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View allThe Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Engels
1884
The book that traced women's oppression to the invention of property.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Friedrich Engels · 1884
This is the bridge between the Marxist and women's-liberation shelves. Engels argues that the patriarchal family is not natural or eternal but historical — that monogamous marriage arose to secure property inheritance, and that the overthrow of mother-right was "the historic defeat of the female sex." The Victorian ethnography he built on, mostly Morgan's, has been superseded; the core move — treating the family and women's status as products of property relations rather than nature — is the one generations of feminist and socialist thought have argued with ever since. Read it alongside Mill and Gilman to watch the same question answered from opposite premises.
11 chapters · 63,579 words · ~4.8 hr read
Contents
Prefaces
Engels's 1884 statement of the materialist premise — and his 1891 survey of forty years of scholarship on the primeval family, from Bachofen to Morgan.
Stages and the Family
Morgan's ladder of human development, then the long central chapter: the sequence of family forms and the argument that monogamy was born of property.
The Gens, from the Iroquois to the Germans
Six case studies of the kinship clan — Iroquois, Greek, Athenian, Roman, Celtic, German — and how growing property dissolved each into a state.
Barbarism and Civilization
The summation: division of labor, money, and class produce the state — and civilization is weighed against Morgan's prophecy of a higher revival of the ancient gentes' liberty.