The woman looks after the house and the preparation of food and clothing, cooks, weaves, sews. The man fights in the wars, goes hunting and fishing, procures the raw materials of food and the tools necessary for doing so. The division of labor is purely primitive, between the sexes only. The population is extremely sparse it is dense only at the tribe’s place of settlement, around which lie in a wide circle first the hunting grounds and then the protective belt of neutral forest, which separates the tribe from others. And that brings us to the examination of the economic basis of these conditions. In “The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Frederick Engels outlined the material reasons for why people lived communally:Ī division of the tribe or of the gens into different classes was equally impossible. An individual’s value to society was not based on their gender but rather on their ability to contribute to each of these critical tasks, tasks which may have been performed by different genders but were held in high esteem regardless. Hunting, gathering, building homes, child rearing and caring for elders - each of these tasks was valued as critical and was accomplished by members of the group working together rather than by individuals or individual familial units. Each task was critical to survival and considered a communal responsibility. There were no social classes based upon wealth or power, and no individuals or families amassed wealth everything was owned by the communities as a whole. In those societies, women and men performed different work, but all people were valued for their contributions to the survival of the group.įor thousands of years, humanity struggled together for survival in the face of scarcity and deprivation. For the vast majority of our existence, we lived in communal societies. If we think of all of human history as one year, or 365 days, the duration of class society and patriarchy would be only five days - less than one week. The capitalists who own the factories, banks and corporations, members of the ruling class, become rich by paying workers less than the value of the goods produced and lining their pockets with the difference - the profits. In a capitalist society, workers produce goods and provide services, but they do not own factories and corporations. Much of the fruits of their labor were handed over to the lords, the landowners that were members of the ruling class that became rich off the land. In a feudal society, serfs and peasants worked the land, but they did not own the land, and they did not keep the full value of what they produced. The ruling class exploits the laboring class in order to amass wealth.įeudalism and capitalism are two examples of class society. ![]() It was the emergence of class society that formed the foundation for patriarchal norms and the oppression of women.Ĭlass society is the organization of society based on economic exploitation. People are separated into two classes with opposing interests: one is the group of people who own the means of production, who use this ownership of resources and productive forces to accumulate wealth unto themselves - the ruling class the other class is the group of people who do not own the means of production, but who, through their labor, in fact produce the wealth of society - the laborers. The oppression of women is rooted in a hierarchical system that values men over women, a system organized around patriarchal norms but that is much broader than patriarchy, in which the oppression of people is not based simply on sex but on class.Ĭlass society the root of women’s oppressionįor the vast majority of human history, society was organized around communal groups, and women were not specially oppressed. Sexism is not natural, which means we can eliminate it. Modern capitalist society is a form of class society, and in today’s capitalist society women face sexism everywhere we turn - within our own homes and personal relationships, in school and in our professional careers, even as we walk down the street.īut this is not the way things always have been and, despite its prevalence in today’s society, the oppression of women is not a part of human nature. Sexism is so endemic today that it can be difficult to imagine a society that does not degrade and devalue women.
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