The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain…. The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and then children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.7
The relations of private property become the mode of exchange. The development of these bourgeois priorities transforms social relations in the family, and, as Marx makes clear in The German Ideology, the family, which is seen as the only truly social relationship, becomes a subordinate need.8 The concerns of private property and possession pervade man-woman relations. In “On the Jewish Question,” Marx writes: “The species relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of commerce. The woman is bought and sold.”9 The mentality of “having” twists species relationships into those of ownership and domination, and marriage into prostitution. And so in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx writes:
Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to private property finds expression in the animal form of opposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property…. Just as woman passes from marriage to general prostitution, so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s subjective substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community.10
Marx saw women’s problems as arising from their status as mere instruments of reproduction, and thus he saw the solution in the socialist revolution. In the Manifesto he wrote that “the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution, both public and private.”11 The bourgeois family is seen in Marx’s writings as an instrument of capitalist society, with no dimensions particular unto itself. Woman’s oppression is her exploitation in a class society through bourgeois marriage and the family. Woman is perceived as just another victim, undistinguished from the proletariat in general, of the pernicious class division of labor. The sexual division of labor as the sexual definition of roles, purposes, activities, etc., had no unique existence for Marx. He had little or no sense of woman’s biological reproduction or maternal functions as critical in creating a division of labor within the family. As a result, Marx perceived the exploitation of men and women as deriving from the same source and assumed that their oppression could be understood in the same structural terms. Revolutionary consciousness is limited to understanding the class relation of exploitation.
There is no reason to doubt, however, that in communist society (where all are to achieve species existence) life would still be structured by a sexual division of labor which would entail different life options for men and women. Sex roles would preassign tasks to women which would necessitate continued alienation and isolation. Essence and existence would still not be one. Marx did not understand that the sexual division of labor in society organizes noncreative and isolating work particularly for women. The destruction of capitalism and capitalist exploitation by itself does not insure species existence, i.e., creative work, social community, and critical consciousness for women.
2. Women’s Exploitation Throughout History
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels discuss the division of labor in early precapitalist society in familial terms. The first division of labor is the “natural” division of labor in the family through the sex act. The act of child-breeding begins the division of labor.12 It is through this act that the first appearance of property arises within the family. For Marx and Engels, this is when wife and child become the slaves of the husband.
This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour power of others. Division of labour and private property are moreover identical expressions….13
Here are seeds of an early, albeit a crude, insight into the nature of sexual division of labor, although there is no discussion of it as such. What weakens and finally limits the insight is that, for Marx and Engels, this division of labor deriving from the sex act is coincidental and identical with the birth of private property—hence, “division of labor and private property are moreover identical expressions.”14 The division of labor has no specific quality of its own, and property arising from a division of labor in the act of procreation is not differentiatied from property arising from the relations of capital. Reproduction and production are seen as one, as they come to be analyzed in relation to the capitalist division of labor in society. There is no notion here that inequalities might arise from the sex act itself. Although reproduction is acknowledged as the first source of the division of labor, it never receives any specific examination. The German Ideology presents, then, a skeletal analysis of women’s condition as it changes through material conditions.
The division of labour is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour imposed by the family. The social structure is therefore limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains; below them the members of the tribe; finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops gradually.15
The division of labor “imposed by the family” is here spoken of as natural, and whether this means “necessary” or “good,” it is a division which was accepted by Marx and Engels. Here, then, the division of labor in the family is not viewed as reflective of the economic society which defines and surrounds it—as it is in the later Communist Manifesto—but rather at this early historical stage Marx and Engels see the family structuring the society and its division of labor. Marx and Engels’ analysis of the family continues: “there develops the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops spontaneously or ‘naturally’ by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g., physical strength), needs, accidents, etc.”16
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels repeated the theme developed in The German Ideology: the “first division of labour is that between man and woman for child-breeding.”17 The first class antagonism thus arises with the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, but what this antagonism is based on is never made clear.18 Engels’ claim is that the first class antagonism accompanies (arises with) the antagonism between man and woman. One would not think that the antagonism referred to was one of class. Yet he ultimately spoke of the conflict between man and woman as class conflict; the man represents the bourgeoisie within the family, the wife represents the proletariat.19 But the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are positions of power deriving from a relation to the economic means of production, not to the sex act of reproduction. By categorizing men and women as classes, the relations of reproduction are subsumed under the relations of production. It is contradictory that Engels acknowledges male-female relations within the family as defining the division of labor in society and yet completely subsumes them under categories of analysis related to reproduction. He offers no explanation that could resolve this dilemma because it stands outside the terms of his analysis.
We have seen that Engels acknowledges that the division of labor emanates from the family to the society. Yet the categories of analysis explaining the slavery of the woman in the family derive entirely from the relations of production. The family comes to be defined by the historical economic modes; it does not itself take part in defining the economy as well as the society, and it is no longer spoken of as a source of the division of labor coincident with economic relations. Economic existence comes to determine