Re: Marx & Engels on Prostitution (was Re: Women &Industrialization)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>...Engels
>sometimes slides into bourgeois feminism of the sort that sees working class
>women as sexually liberated (because of their participation in labor force
>under capitalism) and bourgeois women as oppressed in family by their husbands
>(and hence over-dramatizing middle class women's oppression and idealizing the
>other's liberation)...
>
>Xxxx

I agree with you on Engels' "over-dramatizing middle class women's
oppression" & overestimating the degree of freedom of working-class
women.  Engels' error, with regard to the problem you mention,
primarily lies in his thinking that the cause of bourgeois women's
oppression is the same as that of working-class women's oppression
(the same error bourgeois feminists make).  Engels theorizes that
"monogamy and male domination" are grounded in the foundation of the
need for "the safeguarding and inheritance" of private property.
While this may be a good enough point of departure to analyze the
oppressions of women of propertied classes, it doesn't serve to
illuminate the specific causal mechanisms of proletarian women's
oppression.  Hence Engels ends up arguing that "since large-scale
industry has transferred the woman from the house to the labour
market and the factory, and makes here, often enough, the
bread-winner of the family, the last remnants of male domination in
the proletarian home have lost all foundation -- except, perhaps, for
some of that brutality towards women which became firmly rooted with
the establishment of monogamy."  In attempting to explain the
oppression of working-class women, however, we should look at the
processes of reproduction of labor power (which should be broadly
conceived) and how they are organized in a given social formation,
within the limits created by capitalism & imperialism, as well as how
processes of production & reproduction are tied together (with all
the contradictions created in this knot).

Yoshie