Significant, in this context, are the changes that took place within the family which, in this period, began to separate from the public sphere and acquire its modern connotations as the main center for the reproduction of the work-force.
The counterpart of the market, the instrument for the privatization of social relations, and, above all, for the propagation of capitalist discipline and patriarchal rule, the family emerges in the period of primitive accumulation also as the most important institution for the appropriation and concealment of women's labor. We see this in particular when we look at the working-class family. This is a subject that has been understudied. Previous discussions have privileged the family of propertied men, plausibly because, at the time to which we are referring, it was the dominant form and the model for parental and marital relations. There has also been more interest in the family as a political institution than as a place of work. What has been emphasized, then, is that in the new bourgeois family, the husband became the representative of the state, charged with disciplining and supervising the “subordinate classes,” a category that for 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ-century political theorists (Jean Bodin, for example) included the man’s wife and his children (Schochet 1975). Thus, the identification of the family as a micro-state or a micro-church, and the demand by the authorities that single workers live under the roof and rule of a master. It is also pointed out that within the bourgeois family the woman lost much of her power, being generally excluded from the family business and confined to the supervision of the household.67
But what is missing in this picture is a recognition that, while in the upper class it was property that gave the husband power over his wife and children, a similar power was granted to working-class men over women by means of women’s exclusion from the wage.
Exemplary of this trend was the family of the cottage workers in the putting-out system. Far from shunning marriage and family-making, male cottage workers depended on it, for a wife could “help” them with the work they would do for the merchants, while caring for their physical needs, and providing them with children, who from an early age could be employed at the loom or in some subsidiary occupation. Thus, even in times of population decline, cottage workers apparently continued to multiply; their families were so large that a contemporary 17ᵗʰ-century Austrian, looking at those living in his village, described them as packed in their homes like sparrows on a rafter. What stands out in this type of arrangement is that though the wife worked side-by-side with her husband, she too producing for the market, it was the husband who now received her wage. This was true also for other female workers once they married. In England “a married man … was legally entitled to his wife’s earnings” even when the job she did was nursing or breast-feeding. Thus, when a parish employed women to do this kind of job, the records “frequently hid (their) presence as workers” registering the payment made in the men’s names. “Whether the payment was made to the husband or to the wife depended on the whim of the clerk” (Mendelson and Crawford 1998: 287).
This policy, making it impossible for women to have money of their own, created the material conditions for their subjection to men and the appropriation of their labor by male workers. It is in this sense that I speak of the patriarchy of the wage. We must also rethink the concept of “wage slavery.” If it is true that male workers became only formally free under the new wage-labor regime, the group of workers who, in the transition to capitalism, most approached the condition of slaves was working-class women.67
At the same time – given the wretched conditions in which waged worked lived – the housework that women performed to reproduce their families was necessarily limited. Married or not, proletarian women needed to earn some money, which they did by holding multiple jobs. Housework, moreover, requires some reproductive capital: furniture, utensils, clothing, money for food. But waged workers lived poorly, “slaving away by day and night” (as an artisan from Nuremberg denounced in 1524), just to stave off hunger and feed their wives and children (Brauner 1995: 96). Most barely had a roof over their heads, living in huts where other families and animals also resided, and where hygiene (poorly observed even among the better off) was totally lacking; their clothes were rags, their diet at best consisted of bread, cheese, and some vegetables. Thus, we do not find in this period, among the working class, the classic figure of the full-time housewife. It was only in the 19ᵗʰ century – in response to the first intense cycle of struggle against industrial work – that the “modern family” centered on the full-time housewife’s unpaid reproductive labor was generalized in the working class, in England first and later in the United States.
Its development (following the passage of Factory Acts limiting the employment of men and children in the factories) reflected the first long-term investment the capitalist class made in the reproduction of the work-force beyond its numerical expansion. It was the result of a trade-off, forged under the threat of insurrection, between the granting of higher wages, capable of supporting a “non-working” wife, and a more intensive rate of exploitation. Marx spoke of it as a shift from “absolute” to “relative surplus,” that is, a shift from a type of exploitation based upon the lengthening of the working day to a maximum and the reduction of the wage to a minimum, to a regime where higher wages and shorter hours would be compensated with an increase in the productivity of work and the pace of production. From the capitalist perspective, it was a social revolution, overriding a longheld commitment to low wages. It resulted from a new deal between workers and employers, again founded on the exclusion of women from the wage – putting an end to their recruitment in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution. It was also the mark of a new capitalist affluence, the product of two centuries of exploitation of slave labor, soon to be boosted by a new phase of colonial expansion.
In the 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ centuries, by contrast, despite an obsessive concern with the size of population and the number of “working poor,” the actual investment in the reproduction of the work-force was extremely low. Consequently, the bulk of the reproductive labor done by proletarian women was not for their families, but for the families of their employers or for the market. One third of the female population, on average, in England, Spain, France, and Italy, worked as maids. Thus, in the proletariat, the tendency was towards the postponement of marriage and the disintegration of the family (16ᵗʰ-century English villages experienced a yearly turnover of fifty percent).68 Often the poor were even forbidden to marry, when it was feared that their children would fall on public relief, and when this actually happened, the children were taken away from them and farmed out to the parish to work. It is estimated that one third or more of the population of rural Europe remained single; in the towns the rates were even higher, especially among women; in Germany, forty percent were either “spinsters” or widows (Ozment 1983: 41-42).
Nevertheless – though the housework done by proletarian women was reduced to a minimum, and proletarian women had always to work for the market – within the working-class community of the transition period we already see the emergence of the sexual division of labor that was to become typical of the capitalist organization of work. At its center was an increasing differentiation between male and female labor, as the tasks performed by women and men became more diversified and, above all, became the carriers of different social relations.
