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Vol. 71/No. 26      July 2, 2007

 
Marxism, science, and women’s fight for equality
(Books of the Month column)
 
Below is an excerpt from Sexism and Science one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month in July. The excerpt is from an exchange between Evelyn Reed and Howard Haymes then a professor of education at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Reed is the author of many works on the origins of women’s oppression and the fight for their liberation. She joined the socialist movement in 1940 and was a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States until her death in 1979. Copyright © 1978 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY EVELYN REED  
Liberals and other fair-minded men do not object to the feminist movement—providing women restrict themselves to activities on such practical issues as equal rights, conduct themselves in a ladylike manner, and above all avoid controversial theorizing on the source of female oppression and its solution. Howard Haymes is one of these well-intentioned men who has the best interests of the women’s movement at heart and gives his advice accordingly.

He surveys the galaxy of feminist writers who have articulated the problems and prospects for liberation over the past few years and finds cause for dissatisfaction. The women are too frank in their criticisms of sexist men and politics, and even of other feminists with whom they disagree. They engage in strident debates among themselves on the roots of male supremacy and female inferiority without consulting any male advisers and with no visible loss of solidarity as feminists. He deplores the “alienation” of New Left women from their men because the blemish of male chauvinism persists among them. But he is most distressed by the widespread influence of Engels and his Marxist followers upon the thinking of the movement.

Not only radical feminists but even more conservative writers, Haymes complains, have adopted Engels’s thesis that women are exploited and oppressed by capitalist society. Whether or not they call themselves Marxists, the result is a “veritable verbal bombardment” of capitalism at the hands of these women liberationists. Moreover, he warns, this is not mere leftist rhetoric; it involves serious consideration of the socialist solution to fully eradicate the oppression of women. As Haymes puts it, “clearly collectivist solutions are freely and frequently mentioned” by the feminists.

No less disturbing to Haymes is the mounting feminist interest in anthropology in order to learn about the position of women in primitive society before they became the oppressed sex. According to [Lewis] Morgan and other evolutionary founders of the science in the last century, ancient society was matriarchal and collectivist. Women, far from being inferior, played a leadership role and held an esteemed position. These findings, and the full conclusions to be drawn from them, were set forth by Engels in his book Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. He showed how anthropological data confirmed the Marxist theory on the class roots of female oppression from slavery through feudalism to contemporary capitalism… .

Opposition to Marxism in politics and to evolutionism in anthropology are not new; they have been rife ever since the two branches of science were born in the last century. What is new in the present situation is the women’s upsurge, barely six years old, and the impact these two sciences have already had upon this expanding movement. Women are reopening and reinvestigating social and historical questions that have long been declared by academic authorities—mostly male—as conclusively settled and no longer debatable.  
 
 
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