Many words have been written to explain, justify or rationalise women's social inferiority as against men. There are those like racists with their particular prejudice, who have claimed that this social inferiority is a direct reflection of women's biological inferiority. For example, it has been said that the average brain size in women tends to be smaller than that of men, the inference being that women are less intelligent. It is true that the brain of the female sex in homo sapiens tends to be smaller than in the male, but then the whole morphological structure tends to be smaller in the female than in the male — something known in scientific jargon as sexual dimorphism. The Neanderthal human, who preceded — and was for a time a contemporary of—homo sapiens, had an average brain size of 1,4550 cc. or 100 cc larger than the modern human. However there have been few, if any, attempts to claim that Neanderthal people therefore must have been more intelligent than homo sapiens.
There can be no doubt that the social position of women is closely bound up with the emergence of private property relations and class society. Lewis H. Morgan who, together with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, can be said to be the founders of social anthropology, was the first to discover this connection. His claim was that people living in those stages of human development which he called savagery and barbarism, had social organisation democratic in character. They practised communism in living and operated a matriarchal kinship structure, in contrast to institutionalaliscd private property and territorial government which. Morgan claimed, had evolved from primitive society. He was able to show that the patriarchal and monogamian type of families had not always existed — a complete break from the theory of original sin and the idea that primitive people were the result of degeneration from previous civilisation.
Morgan’s works greatly upset the academics of contemporary society. While Morgan put no special emphasis on the social position of women in primitive society, in the much more free society he described the implication was that women were not oppressed as in civilised periods. Much of what he claimed for primitive society is substantiated by modern anthropology.
However, it must be remembered that the peoples he studied were organised in tribal society and were not primitive in the prehistoric sense as understood by modern anthropologists in their studies of hunter gatherer bands. For example, Elman R. Service, who has made a close study of hunter gatherer peoples still existing in various parts of the world, and who are the closest approximation of early homo sapiens society of 40,000 years ago, says this in his book The Hunters:
Food gathering is the major enterprise of course, but more than that, it is a direct confrontation of man with nature. That is to say, there are no specialised groups who get their food by buying it from, the producer or exchanging services for it in some way. There is no full-time specialisation of labour other than the domestic age and sex divisions that are found in any family. Among hunting-gathering peoples this division of labour is simply that men do the hunting, at least the kind of hunting that takes them any distance from the camp. Women, probably because of the relative confinement of bearing and rearing children, are left to forage near the camp for vegetable foods and such small game as can be easily caught. But this does not mean that men's hunting is necessarily of greater economic importance than women's work.
Service calculates that in aboriginal Australia, even on the northern coast where game and fish are abundant, vegetables make up 70/80 per cent of the people's diet—collected, of course, by women. Woman’s work is important: most hunting-gathering populations could not be maintained without it. On the other hand, they can, and do, go for long periods without meat hunted by men. Only the Eskimos live by hunting and fishing alone, and Eskimo women do most of the fishing.
The question now arises: why was it that the oppression of women by men took place at all? In spite of its shortcomings, the probable explanation for this is that contained in Engels' The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State based, as it is, on the concept of historical materialism and with much use of the researches carried out by Morgan.
Needless to say, this explanation has been, and still is, rejected by most of the supporters of that epitome of all private property societies, capitalism — and by sonic of those who are interested in what is constantly referred to as “the liberation of women”. One such is Simone de Beauvoir who, in her work The Second Sex, says:
. . . On the same grounds it is impossible to deduce the oppression of woman from the institution of private property. Here again the inadequacy of Engels' point of view is obvious. He saw clearly that woman’s muscular weakness became the real point of inferiority only in its relation to the bronze and iron tool; but he did not see that the limitations of her capacity for labour constituted in themselves a concrete disadvantage only in a certain perspective . . .
