Women's work, men's property : the origins of gender and class

209 Pages·1986·1.42 MB·English

by  Coontz

Women’s Work, Men’s
Property:
The Origins of Gender and Class
Edited by Stephanie Coontz
and Peta Henderson
British Library
Cataloguing in Publication Data
Women’s work, men’s property : the origins of
gender and class.
1. Women——Social conditions
I. Coontz, Stephanie II. Henderson, Peta 305.4’2 HQ1154
First published 1986
Second printing 1986
© Stephanie Coontz & Peta Henderson Verso
6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-86091-112-8 (PB) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-799-8 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-798-1
(UK EBK)
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson
1. In the Beginning …: The Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour and
the Development of the First Human Societies
Lila Leibowitz
2. The Dawn of Lineage Societies: The Origins of Women’s Oppression.
Nicole Chevillard and Sébastien Leconte
3. Property Forms, Political Power and Female Labour in the Origins of
Class and State Societies
Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson
4. Slavery and Women
Nicole Chevillard and Sébastien Leconte
5. The Processes of Women’s Subordination in Primitive and Archaic
Greece
Monique Saliou
Bibliography
General Index
Index of Authors
IN MEMORY
OF
LILA LEIBOWITZ
Nicole Chevillard was born in Bois-Colombes, France, in July 1947. She lives in
Paris, where she works as an economist specializing in African Affairs. She
holds the ‘Doctorat d’Etat’ from the University of Paris X-Nanterre (1979). Her
dissertation, ‘Les Inégalités économiques entre sexes: Fondements – roles et
articulations’, was written jointly with Sébastien Leconte.
Stephanie Coontz was born in Seattle, Washington in 1944. She received a B.A.
in the history honours programme at the University of California and an M. A.
from the University of Washington, where she was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow.
She was an associate editor of the International Socialist Review, and has taught
at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington since 1975. She co-
edited and contributed articles to Life in Capitalist America (Pathfinder 1974),
and is currently completing a manuscript on the history of American families.
Peta Henderson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1937. She holds a B.A.
from Swarthmore College, an M.A. from McGill University, and a Ph.D. from
the University of Connecticut (1976). She is a Member of the Faculty in
Anthropology at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, where she
has taught since 1974. She has done field research in Belize and Puerto Rico and
has published articles on development and population policy.
Sébastien Leconte was born in Douala, Cameroun, in September 1949. He
currently lives in Paris, where he works as an economist. He holds the ‘Doctorat
d’Etat’ from the University of Paris X – Nanterre (1979). His dissertation, ‘Les
Inégalités économiques entre sexes: Fondements – rôles et articulations’, was
written jointly with Nicole Chevillard.
Lila Leibowitz was born in New York City in 1930. She was Associate Professor
of Anthropology at Northeastern University from 1972 until her untimely death
in June 1984. She was an honours graduate at Brooklyn College, and earned her
M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University (1971). She authored Females,
Males, Families: A Biosocial Approach and numerous journal articles.
Monique Saliou was born in 1952. She graduated from the Ecole Normale
Superieure, ‘agrégée’ in history. She specializes in the history of religions. She
is the author of numerous articles in feminist journals and in theoretical journals
of the Fourth International.
Preface
This book began as separate strands of research in America and France. We
would like to thank the International Research Institute for Scientific and
Democratic Socialism and the Robert H. Langston Foundation for bringing the
authors together and providing travel funds so that we could meet and discuss
our work. The Institute also funded the translation of the French articles into
English, which was done by Aaron Barzman. The editors would also like to
thank The Evergreen State College for providing us with research time, The
Evergreen State College Interlibrary Loan Department for their remarkable
ability to track down the many books and articles we requested, and our
Evergreen State College students for their insightful comments and criticisms.
Introduction
‘Explanations’ of Male Dominance
Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson
Male dominance is one of the earliest known and most widespread forms of
inequality in human history. To some, the very idea of a book on the origins of
sexual inequality is absurd. Male dominance seems to them a universal, if not
inevitable, relationship that has been with us since the dawn of our species. A
growing body of evidence and theory, however, suggests that this is not the case,
and a number of scholars have begun to address the issue of male dominance as
a historical phenomenon, grounded in a specific set of circumstances rather than
flowing from some universal aspect of human nature or culture. The essays in
this volume offer differing perspectives on the development of sex role
differentiation and sexual inequality (the two are by no means identical), but
share a belief that these phenomena did have origins, and that these must be
sought in sociohistorical events and processes. Before turning to these theories,
we would like critically to review some of the alternative explanations of sexual
inequality.
A starting point for many theories of gender inequality is the assumption that
biology is destiny: the roles men and women play in society, and the different
privileges attached to these roles, are said to be fundamentally determined by our
genes, which are in turn the product of natural selection. One common approach
within this general framework of biological reductionism is to explain human
sex role patterns and inequalities by reference to our primate heritage. The most
popular model for this approach is the baboon. The scenario is as follows: Male
baboons are twice as large as females; this sexual dimorphism (differentiation in
secondary physical characteristics) is related to differences in both function and
status; male size, strength, and aggression are adaptive traits for defending the
troop and maintaining order within it, and a tight male dominance hierarchy also
reproduces this aggression, the most dominant/aggressive animal being the one
that gets the greatest access to ‘receptive’ females and to food. With minor
differences in emphasis and use of evidence, a whole series of authors imply that
male aggression and dominance (with their necessary accompaniment, female
passivity or dependence) are therefore part of our genetic primate heritage. Male
aggressive instincts are also said to have served early humans well in their role
as ‘predators’.1
There are a number of problems with this approach. In the first place, there is
much more variability in primate behaviour than these authors admit. Some
species are highly dimorphic; some are not. Mating patterns range from
monogamy to promiscuity (by both males and females), while parenting and
socialization behaviours are extraordinarily diverse among different species, or
even in the same species under different environmental conditions.2 Forest
baboons, for example, are very different from the savannah baboons so beloved
by the theorists cited above: ‘Aggression in general is very infrequent, and male
dominance hierarchies are difficult to discern. Intertroop encounters are rare, and
friendly. When the troop is startled … it flees, and, far from forming a rearguard,
the males — being biggest and strongest — are frequently up the trees long
before the females’.3 Adult females, far from being passive followers of the
males, actually determine the direction and timing of troop movement. Similarly,
chimpanzees, with whom humans share ninety-nine percent of our genes and
from whom we may have diverged as little as five million years ago, are highly
social animals who display a very low degree of male dominance, hierarchy, or
aggression.4
Where aggression and male dominance are found in primate groups, there is
some question as to how much of this is natural and how much a response to
stress. The male dominant savannah baboons live in game parks where predators
and humans are concentrated in numbers far beyond those likely in aboriginal
conditions. There is considerable evidence that such stressful circumstances,
especially captivity, markedly increase hierarchy and aggression. Indeed, the
noted researchers who filmed ‘Baboon Social Organization’ (1963) only induced
what they called ‘latent’ dominance behaviour by artificial feeding, while forest
baboons placed in cages and fed with clumps of food that had to be competed for
showed a great increase in fighting, aggression, and dominance behaviour.5 Is
such behaviour natural or pathological? Many scholars now suggest that the
normal behaviour patterns of our primate ancestors involved sharing and
cooperation rather than aggression, male dominance, and competition.6