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In this article we will discuss about the views of various writers on the origin and evolution of family.
Lewis H. Morgan’s work “Ancient Society” was published in 1877. Marx read this work and made extensive notes on it. But it was Engels who published in 1884 an extensive commentary on it after Marx’s death under the title of “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”.
In this work, Marx’s general theories of social and economic history are combined with Morgan’s speculative history of kinship institutions.
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Engels argued in this work that during the early stages of human evolution the forces of production were owned by the community and the family in its present-day form did not exist. He further posited that promiscuity of sexual relationships characterised the period of primitive communism. There were no prescribed rules regulating sexual relationships. In effect, the society was the family.
Engels has been criticised to indulge in this kind of speculation because it implied, according to some, that Engels was opposed to any sort of family relationships and that the family should be abolished in socialist societies.
The anthropologist Kathieen Gough argues that the picture drawn by Engels may not be far from the truth. She bases her arguments on the type of sex life prevalent among men nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, who live in ‘promiscuous hordes’. She believes that’ this may have been the pattern of early man.
The other criticism of Engels that he advocated, indirectly though, the abolition of family is also misplaced. Engels went out of his way to point out that the emotional and sexual elements involved in family relations can only be paramount when considerations of property do not vitiate the relationships.
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He argued that the proletariat makes and breaks marital unions only upon the basis of mutual attraction, whereas in bourgeois societies the conjugal pair is united in marriage even when they have no love for each other and may even engage in adultery with other available partners.
The most general conclusion of the book is that a stable monogamous family system, dominated by male authority and prescribed and supported by law, has really develop as a device for the perpetuation of the private ownership of property.
In Engel’s words “It is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity, such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs”.
Modern anthropological researches have, however found many of its details to be incorrect. For example, many hunting and gathering bands have been found to have monogamous marriage and nuclear family.
It is argued that man lived in hunting and gathering bands for 99.9 p.c. of his existence. Hence, the evolution of monogamous, and nuclear family, as sketched by Engels, may be nothing more than figments of his imagination.
It is further pointed out that although nuclear families and monogamous marriages exist in small-scale societies, they form a part of a larger kinship group. When individuals marry, they take upon themselves various obligations to their spouse’s kin. The result is something like a large extended family.
It is interesting to note that Marxian analysis of the family in capitalistic society developed mainly in the late 1960s as a part of the feminist movement. The feminist writers attacked the male-dominated family system by employing Marxian concepts.
It was argued that the male-dominated family served the purposes of a capitalist society from more than one point of view. To begin with, the family produces one of the basic commodities of capitalism very cheaply, namely, labour.
The production is cheap because the capitalists do not pay anything for the production and rearing of children. Secondly, the wife is not paid anything for bearing and rearing of children. It is pointed out that the amount of labour given by women in the course of their household duties is quite large and very profitable to those who own the means of production.
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The wife serves the husband who happens to be a wage-earner under a capitalist system. The capitalist, therefore, gets the services of two individuals by paying only for one. This is, it is held, no more than exploitation.
Thirdly, the husband is committed, under the existing family system, to support his wife and children. This acts as a brake upon him when he has genuine grounds for revolting against his capitalist employer and withdrawing his labour.
Margaret Benston, one of the feminist writers, therefore, argues:
“As an economic unit, the nuclear family is a valuable stabilising force in capitalist society”.
Fourthly, Fran Ansley, another feminist writer, puts the view of Talcott Parsons that the family tends to stabilize adult personalities into a Marxist framework. She looks upon the emotional and affectional support given by the wife to her husband as a safety valve for the frustration from which the husband suffers by working in a capitalist system.
The wife absorbs her husband’s frustration by being soft, sympathetic, comforting and affectionate towards him.
In the words of Ansley:
“With every worker provided with a sponge to soak up his possibly revolutionary ire, the bosses rest more secure.”
Finally, some of the feminist writers point to male dominance in the family and relate it to the stability of the capitalist system. The petty dictatorship which most men exercise over their wives and families enables them to vent their anger and frustration in a way which poses no challenge to the system
Engels saw female subordination as a result of the emergence of private property, particularly the private ownership of the forces of production.
It is interesting to note that both Marx and Engels saw in the increasing demand for female wage labour in nineteenth-century capitalist society the beginnings of women’s liberation. They argued that female employment would largely emancipate women from economic dependence upon their husbands and thereby from male dominance within the family.
Marx and Engels believed that true equality between the sexes would be established only in a socialist society, because the onerous duties of house work and motherhood would no longer be performed by individual women. All work would be the responsibility of the community.
In the words of Engel, “Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and production of the children becomes a public matter”.
In capitalist societies there has been a large-scale entry of women in the labour market. But the women have not yet been emancipated from male dominance.
The comparative studies of working wives’ and ‘full-time housewife’ have shown that power relationship within the family have not changed much even in cases where wives work outside the home.
Some feminist writers even go so far as to say that female wage labour in a capitalist society has the effect of strengthening the capitalist system because entry of female workers in large numbers tends to keep wages down and profits up.
In socialist societies also things have not moved in the way Marx and Engels predicted more than a hundred years ago. Women in USSR have definitely improved their position in the labour market. In 1922 they constituted 22% of the labour force. In 1973 the figure has gone up to 51%.
Despite the fact that over half the labour force is female, women are still primarily responsible for housework and child care it has been reported by David Lane that women in USSR find it difficult to combine their domestic and occupational roles, and that traditional attitudes about a women’s place in family still linger, particularly in rural areas David Lane concludes that collective ownership of the forces of production is “a necessary but not a sufficient condition for female liberation”, and that cultural attitudes are only partly, and not in their entirety, shaped by economic conditions.
Lane observes:
“Thousands of years of history of the subjection of women influence attitudes which men learn, and while communist governments may significantly alter the institutional arrangements of society, it is much more difficult to change attitudes to get women accepted in authority roles on the same basis as men”.
Hilda Scott, who lived in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1973, after having surveyed the position of women in families in Eastern Europe, reported that working women’s domestic responsibilities are similar to those in USSR. Her concluding observations are very significant.
“The early proponents of Marxism evidently did not realize that a lag in consciousness is involved which is more difficult to overcome than it is to win recognition for the rights of labour or the rights of Blacks or other minorities or oppressed nations, because belief in women’s inferiority is old and more deeply ingrained, and involves the total population, since woman sees herself in the mirror man holds up”.
In the face of these facts, may feminist writers agree that Marxian theory fails to provide an adequate explanation for the inequality between sexes. They consider the promise that socialism would ultimately liberate women too naive to accept.
Shula smith Firestone argues that sexual inequality is rooted in biological differences, that men and women are born different. Women bear children and, as such, they become dependent on men.
This dependence produces unequal power relationships within the family. Thus, inequality between man and woman began, according to her, not with private property, as was argued by Engels, but with the reproductive functions of men and women.
It is argued that women would be truly freed when they cease to be slaves to their biology. The answer lies not simply in reliable birth control techniques but in artificial reproduction. Women will only be free when babies are conceived and developed outside the women.