development, the State displaces the contention among
the gens and assumes the disputes about women, divorce, adultery, etc.,
which went to be heard in public tribunals, abolishing the domestic
tribunal. Later on, under imperial rule, tutelage on women will be
abolished, answering to social and economic demands. Women get a fixed
dowry (individual patrimony) which does not return to the agnates
(parental relatives) nor belongs to the husband; that way she is given an
economic base for her independence and development. By the end of the
Republic mothers had been given recognized rights over their children,
receiving custody of them due to the father's misconduct or his being
placed under tutelage.
Under emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the year 178, a great step is taken in
the process of property and family: children are declared heir to their
mother in preference to agnates; that way the family is based on a link
of consanguinity and the mother emerges as equal to the father before the
children, the children also are recognized as children of the wife and,
derived from the above, the daughter inherits just as her male siblings.
But while the State "emancipates" women from the family, it submits them
to its tutelage and restricts their acts. And simultaneously to the
social rise of women, an anti-feminist campaign was initiated in Rome
invoking their inferiority and invoking their "imbecility and fragility
of the sex" to legally reduce them.
In Rome then, socially women had it better than in Greece and acquired
respect and even great influence in social life, as shown by the words of
Cato: "Everywhere men govern women, and we, who govern all men, are
governed by our women." Roman history has outstanding exalted women, from
the Sabinas, through Lucretia and Virginia to Cornelia. Criticisms of
women, not as women but as contemporaries, developed by the end of the
First and Second centuries of our era; in this way Juvenal reproaches
them: lasciviousness, gluttony, to dedicate themselves to manly
occupations and their passion for hunting and sports.
Roman society recognized some rights of women, especially the right to
property, but did not open to them civil activities and much less public
affairs, activities which they developed "illegally" and in a restricted
way; for that reason Roman matrons ("having lost their ancient virtues")
tended to seek other fields in which to employ their energies.
In the decline of slavery and the development of feudalism, to consider
the feminine situation one must keep in mind the influence of
Christianity and the Germanic contribution. Christianity contributed
quite a bit to the oppression of women; among the fathers of the church
there is a definite demeaning of women, whom they consider inferior,
servants of men and sources of evil. To what has been said let's add the
condemnation by St. John Chrisostomus, a saint of the Catholic Church:
"No savage beast is as damaging as woman." Under this influence the
advances reached under Roman legislation are at first mitigated and later
on denied.
Germanic societies based on war gave women a secondary situation due to
their smaller physical strength; however they were respected and had
rights which made them an associate of their spouse. Let's remember that
on this subject Tacitus wrote: "in peace and in war she shares his luck;
she lives with him and dies with him."
Christianity and Germanicism influenced the condition of women under
feudalism. Women were in a situation of absolute dependence with respect
to the father and husband; by the times of king Clovis "the mundium
weighs over her during all her life." Women developed their lives
completely submitted to the feudal lord, although protected by the laws
"as property of man and mother of children"; her value increases with
fertility, being worth triple the value of a free man, a value she loses
when she can no longer bear offspring: woman is a reproductive womb.
As happened in Rome, also under feudalism we see an evolution in the
condition of women, in function of the curbing of feudal powers and the
increase of royal powers: the mundium is transferred from the lords to
the king; the mundium becomes a burden for the tutor, yet the submission
by tutelage is kept.
At the convulsive times when feudalism was formed the condition of women
was uncertain; since the rights to sovereignty and property, public and
private, were not well specified, the condition of women was changing and
heightened or lowered according to social contingencies.
First they were denied private rights, because women had no public
rights. Until the 11th century force and arms impose order and sustain
property directly: to jurists, a fiefdom "is a land possessed with charge
of military service" and women could not have feudal right since they
could not defend it with arms nor render military service. When fiefdoms
turn into patrimonies and are inheritable (according to Germanic norms
women could also inherit), feminine succession is admitted; but this does
not improve their condition: woman is just an instrument through whom
dominion is transferred, as in Greece.
Feudal property is not familial as in Rome, but of the sovereign, of the
lord, and women too belong to the lord; it is him who chooses her
husband. As it was written, "an heiress is a land and a castle: suitors
contended to dispute that prize, and often the young woman is only 12
years old, or younger, when her father or lord gives her as prize to any
baron." The woman needs a lord who "protects" her and her rights; thus a
Duchess of Burgundy proclaimed to the king: "My husband has just died,
but what good is mourning ...? Find me a husband who is powerful, because
I much need him to defend my lands." In this form her spouse had great
marital power over the woman, whom he treated without consideration,
mistreating her, beating her, etc. and whose only obligation was to
"punish her reasonably," the same some codes required today to correct
children.
The prevailing warlike conception made the medieval knight pay more
attention to his horses than to his wifet suffices to emphasize that in
the beginning and development of the burgs, women took part in the
election of deputies to the General States; which shows feminine
political participation, as well as the existence of rights over family
goods, since the husband could not alienate real properties without the
consent of the wife. However, absolutist legislation will soon fetter
these norms to fight off the diffusion of the bad bourgeois example.
This historical exposition exemplifies the thesis by Engels and the
classics on the social roots of the condition of women and its
relationship to property, family and State, it helps us to understand its
certainty and see its actuality more clearly. All this carries us to a
conclusion, the need to firmly adhere to the working class positions and
apply them to understand the woman question, participate in its solution,
and reject, constantly and decisively, the distortions of Marxist theses
on the subject and the so-called superior developments which are but
attempts to substitute bourgeois ideas for proletarian concepts on this
front, to disorient the women's movement on the march.