Impoverished and disempowered as they may be, male waged workers could still benefit from their wives’ labor and wages, or they could buy the services of prostitutes. Throughout this first phase of proletarianization, it was the prostitute who often performed for male workers the function of a wife, cooking and washing for them in addition to serving them sexually. Moreover, the criminalization of prostitution, which punished the woman but hardly touched her male customers, strengthened male power. Any man could now destroy a woman simply by declaring that she was a prostitute, or by publicizing that she had given in to his sexual desires. Women would have to plead with men “not to take away their honor” (the only property left to them) (Cavallo and Cerutti 1980: 346ff), the assumption being that their lives were now in the hands of men who (like feudal lords) could exercise over them a power of life and death.69
The Taming of Women and the Redefinition of Femininity and Masculinity: Women the Savages of Europe
It is not surprising, then, in view of this devaluation of women’s labor and social status, that the insubordination of women and the methods by which they could be “tamed” were among the main themes in the literature and social policy of the “transition” (Underdown 1985a: 116-36).70 Women could not have been totally devalued as workers and deprived of autonomy with respect to men without being subjected to an intense process of social degradation; and indeed, throughout the 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ centuries, women lost ground in every area of social life.
A key area of change in this respect was the law, where in this period we can observe a steady erosion of women’s rights. 71 One of the main rights that women lost was the right to conduct economic activities alone, as femme soles. In France, they lost the right to make contracts or to represent themselves in court, being declared legal “imbeciles.” In Italy, they began to appear less frequently in the courts to denounce abuses perpetrated against them. In Germany, when a middle-class woman became a widow, it became customary to appoint a tutor to manage her affairs. German women were also forbidden to live alone or with other women and, in the case of the poor, even with their own families, since it was expected that they would not be properly controlled. In sum, together with economic and social devaluation, women experienced a process of legal infantilization.
Women’s loss of social power was also expressed through a new sexual differentiation of space. In the Mediterranean countries women were expelled not only from many waged jobs but also from the streets, where an unaccompanied woman risked being subjected to ridicule or sexual assault (Davis 1998). In England, too, (“a women’s paradise” in the eyes of some ltalian visitors), the presence of women in public began to be frowned upon. English women were discouraged from sitting in front of their homes or staying near their windows; they were also instructed not to spend time with friends (in this period the term “gossip” – female friend – began to acquire a disparaging connotation). It was even recommended that women should not visit their parents too often after marriage.
How the new sexual division of labor reshaped male-female relations can be seen from the broad debate that was carried out in the learned and popular literature on nature of female virtues and vices, one of the main avenues for the ideological redefinition of gender relations in the transition to capitalism. Known from an early phase as “la querrelle des femmes,” what transpires from this debate is a new sense of curiosity for the subject, indicating that old norms were breaking down, and the public was becoming aware that the basic elements of sexual politics were being reconstructed. Two trends within this debate can be identified. On the one hand, new cultural canons were constructed maximizing the differences between women and men and creating more feminine and more masculine prototypes (Fortunati 1984). On the other hand, it was established that women were inherently inferior to men – excessively emotional and lusty, unable to govern themselves – and had to be placed under male control. As with the condemnation of witchcraft, consensus on this matter cut across religious and intellectual lines. From the pulpit or the written page, humanists, Protestant reformers, counter-reformation Catholics, all cooperated in the vilification of women, constantly and obsessively.
(A scold is paraded through the community wearing the “bridle,” an iron contraption used to punish women with a sharp tongue. Significantly, a similar device was used by European slaveholders in Africa to subdue their captives and carry them to their ships.)
Women were accused of being unreasonable, vain, wild, wasteful. Especially blamed was the female tongue, seen as an instrument of insubordination. But the main female villain was the disobedient wife, who, together with the “scold,” the “witch,” and the “whore” was the favorite target of dramatists, popular writers, and moralists. In this sense, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1593) was the manifesto of the age. The punishment of female insubordination to patriarchal authority was called for and celebrated in countless misogynous plays and tracts. English literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period feasted on such themes. Typical of this genre is John Ford’s ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore (1633) which ends with the didactic assassination, execution and murder of three of the four female characters. Other classic works concerned with the disciplining of women are John Swetnam’s Arraignment of Lewed, Idle, Forward, Inconstant Women (1615); and The Parliament of Women (1646), a satire primarily addressed against middle class women, which portrays them as busy making laws in order to gain supremacy over their husbands. 72 Meanwhile, new laws and new forms of torture were introduced to control women’s behavior in and out of the home, confirming that the literary denigration of women expressed a precise political project aiming to strip them of any autonomy and social power. In the Europe of the Age of Reason, the women accused of being scolds were muzzled like dogs and paraded in the streets; prostitutes were whipped, or caged and subjected to fake drownings, while capital punishment was established for women convicted of adultery (Underdown 1985a: 117ff).
It is no exaggeration to say that women were treated with the same hostility and sense of estrangement accorded “Indian savages” in the literature that developed on this subject after the Conquest. The parallel is not casual. In both cases literary and cultural denigration was at the service of a project of expropriation. As we will see, the demonization of the American indigenous people served to justify their enslavement and the plunder of their resources. In Europe, the attack waged on women justified the appropriation of their labor by men and the criminalization of their control over reproduction. Always, the price of resistance was extermination. None of the tactics deployed against European women and colonial subjects would have succeeded, had they not been sustained by a campaign of terror. In the case of European women it was the witch-hunt that played the main role in the construction of their new social function, and the degradation of their social identity.
The definition of women as demonic beings, and the atrocious and humiliating practices to which so many of them were subjected left indelible marks in the collective female psyche and in women’s sense of possibilities. From every viewpoint – socially, economically, culturally, politically – the witch-hunt was a turning point in women’s lives; it was the equivalent of the historic defeat to which Engels alludes, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), as the cause of the downfall of the matriarchal world. For the witch-hunt destroyed a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power in pre-capitalist Europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feudalism.
