1. The oppression of women is not determined by their biology, as many contend. Its origins are economic and social in character. Throughout the evolution of pre-class and class society, women’s childbearing function has always been the same. But their social status has not always been that of a degraded domestic servant, subject to man’s control and command.

2. Before the development of class society, during the historical period that Marxists have traditionally referred to as primitive communism (subsistence societies), social production was organized communally and its product shared equally. There was therefore no exploitation or oppression of one group by another because no material basis for such social relations existed. Both sexes participated in social production, helping to ensure the sustenance and survival of all. The social status of both women and men reflected the indispensable roles that each of them played in this productive process.

3. The origin of women’s oppression is intertwined with the transition from pre-class to class society. The exact process by which this complex transition took place is a continuing subject of research and discussion even among those who subscribe to a historical materialist view. However, the fundamental lines along which women’s oppression emerged are clear. The change in women’s status developed along with the growing productivity of human labor based on agriculture, the domestication of animals, and stock raising; the rise of new divisions of labor, craftsmanship, and commerce; the private appropriation of an increasing social surplus; and the development of the possibility for some humans to prosper from the exploitation of the labor of others.

In these specific socio-economic conditions, as the exploitation of human beings became profitable for a privileged few, women, because of their biological role in production, became valuable property. Like slaves and cattle, they were a source of wealth. They alone could produce new human beings whose labor power could be exploited. Thus the purchase of women by men, along with all the rights to their future offspring, arose as one of the economic and social institutions of the new order based on private property. Women’s primary social role was increasingly defined as domestic servant and child-bearer.

Along with the private accumulation of wealth, the patriarchal family developed as the institution by which responsibility for the unproductive members of society – especially the young – was transferred from society as a whole to an identifiable individual or small group of individuals. It was the primary socio-economic institution for perpetuating from one generation to the next the class divisions of society – divisions between those who possessed property and lived off the wealth produced by the labor of others, and those who, owning no property, had to work for others to live. The destruction of the egalitarian and communal traditions and structures of primitive communism was essential for the rise of an exploiting class and its accelerated private accumulation of wealth.

This was the origin of the patriarchal family. In fact, the word family itself, which is still used in the Latin-based languages today, comes from the original Latin famulus, which means household slave, and familia, the totality of slaves belonging to one man.

Women ceased to have an independent place in social production. Their productive role was determined by the family to which they belonged, by the man to whom they were subordinate. This economic dependence determined the second-class status of women, on which the cohesiveness and continuity of the patriarchal family has always depended. If women could simply take their children and leave, without suffering any hardship, the patriarchal family would not have survived through the millennia.

The patriarchal family and the subjugation of women thus came into existence along with the other institutions of emerging class society in order to buttress nascent class divisions and perpetuate the private accumulation of wealth. The state, with its police and armies, laws and courts, enforced this relationship. Ruling-class ideology, including religion, arose on this basis and played a vital role in justifying the degradation of the female sex.

Women, it was said, were physically and mentally inferior to men and therefore were ‘naturally’ or biologically the second sex. While the subjugation of women has always had different consequences for women of distinct classes, all women, regardless of class were and are oppressed as part of the female sex.

4. The family system is the fundamental institution of class society that determines and maintains the specific character of oppression of the female sex.

Throughout the history of class society, the family system has proved its value as an institution of class rule. The form of the family has evolved and adapted itself to the changing needs of the ruling class as the modes of production and forms of private property have gone through different stages of development. The family system under classical slavery [pre-feudal times] was different from the family system during feudalism (there was no real slave family). Both were quite different from what is often called the urban ‘nuclear family’ of today.

Moreover, the family system simultaneously fulfills different social and economic requirements in reference to classes with different productive roles and property rights whose interests are diametrically opposed. For example, the ‘family’ of the serf and the ‘family’ of the nobleman were quite different socio-economic formations. However they were both part of the family system, an institution of class rule that has played an indispensable role at each stage in the history of class society.

In class society the family is the only place most people can turn to try to satisfy some basic human needs, such as love and companionship. However poorly the family may meet these needs for many, there is no real alternative as long as private property exists. The disintegration of the family under capitalism brings with it much misery and suffering precisely because no superior framework for human relations can yet emerge.