Having exposed the social condition of women and the historical outline
of its development linked to property, family and State, what remains is
to treat the question of the emancipation of women from a Marxist
viewpoint.
Marxism fundamentally holds that the development of machinery
incorporates women, as well as children, into the productive process,
thereby multiplying the number of hands to be exploited, destroying the
working class family, physically degenerating women and materially and
morally sinking them into the miseries of exploitation.
Analyzing women and children at work Karl Marx wrote: "In so far as
machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means of employing
laborers of slight muscular strength, and those whose bodily development
is incomplete, but whose limbs are all the more supple. The labor of
women and children was, therefore, the first cry of the capitalist
application of machinery. That mighty substitute for labour and labourers
was forthwith changed into a means for increasing the number of
wage-labourers by enrolling, under the direct sway of capital, every
member of the woman's family, without distinction of age or sex.
Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the
children's play, but also of free labour at home within moderate limits
for the support of the family."
"The value of labour-power was determined, notwomen act in favor of their
emancipation, and that this demands to socially end domestic work which
absorbs and annihilates women, which to Engels implies destroying private
ownership of the means of production and developing large-scale
production based ogo on enjoying privileges."
"From the first months of its existence, Soviet power, as the power of
workers, realized the most decisive and radical legislative change with
respect to women. In the Soviet Republic no stone was left unturned which
kept women in a position of dependence. I am referring precisely to those
laws which used the dependent situation of women in a special way, making
her victim of the inequality of rights and often even of humiliations,
that is to say laws on divorce, on natural children and on the right of
women to sue the father in court to support the child." (Tasks of the
Women Workers in the Soviet Republic.)
>From this comparative analysis the conclusion is taken that only the
revolution which places the working class in power in alliance with the
peasantry is capable of sanctioning the true judicial legal equality
between men and women, and even further, of enforcing it. However, as
Lenin himself taught, this true legal equality initiated by the
revolution is but the beginning of a protracted struggle for the full and
complete equality in life of men and women: "However, the more we rid
ourselves of the burden of old bourgeois laws and institutions, the more
clearly we see that we have barely cleared the terrain for construction,
yet construction itself has not begun."
"The woman continues to be a slave of the home, despite all the
liberating laws, because she is overburdened, oppressed, stupefied,
humiliated by the menial domestic tasks, which make her a cook and a
nurse, which waste her activity in an absurdly unproductive, menial,
irritating, stupefying and tedious labor. The phrase emancipation of
women will only begin for real in the country at the time the mass
struggle begins (led by the proletariat already owning the power of
the State) against this petty home economy, or more precisely, when their
mass transformation begins in a large-scale socialist economy." (A Great
Initiative; emphasis in original.)
Thus Lenin and Mao Tse-tung answered the anticipated opportunist
distortions and pseudo-developments of Marxism which today attempts to
distort the theses of Engels and confuse the working class position on
the woman question.
Marxism conceives the struggle for the emancipation of women as a
protracted but victorious struggle: "This is a protracted struggle, which
requires a radical transformation of the social technique and of customs.
But this struggle will end with the full victory of communism." (Lenin,
On the Occasion of International Working Women's Day.)
The above, in essence, shows there is an identity of struggle between the
revolutionary feminist movement and the working class struggle for the
construction of a new society; and, besides, it helps to understand the
sense of Lenin's words calling women workers to develop the institutions
and means which the revolution placed at their disposal: "We say that the
emancipation of workers must be the work of the workers themselves and
likewise THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN WORKERS MUST BE THE WORK OF WOMEN
WORKERS THEMSELVES." (The Tasks ....)
These are the central theses of Marxism on the emancipation,
politicization and the condition of women; positions which we prefer to
transcribe for the most by quotations from the classics, because these
positions are not sufficiently known, and besides that because they were
masterfully and concisely expressed by the authors themselves, which
relieves us from the task of pretending to give them new editing, more so
after seeing their full and complete actuality. On the other hand, the
distortions of the Marxist positions attempted today on the woman
question also demand the dissemination of the words of the classics
themselves.
Finally, it is indispensable, even if only in passing, to make note that
Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung set forth the thesis of the
emancipation of women and not that of women's liberation, as can be
appreciated from the cited quotations. On this particular, it suffices to
say that the analysis of the condition of woman through history shows her
as subject to tutelage and in a situation of submission with respect to
the male, which makes woman a being who, while belonging to the same
class as her husband or the man she has a relationship with, finds
herself in a situation of inferiority with respect to him, an inferiority
which the laws bless, sanctify and impose. Consistent with this situation
of undervaluing throughout history we see the need to demand her rights
to achieve a formal equality with man under capitalism, and how only the
revolutionary struggle under the leadership of the proletariat is capable
of setting up and fulfilling a genuine legal equality of men and women,
though, as we saw, plentiful equality in life, as Lenin said, will
develop as large-scale socialist production develops. These simple
observations show the certainty of the thesis on women's emancipation
conceived as part of the liberation of the proletariat. While the thesis
of women's liberation historically surfaces as a bourgeois thesis, hidden
at the bottom of which is the counterpoising of men and women due to sex
and camouflaging the root of the oppression of women; today we see how
women's liberation is exposed more each day as bourgeois feminism, which
aims at dividing the people's movement by separating the feminine masses
>from it and seeking mainly to oppose the development of the women's
movement under the leadership and guide of the working class.


Will continue...This is Part 2 of a serie of 4 articles.

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