Production¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter establishes the materialist foundation for the entire analysis: the mode of production determines the social relations of society, including the position of women. The authors argue that the subjugation of women is not a transhistorical or biological given but a product of specific historical conditions, namely the emergence of class society. Drawing on Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the chapter traces the shift from primitive communism—where communal production and collective child-rearing meant relative equality between the sexes—to the rise of surplus production, private property, and the monogamous family as a mechanism for ensuring paternity and inheritance. The key claim is that women’s oppression originates with the division of labour that confined them to domestic work, a sphere excluded from social production and therefore rendered economically dependent and politically powerless.
The text provides concrete historical evidence: in hunter-gatherer bands, women’s gathering contributed as much to subsistence as men’s hunting, granting them social standing. The Neolithic agricultural revolution, however, introduced plough-based farming requiring greater physical strength, shifting productive labour to men and relegating women to the household. The chapter cites examples from ancient Greece, where women were legally classified as perpetual minors, and from classical Rome, where the paterfamilias held absolute authority over wife, children, and slaves. It also references the persistence of matrilineal kinship systems among the Iroquois and in parts of pre-colonial Africa as counter-evidence to claims of universal patriarchy.
The polemical thrust is directed against two opposing positions. First, it attacks bourgeois feminism, which treats patriarchy as an autonomous system of male domination separable from capitalism, arguing instead that women’s oppression is structurally embedded in class exploitation and cannot be abolished piecemeal within capitalism. Second, it refutes biological determinism—the notion that women’s reproductive role naturally consigns them to domesticity—by insisting that the division of labour is a social, not natural, arrangement. The chapter also implicitly critiques reformist approaches that seek equal pay or legal rights without challenging the capitalist mode of production itself. The conclusion is unequivocal: the full emancipation of women requires the abolition of private property and the socialisation of domestic labour, a task only possible through socialist revolution.