Vol. 73/No. 22      June 8, 2009

BY EVELYN REED  
According to the churches and the guardians of the established order, women’s place is in the home serving a husband and children, because the family has always existed. But it is not true that procreation, which is a natural function, is identical with the family, which is a man-made institution. While women have always been the procreators of children, they have not always been isolated in self-enclosed units, each woman serving a husband and family. The “eternal family” hoax is only the ultimate expression of the “uterus theory” of female inferiority.

The first division of labor between the sexes was not, as it is today, a division between a husband and wife, with the man doing outside work while the wife stayed at home doing housekeeping chores. Both sexes in primitive society performed social labor. This was possible because their system of communal production was accompanied by communal child care and education. Female children were trained by the adult women into their future occupations while the male children at a certain age were turned over to the adult men who became their tutors and guardians. Both production and child raising were originally social functions, performed by both women and men. It was only with the downfall of the matriarchal commune and its equalitarian relations between the sexes that women were dispossessed from social production and put into family servitude. Men took over in the new divisions of labor.

Historians often point out that with the advent of the new economy founded upon agriculture and stock raising, many new divisions of labor came into existence, replacing the former sexual division of labor. To give a few examples, pastoral activities became separated from farming; metallurgy, house construction, shipbuilding, textiles, pottery, and other crafts became specialized trades. Along with these divisions of labor in the crafts, there grew up specializations in the cultural sphere, from priests and bards to scientists and artists.

The roles of the sexes were radically transformed in the process. As these new divisions and subdivisions of labor grew and proliferated they became more and more—and finally exclusively—in the hands of the men. The women were squeezed out of these fields of social and cultural work—and pushed into home and family life. With the rise of state and church power, women were taught that their whole lives were bounded by the four walls of a home and the best women were those who served their husbands and families without complaint. In this elevation of men and downgrading of women, they were compelled to forfeit not only their former place in social production but also their former system of communal child care.

To be sure, women of the plebeian classes, the “common people,” have always worked. In the long agricultural period they worked on farms as well as in cottage crafts, and they did all this along with bearing children and taking care of households. But working in and through and for an individual husband, home, and family, is by no means the same thing as engaging in socialized labor in a communal society. Participation in social production develops the mind and body; isolation and preoccupation with home chores weakens them and narrows the outlook.

In other words, the division of labor between the sexes has not always been the same. The male-dominated division of labor that came in with class society, private property, and the patriarchal family represented a colossal robbery of the women. This is even more true today with the reduction of the extended, productive farm family to the tiny, nuclear, consuming family of the urban era.

To refute the myths that have helped to keep women oppressed—from the “uterus theory” to the “eternal family” propaganda—is not simply a matter for scientific and historical correction. It has profound implications for the women’s liberation movement. The argument that woman’s biological makeup is responsible for her social inferiority is the chief stock-in-trade for the male supremacists. If this claim proves to be unfounded their position collapses.

Females in nature suffer no disabilities compared to males as a result of their biology. Nor were women downgraded as a result of their maternal role in preclass society. They were held in the highest esteem for their combined functions as producer procreatrix. Woman’s position in society, therefore, has been shaped and reshaped by changing historical conditions. The drastic transformation that overturned matriarchal communism brought about the downfall of the female sex. It was with the rise of patriarchal class society that the biological makeup of women became the ideological pretext for justifying and continuing the dispossession of women from social and cultural life and keeping them in a servile status.

Only by recognizing this can women come to grips with the real causes of our subjugation and degradation which are today bound up with the structure of the capitalist system. Our struggle for liberation will be hindered so long as we are hoodwinked into believing that nature rather than this society is the source of our oppression.

A banner carried by women in a recent demonstration proclaimed, “Biology Is Not Woman’s Destiny.” This should become a watchword of the feminist movement.
 
 
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