Out of this defeat a new model of femininity emerged: the ideal woman and wife – passive, obedient, thrifty, of few words, always busy at work, and chaste. This change began at the end of the 17ᵗʰ century, after women had been subjected for more than two centuries to state terrorism. Once women were defeated, the image of femininity constructed in the “transition” was discarded as an unnecessary tool, and a new, tamed one took its place. While at the time of the witch-hunt women had been portrayed as savage beings, mentally weak, unsatiably lusty, rebellious, insubordinate, incapable of self-control, by the 18ᵗʰ century the canon has been reversed. Women were now depicted as passive, asexual beings, more obedient, more moral than men, capable of exerting a positive moral influence on them. Even their irrationality could now be valorized, as the Dutch philosopher Pierre Bayle realized in his Dictionaire Historique et Critique (1740), in which he praised the power of the female “maternal instinct,” arguing that it should be viewed as a truly providential device, ensuring that despite the disadvantages of childbirthing and childraising, women do continue to reproduce.
Colonization, Globalization, and Women
While the response to the population crisis in Europe was the subjugation of women to reproduction, in colonial America, where colonization destroyed ninety five percent of the aboriginal population, the response was the slave trade which delivered to the European ruling class an immense quantity of labor-power.
As early as the 16ᵗʰ century, approximately one million African slaves and indigenous workers were producing surplus-value for Spain in colonial America, at a rate of exploitation far higher than that of workers in Europe, and contributing to sectors of the European economy that were developing in a capitalist direction (Blaut 1992a: 45-46). 73 By 1600, Brazil alone exported twice the value in sugar of all the wool that England exported in the same year (ibid.: 42). The accumulation rate was so high in the Brazilian sugar plantations that every two years they doubled their capacity. Gold and silver too played a key role in the solution to the capitalist crisis. Gold imported from Brazil reactivated commerce and industry in Europe (DeVries 1976: 20). More than 17,000 tons were imported by 1640, giving the capitalist class there an exceptional advantage in access to workers, commodities, and land (Blaut 1992a: 38-40). But the true wealth was the labor accumulated through the slave trade, which made possible a mode of production that could not be imposed in Europe.
It is now established that the plantation system fueled the Industrial Revolution, as argued by Eric Williams, who noted that hardly a brick in Liverpool and Bristol was not cemented with African blood (1944: 61-63). But capitalism may not even have taken off without Europe’s “annexation of America,” and the “blood and sweat” that for two centuries flowed to Europe from the plantations. This must be stressed, as it helps us realize how essential slavery has been for the history of capitalism, and why, periodically, but systematically, whenever the capitalist system is threatened by a major economic crisis, the capitalist class has to launch a process of “primitive accumulation,” that is, a process of large-scale colonization and enslavement, such as the one we are witnessing at present (Bales 1999).
The plantation system was crucial for capitalist development not only because of the immense amount of surplus labor that was accumulated from it, but because it set a model of labor management, export-oriented production, economic integration and international division of labor that have since become paradigmatic for capitalist class relations.
With its immense concentration of workers and its captive labor force uprooted from its homeland, unable to rely on local support, the plantation prefigured not only the factory but also the later use of immigration and globalization to cut the cost of labor. In particular, the plantation was a key step in the formation of an international division of labor that (through the production of “consumer goods”) integrated the work of the slaves into the reproduction of the European work-force, while keeping enslaved and waged workers geographically and socially divided.
The colonial production of sugar, tea, tobacco, rum, and cotton – the most important commodities, together with bread, in the production of labor-power in Europe – did not take off on a large scale until after the 1650s, after slavery had been institutionalized and wages in Europe had begun to (modestly) rise (Rowling 1987: 51, 76, 85). It must be mentioned here, however, because, when it did take off, two mechanisms were introduced that significantly restructured the reproduction of labor internationally. On one side, a global assembly line was created that cut the cost of the commodities necessary to produce labor-power in Europe, and linked enslaved and waged workers in ways that pre-figured capitalism’s present use of Asian, African, and Latin American workers as providers of “cheap” “consumer” goods (cheapened by death squads and military violence) for the “advanced” capitalist countries.
On the other side, the metropolitan wage became the vehicle by which the goods produced by enslaved workers went to the market, and the value of the products of enslaved-labor was realized. In this way, as with female domestic work, the integration of enslaved labor into the production and reproduction of the metropolitan work-force was further established, and the wage was further redefined as an instrument of accumulation, that is, as a lever for mobilizing not only the labor of the workers paid by it, but also for the labor of a multitude of workers hidden by it, because of the unwaged conditions of their work.
Did workers in Europe know that they were buying products resulting from slave labor and, if they did, did they object to it? This is a question we would like to ask them, but it is one which I cannot answer. What is certain is that the history of tea, sugar, tobacco, and cotton is far more significant than we can deduce from the contribution which these commodities made, as raw materials or means of exchange in the slave trade, to the rise of the factory system. For what traveled with these “exports” was not only the blood of the slaves but the seeds of a new science of exploitation, and a new division of the working class by which waged-work, rather than providing an alternative to slavery, was made to depend on it for its existence, as a means (like female unpaid labor) for the expansion of the unpaid part of the waged working-day.
So closely integrated were the lives of the enslaved laborers in America and waged laborers in Europe that in the Caribbean islands, where slaves were given plots of land (“provision grounds”) to cultivate for their own use, how much land was allotted to them, and how much time was given to them to cultivate it, varied in proportion to the price of sugar on the world-market (Morrissey 1989: 51-59) – plausibly determined by the dynamics of workers’ wages and workers’ struggle over reproduction.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the integration of slave labor in the production of the European waged proletariat created a community of interests between European workers and the metropolitan capitalists, presumably cemented by their common desire for cheap imported goods.
In reality, like the Conquest, the slave trade was an epochal misfortune for European workers. As we have seen, sIavery (like the witch-hunt) was a major ground of experimentation for methods of labor-control that were later imported into Europe. Slavery also affected the European workers’ wages and legal status; for it cannot be a coincidence that only with the end of slavery did wages in Europe decisively increase and did European workers gain the right to organize.