But providing for affection and companionship is not what defines the nature of the family system. It is an economic and social institution whose functions can be summarized as follows:

a) The family is the basic mechanism through which the ruling classes abrogate social responsibility for the economic well being of those whose labor power they exploit – the masses of humanity. The ruling class tries, to the degree possible, to force each family to be responsible for its own, thus institutionalizing the unequal distribution of income, status and wealth.

b) The family system provides the means for passing on property ownership from one generation to the next. It is the basic social mechanism for perpetuating the division of society into classes.

c) For the ruling class, the family system provides the most inexpensive and ideological acceptable mechanism for reproducing human labor. Making the family responsible for care of the young means that the portion of society’s accumulated wealth – appropriated as private property – this is utilized to assure reproduction of the laboring classes is minimized. Furthermore, the fact that each family is an atomized unit, fighting to assure the survival of its own, hinders the most exploited and oppressed from uniting in common action.

d) The family system enforces a social division of labor in which women are fundamentally defined by their childbearing role and assigned tasks immediately associated with this reproductive function: care of the other family members. Thus the family institution rests on and reinforces a social division of labor involving the domestic subjugation and economic dependence of women.

e) The family system is a repressive and conservatising institution that reproduces within itself the hierarchical, authoritarian relationships necessary to the maintenance of class society as a whole. It fosters the possessive, competitive, and aggressive attitudes necessary to the perpetuation of class divisions.

It molds the behavior and character structure of children from infancy through adolescence. It trains, disciplines, and polices them, teaching submission to established authority. It then curbs rebellious, non-conformist impulses. It represses and distorts all sexuality, forcing it into socially acceptable channels of male and female sexual activity for reproductive purposes and socio-economic roles. It inoculates all the social values and behavioral norms that individuals must acquire in order to survive in class society and submit to its domination. It distorts all human relationships by imposing on them the framework of economic dependence, and sexual repression.

5. Under capitalism, as in previous historical epochs, the family has evolved. But the family system continues to be an indispensable institution of class rule, fulfilling all the economic and social functions outlined.

Among the bourgeoisie, the family provides for the transmission of private property from generation to generation. Marriages often assure profitable alliances or mergers of large blocs of capital, especially in the early stages of capital accumulation.

Among the classical petty bourgeoisie, such as farmers, craftsmen or small shopkeepers, the family is also a unit of production based on the labor of family members.

For the working class, while the family provides some degree of mutual protection for its own members, in the most basic sense it is an alien class institution, one that is imposed on the working class, and serves the economic interests of the bourgeoisie not the workers. Yet working people are indoctrinated from childhood to regard it (like wage labor, private property and the state) as the most natural and imperishable of human relations.

a) With the rise of capitalism and the growth of the working class, the family unit among the workers ceases to be a petty-bourgeois unit of production although it remains the basic unit through which consumption and reproduction of labor power are organized. Each member of the family sells his or her labor power individually on the labor market. The basic economic bond that previously held together the family of the exploited and oppressed – i.e. the fact that they had to work together cooperatively in order to survive – begins to dissolve. As women are drawn into the labor market they achieve some degree of economic independence for the first time since the rise of class society. This begins to undermine the acceptance by women of their domestic subjugation. As a result, the family system in undermined.

b) Thus there is a contradiction between the increasing integration of women in the labor market and the survival of the family. As women achieve greater economic independence and more equality, the family institution begins to disintegrate. But the family system is an indispensable pillar of class rule. It must be preserved if capitalism is to survive.

c) The growing number of women in the labor market creates a deep contradiction for the capitalist class, especially during periods of accelerated expansion. They must employ more women to profit from their super-exploitation. Yet the employment of women cuts across their ability to carry out the basic unpaid domestic labor of child rearing for which women are responsible. So the state must begin to buttress the family, helping to assure and subsidize some of the economic and social functions it used to fulfill, such as education, child care, etc.

But such social services are more costly than the unpaid domestic labor of women. They absorb some of the surplus value that would otherwise be appropriated by the owners of capital. They cut into profits. Moreover, social programs of this kind foster the idea that society, not the family, should be responsible for the welfare of its nonproductive members. They raise the social expectations of the working class.

d) Unpaid work by women in the home, if women did not perform unpaid labor inside the families of the working class, the general wage level would have to rise. Real wages would have to be high enough to purchase goods and services which are now produced within the family. (Of course, the general standard of living necessary for the reproduction of labor power is a historically determined given at any time in any country. It cannot be drastically reduced without a crushing defeat of the working class.) Any general decrease of unpaid domestic labor by women would thus cut into total profits, changing the proportion between profits and wages in favor of the proletariat.

However useful it may be, a woman’s household work produces no commodities for the market and thus produces no value or surplus value. Nor does it directly enter into the process of capitalist exploitation. In value terms, unpaid domestic work in the family affects the rate of surplus value. Indirectly it increases the total mass of social surplus value.

e) The indispensable role of the family and the dilemma that the growing employment of women creates for the ruling class becomes clearest in periods of economic crisis. The rulers must accomplish two goals.

