Feminist Thought

Friedrich Engels: On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Discussion Questions: What, according to Engels, determines family structure? Describe the marriage/family systems Engles describes. How/why did they develop these forms? What is the gender division of labor? Is this natural? What determines it?

What kind of family structure, laws and state structures grow out of the industrialized capitalism of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries?

What kind of family structures/gender roles/gender division of labor predominate in today’s post-industrial capitalism (i.e. service-based economy)? Is the shift to post-industrialism creating a more gender equal world? Why or why not?

Why, according to MacKinnon, is Engels’s characterization of the history of family and economy incomplete? What does she argue is obstructing Engels’s view? How does a feminist like MacKinnon characterize the evolution of family roles/structures, the economy/private property, the state?

I. Biography

Engels – On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)

b. November 28, 1820

Barmen, Prussia

d. August 5, 1895, London

Childhood

Strict Protestant upbringing

Bourgeois Family, textile industry, factories in Bremen, Manchester

forced to drop out of high school to become familiar with family business in Bremen

very intellectual, knew 24 languages

lived a double- life as an intellectual and a member of the capitalist/managerial class

reads banned "Young German" writers

joins the Young Hegelians (along with theologian/hstorian Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner)

converted to a "militant atheist"

Serves one-year vol. stint in artillery regiment in Berlin

hangs around the university, becomes part of Young Hegelian group The Free, frequented by Marx

Converted to communism by Moses Hess who predicts revolution will begin in England

Eagerly seizes opportunity to train in family business (spinning mill) in Manchester

Keeps a hand in the business til 1869, when he sells his interest

supports himself, Marx, and Marx's family

leaves inheritance to Marx's daughters

Publishing

1844 contriubted to teh German Yearbooks

meets Marx around this time in Cologne; visits him in Paris. later Brussels

1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England

1845 The German Ideology (with Marx)

1847 The Principles of Communism (Ed.)

1848 The Communist Manifesto

He and Marx participate in the Revolution of 1848, takeover the Neue Rheinische Zeitung

1851-52 writes articles for Marx to appear in the New York Tribune

1878 Herr Duhring's Revolution in Science

Edited volumes 2 (1885) and 3 (1894)of Das Kapital after Marx's death (1883)

1884 The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State

1888 Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical Germany Philosophy

Personal

a womanizer, and hard drinker

lively, witty, "an urbane English gentleman"

Yet,

fathered a child with a maid

long-term live-in mill worker Mary Burns

when she dies, he takes up with her sister

marries her on her death bed (at her request)

II. Notes on the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

A.  Determining factor in history
    is the means of production
    the economic system

B.  System of reproduction (family) structured by the economic system

C.  Stages of development
    savagery, barabarism, civilization
    each characterized by specific type of social organization and FAMILY type 

    Determined by productive, i.e., economic system

D.  Three main stages of social life:  savagery, barbarism, civilization

    Evolutionary change, ordern (note: not dialectical)

II. Primitive state
Productive System:  foraginglower form savagery = sexual freedom
"with every woman belonging equally to every man, and every man to every woman"

III. Hunting with bow and arrow and gathering
A.  Creates 1st Form of Family: The Consanguine Family

    1.  Marriage groups by generation
    “group marriage”
    all grandparents each other’s mates
    all parents, all children, etc.

    2.  Only prohibition intergenerational
    Doesn’t explain why – i.e. doesn’t corresponde to some pre-requisite of the economic system

    3.  *Matrilineal system since only maternal parentage can be assured

    4.  As in punaluan family, women maintain homes, men come and go

B.  2nd Stage of Family: The Punaluan Family

    1. from Hawai’ian word Punalua meaning intimate companion

    2. no marriage between brother and sister, eventually cousins       
        all sisters/cousins live together with their men common husbands
        brothers also had common wives

    3.  claims natural selection at work

4.  all inheritance – matrilineal – no way of knowing who father

C.   3rd Stage:  Pairing family
    1. one man lives w/one woman but man allowed to be unfaithful
        (then how can we be so sure of parentage??)

    2.  women punished for infidelity

    3.  Individual sex love plays no role – economic needs drives relationship

    4.  Communistic Housekeeping

    5.  women respected; free and honorable
        e.g., Iroquois

D. Shift from barbarism to civilization

    Denoted by the shift from hunter/gatherer productive system to to agriculture/animal            husbandry 

E.  Leads to 4th Stage of Family- Monogamous marriage

        1.  cultivation as new source of wealth –

        2.  men – before marginal participants in production and reproduction

        3.  now primary for production

        4.  accumlation of wealth – inheritance – “private property” as a legal category

        5.  creates desire for patrilineal inheritance, hence patriarchal marriage

F.  Engels calls this moment

    When production shifted out of the “private” female controlled realm
    to the “public” male realm

    “the world historical defeat of the female sex”

    1.  leads to the rise of private property, class divisions, women’s oppression

    2.  and the need for the (bourgeois) state

G.  Family origins of the world famulus = domestic slave in Latin
     originally familia meant only the slave holdings of the male citizen
    extended to include wife and children

III. Enter debate between Marxists and Feminists about class/gender

see MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State

pp. 47-top of 50

“bourgeois feminism”
feminism as inherently bourgeois in that it works in the interests of the bourgeoisie

how so?????

(equality - eq to exploit working class on eq basis?  exploitation ok as long as its not along gender lines???)

What is women’s class status?

what is status of nurse who marries a doctor?

an upper-mid class girl who escapes incest to be pimped in inner city?

working class background - going to law school?  becomes entrepreneur??

secretary who marries Bill Gates?

raises questions about domestic relations - to what degree women’s interests/experiences/labor diff from men’s  ?????

MacKinnon and Reed argue - women not a class or a caste (reiterate diffs)

do all proletarians experience class in the same way??

Mac asserts:  “On the level of the work women do women’s lives are strikingly similar across class lines”

what does she mean?

(trained to be concerned with the reprod of life; men’s needs!!  men trained not to care?)

**because of these commonalities feminists argue that ‘women’s liberation is basic to social transformation not merely an index of it”  **meaning??

MacKinnon and others have rooted this diff in analysis of housework - women’s unpaid domestic labor - rel to men

servant of man? slave of man?
would it be better to be paid for domestic labor?

why or why not?

drive up wages if had to pay for these services?

family wage accounts for women’s labor?  does this exist anymore?  why?  why not?