It is also hard to imagine that workers in Europe profited from the Conquest of America, at least in its initial phase. Let us remember that it was the intensity of the antifeudal struggle that instigated the lesser nobility and the merchants to seek colonial expansion, and that the conquistadors came from the ranks of the most-hated enemies of the European working class. It is also important to remember that the Conquest provided the European ruling class with the silver and gold used to pay the mercenary armies that defeated the urban and rural revolts; and that, in the same years when Arawaks, Aztecs, and Incas were being subjugated, workers in Europe were being driven from their homes, branded like animals, and burnt as witches.
We should not assume, then, that the European proletariat was always an accomplice to the plunder of the Americas, though individual proletarians undoubtedly were. The nobility expected so little cooperation from the “lower classes” that initially the Spaniards allowed only a few to embark. Only 8,000 Spaniards migrated legally to the Americas in the entire 16ᵗʰ century, the clergy making up 17% of the lot (Hamilton 1965: 299; Williams 1984: 38-40). Even later, people were forbidden from settling overseas independently, because it was feared that they might collaborate with the local population.
For most proletarians, in the 17ᵗʰ and 18ᵗʰ centuries, access to the New World was through indentured servitude and “transportation,” the punishment which the authorities in England adopted to rid the country of convicts, political and religious dissidents, and the vast population of vagabonds and beggars that was produced by the enclosures. As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker point out in The Many-Headed Hydra (2000), the colonizers’ fear of unrestricted migration was well-founded, given the wretched living conditions that prevailed in Europe, and the appeal exercised by the reports that circulated about the New World, which pictured it as a wonder land where people lived free from toil and tyranny, masters and greed, and where “myne” and “thyne” had no place, all things being held in common (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000; Brandon 1986: 6-7). So strong was the attraction exercised by the New World that the vision of a new society it provided apparently influenced the political thought of the Enlightenment, contributing to the emergence of a new concept of “liberty,” taken to signify masterlessness, an idea previously unknown in European political theory (Brandon 1986: 23-28). Not surprisingly, some Europeans tried to “lose themselves” in this utopian world where, as Linebaugh and Rediker powerfully put it, they could reconstruct the lost experience of the commons (2000: 24). Some lived for years with Indian tribes despite restrictions placed on those who settled in the American colonies and the heavy price to be paid if caught, since escapees were treated like traitors and put to death. This was the fate of some young English settlers in Virginia who, having run away to live with the Indians, on being caught were condemned by the colony's councilmen to be “burned, broken on the wheel... {and} hanged or shot to death” (Koning 1993: 61). “Terror created boundaries,” Linebaugh and Rediker comment (2000: 34). Yet, as late as 1699, the English still had a great difficulty persuading the people whom the Indians captivated to leave their Indian manner of living.
No argument, no entreaties, no tears {a contemporary reported} ... could persuade many of them to leave their Indian friends. On the other hand, Indian children have been carefully educated among the English, clothed and taught, yet there is not one instance that any of these would remain, but returned to their own nations (Koning 1993: 60).
As for the European proletarians who signed themselves away indentured servitude or arrived in the New World in consequence of a penal sentence, their lot was not too different, at first, from that of the African slaves with whom they often worked side by side. Their hostility to their masters was equally intense, so that the planters viewed them as a dangerous lot and, by the second half of the 17ᵗʰ century, began to limit their use and introduced a legislation aimed at separating them from the Africans. But only at the end of the 18ᵗʰ century were racial boundaries irrevocably drawn (Moulier Boutang 1998). Until then, the possibility of alliances between whites, blacks, and aboriginal peoples, and the fear of such unity in the European ruling class’ imagination, at home and on the plantations, was constantly present. Shakespeare gave voice to it in The Tempest (1612) where he pictured the conspiracy organized by Caliban, the native rebel, son of a witch, and by Trinculo and Stephano, the ocean-going European proletarians, suggesting the possibility of a fatal alliance among the oppressed, and providing a counterpoint to Prospero’s magic healing of the discord among the rulers.
In The Tempest the conspiracy ends ignominiously, with the European proletarians demonstrating to be nothing better than petty thieves and drunkards, and with Caliban begging forgiveness from his colonial master. Thus, when the defeated rebels are brought in front of Prospero and his former enemies Sebastian and Antonio (now reconciled with him), they are met with derision and thoughts of ownership and division:
SEBASTIAN. What things are these, my lord Antonio?
Will money buy them?
ANTONIO. Very like; one of them is a plain fish, and, no doubt, marchetable.
PROSPERO. Mark but the badges of these men, my lords,
Then say if they be true. This mis-shapen knave,
His mother was a witch, and one so strong
That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs,
And deal in her command without her power.
These three have robbed me; and this demi-devil –
For he’s a bastard one - had plotted with them
To take my life. Two of these fellows you
Must know and own. This thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine. (Shakespeare, Act V, Scene I, lines 265-276)
Offstage, however, the threat continued. “Both on Bermuda and Barbados white servants were discovered plotting with African slaves, as thousands of convicts were being shipped there in the 1650s from the British islands” (Rowling 1987: 57). In Virginia the peak in the alliance between black and white servants was Bacon’s Rebellion of 1675-76, when African slaves and British indentured servants joined together to conspire against their masters.