They must drive a significant number of women from the workforce to re-establish the reserve labor pool and lower wage levels.

They must cut the growing costs of social services provided by the state and transfer the economic burden and responsibility for these services back onto the individual family of the worker.

In order to accomplish both of these objectives, they must launch an ideological offensive against the very concept of women’s equality and independence, and reinforce the responsibility of the individual family for its own children, its elderly, its sick. They must reinforce the image of the family as the only ‘natural’ form of human relations, and convince women who have begun to rebel against their subordinate status that true happiness comes only through fulfilling their ‘natural’ primary role as wife-mother-housekeeper. To their dismay, the capitalists are now discovering that despite appeals to austerity and dire warnings of crisis, the more thoroughly women are integrated into the work force, the more difficult it is to push sufficient numbers back into the home.

f) In the early stages of industrialization the unregulated, unbridled, brutal exploitation of women and children often goes so far as to seriously erode the family structure in the working class and threaten its usefulness as a system for organizing, controlling, and reproducing the work force.

This was the trend that Marx and Engels drew attention to in nineteenth century England. They predicted the rapid disappearance of the family in the working class. They were correct in their basic insight and understanding of the role of the family in the capitalist society, but they mis-estimated the latent capacity of capitalism to slow down the pace of development of its inherent contradictions. They underestimated the ability of the ruling class to step in to regulate and shore up the family in order to preserve the capitalist system itself. Under strong pressure from the labor movement to ameliorate the brutal exploitation of women and children the state intervened in the long term interests of the capitalist class – even though this cut across the aim of individual capitalists to squeeze every drop of blood out of each worker for sixteen hours a day and let them die at thirty.

g) Capitalist politicians responsible for shaping policies to protect and defend the interests of the ruling class are extremely conscious of the indispensable economic, social and political role of the family and the need to maintain it as the basic social nucleus under capitalism. ‘Defense of the family’ is not only some peculiar demagogic shibboleth of the ultra-right. Maintenance of the family system is the basic political policy of every capitalist state, dictated by the social and economic needs of capitalism itself.

6.) Under capitalism, the family system also provides the mechanism for the super-exploitation of women as wage workers.

a) It provides capitalism with an exceptionally flexible reservoir of labor power that can be drawn into the labor force or sent back home with fewer social consequences than any other component of the reserve army of labor.

Because the entire ideological super-structure reinforces the fiction that women’s place is in the home, high unemployment rates for women cause relatively less social protest. After all, its is said, women work only to supplement an already existing source of income for the family. When they are unemployed, they are occupied with their household chores and are not so obviously ‘out of work’. The anger and resentment they feel is often dissipated as a serious social threat by the general isolation and atomization of women in separate, individual households. Thus in any period of economic crisis, the austerity measures of the ruling class always include attacks on women’s right to work, including increased pressure on women to accept part-time employment, cut-backs in unemployment benefits for ‘housewives’, and the reduction of social services such a child-care facilities.

b) Because women’s ‘natural’ place is in the home, capitalism has a widely accepted rationalization for perpetuating:

i) the employment of women in low-paying, unskilled jobs. “They aren’t worth training because they’ll only get pregnant or married and quit.”

ii) unequal pay rates and low pay. “They’re only working to buy gadgets and luxuries anyway.”

iii) deep divisions within the working class itself. “She’s taking a job a man should have had.”

iv) the fact that women workers are not proportionally integrated in the trade unions and other organizations of the working class. “She shouldn’t be running around going to meetings. She should be home taking care of the kids.”

c) Since all wage structures are built from the bottom up, this super-exploitation of women as a reserve work force plays an irreplaceable role in holding down men’s wages as well.

d) The subjugation of women within the family system provides the economic, social and ideological foundations that make their super-exploitation possible. Women workers are exploited not only as wage labor but also as a pariah labor pool defined by sex.

7.) Because the oppression of women is historically intertwined with the division of society into classes and with the role of the family as the basic unit of class society, this oppression can only be eradicated with the abolition of private ownership of the means of production. Today it is these class relations of production – not the productive capacities of humanity – which constitute the obstacle to transferring to society as a whole the social and economic functions borne under capitalism by the individual family.

The text above is an excerpt from a 1979 resolution passed by the World Congress of the Fourth International. The entire resolution is available in pamphlet form from Socialist Action/Walnut Publishing at 3425 Cesar Chavez St., San Francisco, CA 94110.