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Vol. 79/No. 38 October 26, 2015
(Books of the Month column)
Why capitalism extended
marriage to the working class
Problems of Women’s Liberation by Evelyn Reed is one of Pathfinder’s
Books of the Month for October. In her writings Reed explores the
economic and social roots of women’s oppression from prehistoric society
to modern capitalism. An active participant in the women’s liberation
movement of the 1960s and ’70s, she spoke and debated on this topic in
cities throughout the world. This piece is from the chapter, “How Women
Lost Control of Their Destiny and How They Can Regain It,” a talk given
to some 250 participants at the Southern Female Liberation Conference
held at Mt. Beulah, Mississippi, in May 1970. Reed joined the socialist
movement in 1940 and remained a leading member of the Socialist Workers
Party until her death in 1979. Copyright © 1969 by Pathfinder Press.
Reprinted by permission.
BY EVELYN REED
Universal marriage, covering all classes, became prevalent in Western
civilization along with the rise of bourgeois relations. Even then it
took some time to mature as a legal mandate. The poor and propertyless
passed through a period of “common law” marriage before they achieved
the same kind of legal marriage ties, sanctioned by the state, as did
the wealthy classes. Today, with or without a church wedding, all
classes of married couples receive the same state-authenticated marriage
certificates which make them officially and legally married.
At this present stage in the evolution of marriage and the family the
original propertied basis of the institution is obscured by the fact
that the poor and propertyless are just as much obliged to enter into
the state of legal wedlock as the rich. Marriage had now become
mandatory upon all classes. Failure to comply resulted in legal
penalties of various kinds, not the least of which was branding the
unmarried wife as a “prostitute” and her children as illegitimate. The
unmarried mother and her children were treated as social outcasts, a
fate that was regarded as worse than death.
This raises the question: How and why did an institution created by the
wealthy class to serve its propertied interests become extended to the
working masses which have little or no property? How did a class
institution in its inception become a mass institution in its subsequent
development? The answer to this must be sought in the capitalist mode of
class exploitation.
Capitalism brought into being large-scale industry and along with it
masses of the proletariat packed into factory towns and cities. This
brought about a change in the economic position of women. So long as
agriculture and household crafts remained dominant in production, all
the members of the family, women and children included, helped in the
work that sustained the family and the community. Cooperative labor
within the family framework was the characteristic mode of life on the
farms, in the small shops, and in the home enterprises.
But with the rise of industrial capitalism, these productive families of
the preindustrial era were displaced by the nonproductive consumer
families of urban life. With the dispossession of masses of men from
farms and small businesses, and their relocation as wage workers in
industrial cities, women were stripped of their former place in
productive work and relegated to breeding and housekeeping. They became
consumers totally dependent upon a breadwinner for their support.
Under these circumstances somebody had to be saddled with the lifetime
responsibility for taking care of dependent women and children. This was
fixed, through universal marriage, upon the husbands and fathers,
although no guarantees whatever were given to these wage earners that
they would always have jobs or sufficient pay to fulfill their family
obligations.
To conceal this economic exploitation a new myth was invented. Under
church doctrine marriages were “made in heaven” and had a divine
sanction. But now there arose the propaganda that the family was a
“natural” unit without which humans cannot satisfy their normal needs
for love and children. Hence it became the “natural” obligation of the
father and/or mother to provide for their loved ones — regardless of
whether they were unemployed or incapacitated or even dead.
Here, then, is the answer to our first question, what kind of society
requires the institution of marriage and the family and for what
purposes. It is class society that needs it, to serve the purposes of
the rich. In the beginning the institution served a single purpose, that
connected with the ownership and inheritance of private property. But
today the family serves a double purpose; it has become a supplementary
instrument in the hands of the exploiting class to rob the working
masses. Universal, state-imposed marriage became advantageous to the
profiteers with the rise of the industrial wage-slave system. It
relieved the capitalists of all social responsibility for the welfare of
the workers and dumped heavy economic burdens upon the poor in the form
of family obligations. Each tiny “nuclear” family must live or perish
through its own efforts, with little or no assistance from outside.
One difference between factory exploitation and family exploitation is
that the former is easily recognizable for what it is, while the other
is not. You cannot convince wage workers that their economic dependence
upon the bosses is either sacred or natural; on the contrary, they know
they are being put upon, sweated, and exploited. But in the case of the
family, Mother Nature and the Divinity are both conjured up to disguise
its economic basis by declaring it to be both “sacred” and “natural.” In
truth, the only thing sacred to the capitalist ruling class is the
almighty dollar and the rights of private property. Under these
conditions, the human needs for love, whether sexual or parental, are
not benefited but twisted and thwarted by an institution which was not
founded upon love but upon economic considerations.
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