It is for this reason that, starting in the 1640s, the accumulation of an enslaved proletariat in the Southern American colonies and the Caribbean was accompanied by the construction of racial hierarchies, thwarting the possibility of such combinations. Laws were passed depriving Africans of previously granted civil rights, such as citizenship, the right to bear arms, and the right to make depositions or seek redress in a tribunal for injuries suffered. The turning point was when slavery was made an hereditary condition, and the slave masters were given the right to beat and kill their slaves. In addition, marriages between “blacks” and “whites” were forbidden. Later, after the American War of Independence, white indentured servitude, deemed a vestige of British rule, was eliminated. As a result, by the late 18th century, colonial America had moved from “a society with slaves to a slave society” (Moulier Boutang 1998: 189), and the possibility of solidarity between Africans and whites had been severely undermined. “White,” in the colonies, became not just a badge of social and economic privilege “serving to designate those who until 1650 had been called ‘Christians’ and afterwards ‘English’ or ‘free men’” (ibid.: 194), but a moral attribute, a means by which social hegemony was naturalized. “Black” or “African,” by contrast, became synonymous with slave, so much so that free black people – still a sizeable presence in early 17ᵗʰ-century America – were later forced to prove that they were free.
Endnotes
66. In a thorough critique of 17ᵗʰ-century social contract theory, as formulated by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Carol Pateman (1988) argues that the “social contract” was based on a more fundamental “sexual contract,” which recognized men’s right to appropriate women’s bodies and women’s labor.
67. Ruth Mazo Karras (1996) writes that “’Common woman’ meant a woman available to all men; unlike ‘common man’ which denoted someone of humble origins and could be used in either a derogatory or a laudatory sense, it did not convey any meaning either of non-gentile behavior or of class solidarity” (p. 138).
68. For the family in the period of the “transition,” see Lawrence Stone (1977); and André Burguière and François Lebrun, “Priests, Prince, and Family,” in Burguière, et al., A History of the Family: The Impact of Modernity (1996), Volume Two, 95ff.
69. On the character of 17ᵗʰ-century patriarchalism and, in particular, the concept of patriarchal power in social contract theory, see again Pateman (1988); Zilla Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (1981); and Margaret R. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes To Women in Early Modern Society (1995).
Discussing the changes contract theory brought about in England, in the legal and philosophical attitude towards women, Sommerville argues that the contractarians supported the subordination of women to men as much as the patriarchalists, but justified it on different grounds. Being at least formally committed to the principle of “natural equality,” and “government by consent,” in defense of male supremacy they invoked the theory of women’s “natural inferiority,” according to which women would consent to their husbands’ appropriation of their property and voting rights upon realizing their intrinsic weakness and necessary dependence on men.
70. See Underdown (1985a), “The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England,” in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (1985), 116-136; Mendelson and Crawford (1998), 69-71.
71. On women’s loss of rights in 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ-century Europe, see (among others) Merry Wiesner (1993), who writes that: “The spread of Roman law had a largely negative effect on women’s civil legal status in the early modern period both because of the views of women which jurists chose to adopt from it and the stricter enforcement of existing laws to which it gave rise” (p.33).
72. Adding to the dramas and tracts also the court records of the period, Underdown concludes that “between 1560 and 1640 ... such records disclose an intense preoccupation with women who are a visible threat to the parriarchal system. Women scolding and brawling with their neighbors, single women refusing to enter service, wives domineering or beating their husbands: all seem to surface more frequently than in the period immediately before or afterwards. It will not go unnnoticed that this is also the period when witchcraft accusations reach a peak” (1985a: 119).
73. James Blaut (1992a) points out that within a few decades after 1492 “the rate of growth and change speeded up dramatically and Europe entered a period of rapid development.” He writes:
“Colonial enterprise in the 16ᵗʰ century produced capital in a number of ways. One was gold and silver mining. A second was plantation agriculture, principally in Brazil. A third was trade with Asia in spice, cloth and much more. A fourth element was the profit returned to European houses from a variety of productive and commercial enterprises in the Americas. ...A fifth was slaving. Accumulation from these sources was massive (p.38).
Would Caliban’s conspiracy have had a different outcome had its protagonists been women? Had the instigators been not Caliban but his mother, Sycorax, the powerful Algerian witch that Shakespeare hides in the play’s background, and not Trinculo and Stephano but the sisters of the witches who, in the same years of the Conquest, were being burned in Europe at the stake?
This question is a rhetorical one, but it serves to question the nature of the sexual division of labor in the colonies, and of the bonds that could be established there between European, indigenous, and African women by virtue of a common experience of sexual discrimination.
In I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992), Maryse Condé gives us an insight into the kind of situation that could produce such bonding, by describing how Tituba and her new mistress, the Puritan Samuel Parris’ young wife, gave each other support at first against his murderous contempt for women.
An even more outstanding example comes from the Caribbean, where low-class English women “transported” from Britain as convicts or indentured servants became a significant part of the labor-gangs on the sugar estates. “Considered unfit for marriage by propertied white males, and disqualified for domestic service,"” because of their insolence and riotous disposition, “landless white women were dismissed to manual labor in plantations, public construction works, and the urban service sector. In these worlds they socialized intimately with the slave community, and with enslaved black men.” They established households and had children with them (Beckles 1995: 131-32). They also cooperated as well as competed with female slaves in the marketing of produce or stolen goods.
But with the institutionalization of slavery, which was accompanied by a lessening of the burden for white workers, and a decrease in the number of women arriving from Europe as wives for the planters, the situation changed drastically. Regardless of their social origin, white women were upgraded, or married off within the ranks of the white power structure, and whenever possible they became owners of slaves themselves, usually female ones, employed for domestic work (ibid.).74
This, however, was not an automatic process. Like sexism, racism had to be legislated and enforced. Among the most revealing prohibitions we must again count that marriage and sexual relations between blacks and whites were forbidden, white women who married black slaves were condemned, and the children resulting from such marriages were enslaved for life. Passed in Maryland and Virginia in the 1660s, these laws prove that a segregated, racist society was instituted from above, and that intimate relations between “blacks” and “whites” must have been very common, indeed, if life-enslavement was deemed necessary to terminate them.
As if following the script laid out by the witch-hunt, the new laws demonized the relation between white women and black men. When they were passed in the 1600s, the witch-hunt in Europe was coming to an end, but in America all the taboos surrounding the witch and the black devil were being revived, this time at the expense of black men.
