finds its historical beginnings in the overthrow of 'mother right', the matrilineal society, and its replacement by patriarchal social organisation. Mother right was abolished, and the monogamous, patriarchal family became the basic unit of human society. Engels described this process most graphically: "The overthrow of mother right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she begame the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of Line Ongin ot the amil Property, and the State The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels, 182 pages, published by Pathfinder Press. Price £3.50.
Available from The Other Bookshop, PO Box 50, London NI 2XP. Include 37p postage and packing. been abolished.' The overthrow of mother right and the subordination of women in the home were the products of the same historical 'natural' function, ensuring intermarriage between different tribes, and maintaining extended torms organisation.
The element monogamous family was its emobodiment of the subjugation of one sex by the other. The concept of adultery arose tor the first time.
Process In one great historical process the social surplus that was produced as a result of the greater productivity of all human labour was appropriated by men rather than women, and between men, creating the first economic classes.
But while a class of men had appropriated the wealth of society, the existence of a matrilineal society meant that it could not be inherited by the man's kin, but instead passed at his death to the kin of his wife. His own children, as part of his tribe rather than their mother's, would not inherit this wealth. It was therefore necessary to overthrow mother right and replace it with a patrilineal organisation of society.
But patriarchy alone was insufficient, for the only way of being sure of the paternity of children was to entorce the fidelity of women. Thus the institution of monogamy followed hard on the heels of patriarchy. Monogamy is based upon the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of unfirst form of organisation of human relations to be based, not on natural, but on them.
Secondly the entire character of domestic work is changed. 'In the ancouples and their unit, children, the task entrusted to woman of managing the household was as much a public, a socially necessary industry as of food With. the patriarchal family, and still more with the mongamous family, a change came. Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became the head female servant, exparticipation in social This essential form of the family has existed throughout the entire history of class society, since its first development. It has taken different forms, with more or of the woman within the family itself, but throughout whole "civilisation', that is class society, it has been the monogamous family which has been the cellular unit of society. And as Engels explained, through the study of the specific form of the family in a particular society, the 'nature of the ancontradictions fully developed in that society' can be studied It is within the monogamous family, and the entire family system of class male society, that the oppression of women is
Socialist Action 19 June 1987