Instead, she implies as a metaphysical explanation:
Thus it is that man’s interest in his property becomes an intelligible relation. But we see that man's interest cannot be explained through the tool alone: we must grasp in its entirety the attitude of man wielding the tool, an attitude that implies an ontological substructure, a foundation in the nature of his being
It is not surprising that someone with these ideas can write the following passage in relation to the aspirations of women:
I have pointed out in the introduction how different women's situation is, particularly on account of the community of life and interests which entails here solidarity with man — and also because he finds in her an accomplice: no desire for revolution dwells within her, nor any thought of her own disappearance as a sex — all she asks is that aspects of sexual differentiation be abolished.
In other words, let capitalism remain providing women are not discriminated against. If the determining factor in women's inferior standing is an existentialist one and is not linked to the rise of private property relations and class society, why did women allow it to happen? If the special oppression of women is not a necessary corollary — as de Beauvoir suggests — why was it that the agitation for woman’s liberation had to wait for the 20th century?
During the 20th century there has been much anthropological field work and study of the cultural diversity — and similarity — of various peoples in different parts of the world, with the emphasis on the differences. Margaret Mead, in her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, describes her study of three tribes living in New Guinea; the Arapesh, the Mundugumor and the Tchambuli;
We have now considered in detail the approved personalities of each sex among the primitive peoples. We found the Arapesh—both men and women displaying a personality that out of our historically limited preoccupations, we would call maternal in its parental aspects and feminine in its sexual aspects. We found men as well as women trained to be cooperative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others. We found no idea that sex was a powerful driving force either for men or for women. In marked contrast to these attitudes, we found among the Mundugumor that both men and women developed as ruthless aggressive positively sexed individuals, with the maternal cherishing aspects of personality at a minimum. Both men and women approximated to a personality type that we in our culture would find only in an undisciplined and very violent male. Neither the Arapesh nor the Mundugumor profit by a contrast between the sexes. The Arapesh ideal is the mild responsive man married to the mild responsive woman: the Mundugumor ideal is the violent aggressive man married to the violent aggressive woman. In the third tribe, the Tchambuli, we found a genuine reversal of the sex attitudes of our own culture, with the woman the dominant impersonal managing partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person. These three situations suggest, then, a very definite conclusion. If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine, such as passivity, responsiveness and a willingness to cherish children — can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe and in another be outlawed for the majority of women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behaviour as sex-linked. And this conclusion becomes even stronger when we consider the actual reversal in Tchambuli of the position of dominance of the two sexes, in spite of the existence of formal patrilineal institutions.
Whatever the other conclusions or speculations one can draw from this, one thing is certain. It show's that human society is capable of a variety of behavioural patterns, and that the so-called masculine and feminine characteristics are not based on fundamental sex differences, but reflect the cultural conditioning of their societies. The question could be posed here, what are the crucial factors which determine the cultural conditioning? It would seem that these studies go some way to support the implication of Simone de Beauvoir of an ontological explanation, and to invalidate the universal approach of Morgan in his insistence that “The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, one in progress.” However, what has to be taken into account is that all of these studies have been carried out with peoples living in tribal society where private property relations had already developed to a considerable extent, as indeed were Morgan’s, and should not be regarded as examples of the hunter-gatherer society of prehistoric people of some 40,000-50.000 years ago. As E. R. Service points out in his introduction to The Hunters “All the hunting gathering societies listed above have certain characteristics in common that serve to set them apart from tribal and other higher levels of society.”
As mentioned earlier, the hunter-gathering peoples studied by Service and others are the nearest approximation to the society of primitive humanity. There is no substantial evidence whatever to suggest that ownership aggression or the domination of one sex by the other has any part either with the hunter-gatherer peoples living, or in the society of primitive peoples of prehistoric times.
The agitation for women’s liberation is a phenomenon of modern capitalism. The oppression of women by men only arises in those societies where the form of marriage and the family is patriarchal or monogamian. and is associated with private property relations of an advanced kind. The problem is only recognised after the possibility of its solution has become apparent.
The social problems engendered by capitalist society, which dominates the whole world, cut across all speculation, all special pleading. The liberation of women is inextricably bound up with the liberation of the whole of humanity. Capitalism exploits its working class regardless of their sex. The question to-day is not just the emancipation of women, but the emancipation of the working class, regardless of sex.
Harry Walters
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