“Divide and rule” also became official policy in the Spanish colonies, after a period when the numerical inferiority of the colonists recommended a more liberal attitude towards inter-ethnic relations and alliances with the local chiefs through marrliage. But, in the 1540s, as the increase in the number of mestizos was undermining colonial privilege, “race” was established as a key factor in the transmission of property, and a hierarchy was put in place to separate indigenous, mestizos, and mulattos from each other and from the white population (Nash 1980).75 Prohibitions relating to marriage and female sexuality served here, too, to enforce social exclusion. But in Spanish America, segregation along racial lines succeeded only in part, checked by migration, population decline, indigenous revolt, and the formation of a white urban proletariat with no prospect of economic advancement, and therefore prone to identify with mestizos and mulattos more than with the white upper-class. Thus, while in the plantation societies of the Caribbean the differences between European and Africans increased with time, in the South American colonies a “re-composition” became possible, especially among low-class European, mestiza, and African women who, beside their precarious economic position, shared the disadvantages deriving from the double standard built into the law, which made them vulnerable to male abuse.
(A female slave being branded. The branding of women by the devil had figured prominently in the European witch-trials, as a symbol of total subjugation. But in reality, the true devils were the white slave traders and plantantion owners who (like the men in this picture) did not hesitate to treat the women they enslave like cattle.)
Signs of this “recomposition” can be found in the records which the Inquisition kept in 18ᵗʰ century Mexico of the investigations it conducted to eradicate magical and heretic beliefs (Behar 1987: 34-51).The task was hopeless, and soon the Inquisition lost interest in the project, convinced that popular magic was no longer a threat to the political order. But the testimonies it collected reveal the existence of multiple exchanges among women in matters relating to magical cures and love remedies, creating in time a new cultural reality drawn from the encounter between the African, European and indigenous magical traditions. As Ruth Behar writes:
Indian women gave hummingbirds to Spanish healers for use in sexual attraction, mulatta women told mestiza women how to tame their husbands, a loba sorceress introduced a coyota to the Devil. This “popular” system of belief ran parallel to the system of belief of the Church, and it spread as quickly as Christianity did in the New World, so that after a while it became impossible to distinguish in it what was “Indian” or “Spanish” or “African” (ibid.).76
Assimilated in the eyes of the Inquisition as people “without reason,” this variegated female world which Ruth Behar describes is a telling example of the alliances that, across colonial and color lines, women could build, by virtue of their common experience, and their interest in sharing the traditional knowledges and practices available to them to control their reproduction and fight sexual discrimination.
Like discrimination on the basis of “race,” this was more than a cultural baggage which the colonizers brought from Europe with their pikes and horses. No less than the destruction of communalism, it was a strategy clictated by specific economic interest and the need to create the preconditions for a capitalist economy, and as such always adjusted to the task at hand.
In Mexico and Peru, where population decline recommended that female domestic labor in the home be incentivized, a new sexual hierarchy was introduced by the Spanish authorities that stripped indigenous women of their autonomy, and gave their male kin more power over them. Under the new laws, married women became men’s property, and were forced (against the traditional custom) to follow their husbands to their homes. A compadrazgo system was also created further limiting their rights, placing the authority over children in male hands. In addition, to ensure that indigenous women reproduced the workers recruited to do mita work in the mines, the Spanish authorities legislated that no one could separate husband from wife, which meant that women were forced to follow their husbands whether they wanted it or not, even to areas known to be death camps, due to the pollution created by the mining (Cook Noble 1981: 205-6).77
The intervention of the French Jesuits in the disciplining and training of the Montagnais-Naskapi, in mid-17ᵗʰ century Canada, provides a revealing example of how gender differences were accumulated. The story is told by the late anthropologist Eleanor Leacock in her Myths of Male Dominance (1981), where she examines the diary of one of its protagonists. This was Father Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary who, in typical colonial fashion, had joined a French trading post to Christianize the Indians, and turn them into citizens of “New France.” The Montagnais-Naskapi were a nomadic Indian nation that had lived in great harmony, hunting and fishing in the eastern Labrador Peninsula. But by the time of Le Jeune’s arrival, their community was being undermined by the presence of Europeans and the spread of fur-trading, so that some men, eager to strike a commercial alliance with them, were amenable to letting the French dictate how they should govern themselves (Leacock 1981: 396).
As often happened when Europeans came in contact with native Americans populations, the French were impressed by Montagnais-Naskapi generosity, their sense of cooperation and indifference to status, but they were scandalized by their “lack of morals;” they saw that the Naskapi had no conception of private property, of authority, of male superiority, and they even refused to punish their children (Leacock 1981: 34-38). The Jesuits decided to change all that, setting out to teach the Indians the basic elements of civilization, convinced that this was necessary to turn them into reliable trade partners. In this spirit, they first taught them that “man is the master,” that “in France women do not rule their husbands,” and that courting at night, divorce at either partner’s desire, and sexual freedom for both spouses, before or after marriage, had to be forbidden. Here is a telling exchange Le Jeune had, on this score, with a Naskapi man:
“I told him it was not honorable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was present, was his son. He replied, ‘Thou has no sense. You French people love only your children; but we love all the children of our tribe.’ I began to laugh seeing that he philosophized in horse and mule fashion” (ibid.: 50).
Backed by the Governor of New France, the Jesuits succeeded in convincing the Naskapi to provide themselves with some chiefs, and bring “their” women to order. Typically, one weapon they used was to insinuate that women who were too independent and did not obey their husbands were creatures of the devil. When, angered by the men’s attempts to subdue them, the Naskapi women ran away, the Jesuits persuaded the men to chase after their spouses and threaten them with imprisonment:
“Such acts of justice” – Le Jeune proudly commented in one particular case – “cause no surprise in France, because it is usual there to proceed in that manner. But among these people ... where everyone considers himself from birth as free as the wild animals that roam in their great forests ... it is a marvel, or rather a miracle, to see a peremptory command obeyed, or any act of severity or justice performed” (ibid.: 54).
