Why capitalist rulers expanded marriage to working people

Below is an excerpt from “How Women Lost Control of Their Destiny and How They Can Regain It,” a talk given in 1970 by Evelyn Reed, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party until her death in 1979. It is reproduced in Problems of Women’s Liberation, one of the Books of the Month for June. It explores the economic and social roots of women’s oppression. Reed explains why the oppression of women is a product of property — not sexual — relations, and how winning women’s liberation is intertwined with the fight to overthrow capitalist rule. Copyright © 1970 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY EVELYN REED

In its earlier stages, as in ancient Greece and Rome where this institution was consolidated, the propertied basis of monogamous marriage was bluntly expressed. The Roman jurists, who formulated the principle of “patria potestas” (all power to the father), also codified the laws of property which furnished the basis of the marriage laws. These have remained essentially the same through all the three principal stages of class society: chattel slavery, feudalism, and capitalism.

Under chattel slavery, marriage was the prerogative of the patricians, that is, of the wealthy and noble class alone. Slaves did not marry; even their mating was subject to the whim or will of the master. But at that early point in social development even the plebeians did not marry in the formal sense of the term; they merely cohabited as pairs according to old folk customs and traditions. Thus marriage began as an upper-class innovation for the exclusive benefit of the big proprietors of wealth. …

At this present stage in the evolution of marriage and the family the original propertied basis of the institution is obscured by the fact that the poor and propertyless are just as much obliged to enter into the state of legal wedlock as the rich. Marriage had now become mandatory upon all classes. Failure to comply resulted in legal penalties of various kinds, not the least of which was branding the unmarried wife as a “prostitute” and her children as illegitimate. The unmarried mother and her children were treated as social outcasts, a fate that was regarded as worse than death.

This raises the question: How and why did an institution created by the wealthy class to serve its propertied interests become extended to the working masses which have little or no property? How did a class institution in its inception become a mass institution in its subsequent development? The answer to this must be sought in the capitalist mode of class exploitation.

Capitalism brought into being large-scale industry and along with it masses of the proletariat packed into factory towns and cities. This brought about a change in the economic position of women. So long as agriculture and household crafts remained dominant in production, all the members of the family, women and children included, helped in the work that sustained the family and the community. Cooperative labor within the family framework was the characteristic mode of life on the farms, in the small shops, and in the home enterprises.

But with the rise of industrial capitalism, these productive families of the preindustrial era were displaced by the nonproductive consumer families of urban life. With the dispossession of masses of men from farms and small businesses, and their relocation as wage workers in industrial cities, women were stripped of their former place in productive work and relegated to breeding and housekeeping. They became consumers totally dependent upon a breadwinner for their support.

Under these circumstances somebody had to be saddled with the lifetime responsibility for taking care of dependent women and children. This was fixed, through universal marriage, upon the husbands and fathers, although no guarantees whatever were given to these wage earners that they would always have jobs or sufficient pay to fulfill their family obligations.

To conceal this economic exploitation a new myth was invented. Under church doctrine marriages were “made in heaven” and had a divine sanction. But now there arose the propaganda that the family was a “natural” unit without which humans cannot satisfy their normal needs for love and children. Hence it became the “natural” obligation of the father and/or mother to provide for their loved ones — regardless of whether they were unemployed or incapacitated or even dead.

Here, then, is the answer to our first question, what kind of society requires the institution of marriage and the family and for what purposes. It is class society that needs it, to serve the purposes of the rich. In the beginning the institution served a single purpose, that connected with the ownership and inheritance of private property. But today the family serves a double purpose; it has become a supplementary instrument in the hands of the exploiting class to rob the working masses. Universal, state-imposed marriage became advantageous to the profiteers with the rise of the industrial wage-slave system. It relieved the capitalists of all social responsibility for the welfare of the workers and dumped heavy economic burdens upon the poor in the form of family obligations. Each tiny “nuclear” family must live or perish through its own efforts, with little or no assistance from outside.

One difference between factory exploitation and family exploitation is that the former is easily recognizable for what it is, while the other is not. You cannot convince wage workers that their economic dependence upon the bosses is either sacred or natural; on the contrary, they know they are being put upon, sweated, and exploited. But in the case of the family, Mother Nature and the Divinity are both conjured up to disguise its economic basis by declaring it to be both “sacred” and “natural.” In truth, the only thing sacred to the capitalist ruling class is the almighty dollar and the rights of private property. Under these conditions, the human needs for love, whether sexual or parental, are not benefited but twisted and thwarted by an institution which was not founded upon love but upon economic considerations.

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