The Jesuits’ greatest victory, however, was persuading the Naskapi to beat their children, believing that the “savages’” excessive fondness for their offspring was the major obstacle to their Christianization. Le Jeune’s diary records the first instance in which a girl was publicly beaten, while one of her relatives gave a chilling lecture to the bystanders on the historic significance of the event: “This is the first punishment by beating (he said) we inflict on anyone of our Nation...” (ibid.: 54-55).
The Montagnais-Naskapi men owed their training in male supremacy to the fact that the French wanted to instill in them the “instinct” for private property, to induce them to become reliable partners in the fur trade. Very different was the situation on the plantations, where the sexual division of labor was immediately dictated by the planters’ requirements for labor-power, and by the price of commodities produced by the slaves on the international market.
Until the abolition of the slave trade, as Barbara Bush and Marietta Morrissey have documented, both women and men were subjected to the same degree of exploitation; the planters found it more profitable to work and “consume” slaves to death than to encourage their reproduction. Neither the sexual division of labor nor sexual hierarchies were thus pronounced. African men had no say concerning the destiny of their female companions and kin; as for women, far from being given special consideration, they were expected to work in the fields like men, especially when sugar and tobacco were in high demand, and they were subject to the same cruel punishments, even when pregnant (Bush 1990: 42-44).
Ironically then, it would seem that in slavery women “achieved” a rough equality with the men of their class (Momsen 1993). But their treatment was never the same. Women were given less to eat; unlike men, they were vulnerable to their masters’ sexual assaults; and more cruel punishment were inflicted on them, for in addition to the physical agony women had to bear the sexual humiliation always attached to them and the damage done, when pregnant, to the fetuses they carried.
A new page, moreover, opened after 1807, when the slave trade was abolished and the Caribbean and American planters, adopted a “slave breeding” policy. As Hilary Beckles points out, in relation to the island of Barbados, plantation owners had attempted to control the reproductive patterns of female slaves since the 17ᵗʰ century, “{encouraging} them to have fewer or more children in any given span of time,” depending on how much field labor was needed. But only when the supply of African slaves diminished did the regulation of women’s sexual relations and reproductive patterns become more systematic and intense (Beckles 1989: 92).
In Europe, forcing women to procreate had led to the imposition of capital punishment for contraception. In the plantations, where slaves were becoming a precious commodity, the shift to a breeding policy made women more vulnerable to sexual assault, though it led to some “ameliorations” of women’s work conditions: a reduction of work-hours, the building of lying-in-houses, the provision of midwives assisting the delivery, an expansion of social rights (e.g. of travel and assembly) (Beckles: 1989: 99-100; Bush 1990: 135). But these changes could not reduce the damages inflicted on women by field-labor, nor the bitterness women experienced because of their lack of freedom. With the exception of Barbados, the planters’ attempt to expand the work-force through “natural reproduction” failed, and the birth rates on the plantations remained “abnormally low” (Bush 136-37; Beckles 1989, ibid.). Whether this phenomenon was a result of outright resistance to the perpetuation of slavery, or a consequence of the physical debilitation produced by the harsh conditions to which enslaved women were subjected, is still a matter of debate (Bush 1990: 143ff). But, as Bush points out, there are good reasons to believe that the main cause of the failure was the refusal of women to procreate, for as soon as slavery was eradicated, even when their economic conditions in some respect deteriorated, the conmunities of freed slaves began to grow (Bush 1990).78
Women’s refusals of victimization also reshaped the sexual division of labor, as occurred in Caribbean islands where enslaved women turned themselves into semi-free market vendors of the products they cultivated in the “provision grounds” (in Jamaica, “polinks”), given by the planters to the slaves so that they could to support themselves. The planters adopted this measure to save on the cost of reproducing labor. But access to the “provision grounds” turned out to be advantageous for the slaves as well; it gave them more mobility, and the possibility to use the time allotted for their cultivation for other activities. Being able to produce small crops that couJd be eaten or sold boosted their independence. Those most devoted to the success of the provision grounds were women, who marketed the crops, re-appropriating and reproducing within the plantation system what had been one of their main occupations in Africa. As a result, by the mid-18ᵗʰ century, enslaved women in the Caribbean had carved out for themselves a place in the plantation economy, contributing to the expansion, if not the creation, of the island’s food market. They did so both as producers of much of the food consumed by the slaves and the white population, and also as hucksters and market vendors of the crops they cultivated, supplemented with goods taken from the master’s shop, or exchanged with other slaves, or given to them for sale by their masters.
It was in this capacity that female slaves also came into contact with white proletarian women, often former indentured servants, even after the latter had been removed from gang-labor and emancipated. Their relationship at times could be hostile: proletarian European women, who also survived mostly through the growing and marketing of food crops, stole at times the products that slave women brought to the market, or attempted to impede their sales. But both groups of women also collaborated in building a vast network of buying and selling relations which evaded the laws passed by the colonial authorities, who periodically worried that these activities may place the slaves beyond their control.
Despite the legislation introduced to prevent them from selling or limiting the places in which they could do so, enslaved women continued to expand their marketing activities and the cultivation of their provision plots, which they came to view as their own so that, by the late 18ᵗʰ century, they were forming a proto-peasantry with practically a monopoly of island markets. Thus, according to some historians, even before emancipation, slavery in the Caribbean had practically ended. Female slaves – against all odds – were a key force in this process, the ones who, with their determination, shaped the development of the slave community and of the islands’ economies, despite the authorities’ many attempts to limit their power.
Enslaved Caribbean women had also a decisive impact on the culture of the white population, especially that of white women, through their activities as healers, seers, experts in magical practices, and their “domination” of the kitchens, and bedrooms, of their masters (Bush 1990).
Not surprisingly, they were seen as the heart of the slave community. Visitors were impressed by their singing, their head-kerchiefs and dresses, and their extravagant manner of speaking which are now understood as a means of satirizing their masters. African and Creole women influenced the customs of poor female whites, whom a contemporary portrayed as behaving like Africans, walking with their children strapped on their hips, while balancing trays with goods on their heads (Beckles 1989: 81). But their main achievement was the development of a politics of self-reliance, grounded in survival strategies and female networks. These practices and the values attached to them, which Rosalyn Terborg Penn has identified as the essential tenets of comemporary African feminism, redefined the African community of the diaspora (pp. 3-7). They created not only the foundations for a new female African identity, but also the foundations for a new society committed – against the capitalist attempt to impose scarcity and dependence as structural conditions of life – to the re-appropriation and concentration in women’s hands of the fundamental means of subsistence, starting from the land, the production of food, and the inter-generational transmission of knowledge and cooperation.
(Above: A family of slaves (detail). Enslaved women struggled to continue the activities they had carried on in Africa, such as marketing the produce they grew, which enabled them to better support their families and achieve some autonomy. (From Barbara Bush, 1990.)
Below: A festive gathering on a West Indian plantation. Women were the heart of such gatherings as they were the heart of the enslaved community, and the staunchest defenders of the culture brought from Africa.)
Capitalism and the Sexual Divison of Labor
As this brief history of women and primitive accumulation has shown, the construction of a new patriarchal order, making of women the servants of the male work-force, was a major aspect of capitalist development.
On its basis a new sexual division of labor could be enforced that differentiated not only the tasks that women and men should perform, but their experiences, their lives, their relation to capital and to other sectors of the working class. Thus, no less than the international division of labor, the sexual division of labor was above all a power-relation, a division within the work-force, while being an immense boost to capital accumulation.
This point must be emphasized, given the tendency to attribute the leap capitalism brought about in the productivity of labor only to the specialization of work-tasks. In reality, the advantages which the capitalist class derived from the differentiation between agricultural and industrial labor and within industrial labor itself – celebrated in Adam Smith’s ode to pin-making – pale when compared to those it derived from the degradation of women’s work and social position.
As I have argued, the power-difference between women and men and the concealment of women’s unpaid-labor under the cover of natural inferiority, have enabled capitalism to immensely expand the “unpaid part of the working day,” and use the (male) wage to accumulate women’s labor; in many cases, they have also served to deflect class antagonism into an antagonism between men and women. Thus, primitive accumulation has been above all an accumulation of differences, inequalities, hierarchies, divisions, which have alienated workers from each other and even from themselves.
As we have seen, male workers have often been complicitous with this process, as they have tried to maintain their power with respect to capital by devaluing and disciplining women, children, and the populations the capitalist class has colonized. But the power that men have imposed on women by virtue of their access to wage-labor and their recognized contribution to capitalist accumulation has been paid at the price of self-alienation, and the “primitive disaccumulation” of their own individual and collective powers.
In the next chapters I further examine this disaccumulation process by discussing three key aspects of transition from feudalism to capitalism: the constitution of the proletarian body into a work-machine, the persecution of women as witches, and the creation of “savages” and “cannibals” both in Europe and the New World.
Endnotes
74. Exemplary is the case of Bermuda, cited by Elaine Forman Crane (1990). Crane writes that several white women in Bermuda were owners of slaves – usually other women – thanks to whose labor they were able to maintain a certain degree of economic autonomy (pp. 231-258).
75. June Nash (1980) writes that “A significant change came in 1549 when racial origin became a factor, along with legally sanctioned marital unions, in defining rights of succession. The new law stated that no mulatto (offspring of a black man and an Indian women), mestizo, person born out of wedlock was allowed to have Indians in encomienda. ...Mestizo and illegitimate became almost synonymous” (p. 140).
76. A coyota was a part-mestiza and part-Indian woman. Ruth Behar (1987), 45.
77. The most deadly ones were the mercury mines, like that in Huancavelica, in which thousands of workers died of slow poisoning amidst horrible sufferings. As David Noble Cook writes:
“Laborers in the Huancavelica mine faced both immediate and long term dangers. Cave-ins, floods, and falls as a result of slipping shafts posed daily threats. Intermediate health hazards were presented by a poor diet, inadequate ventilation in the underground chambers, and a sharp temperature difference between the mine interiors and the rarefied Andean atmosphere. ...Workers who remained for long periods in the mines perhaps suffered the worst fate of all. Dust and fine particles were released into the air by the striking of the tools used to break the ore loose. Indians inhaled the dust, which contained four dangerous substances: mercury vapors, arsenic, arsenic anhydride, and cinnabar. Long exposure ... resulted in death. Known as mal de la mina, or mine sickness, it was incurable when advanced. In less severe cases the gums were ulcerated and eaten away... (pp. 205-6).
78. Barbara Bush (1990) points out that, if they wanted to abort, slave women certainly knew how to, having had available to them the knowledge brought from Africa (p. 141).
(Title page of Andreas Vesalius’ DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA (Padua, 1543). The triumph of the male, upper class, patriarchal order through the constitution of the new anatomical theatre could not be more complete. Of the woman dissected and delivered to the public gaze, the author tells us that “in fear of being hanged {she} had declared herself pregnant,” but after it was discovered that she was not, she was hung. The female figure in the back (perhaps a prostitute or a midwife) lowers her eyes, possibly ashamed in front of the obscenity of the scene and its implicit violence.)
tears posted:I picked up this book and thought i'd have a go at reviewing it: nice high quality glossy paper, cover has a matt finish that is very nice to touch, excellent use of pictures (lacking from most books, why?) pleasing choice of font, font size is a little small though. Great production values on this book
me picking up the book: Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God. It even has a watermark. *begins to sweat*
cars posted:Daddyholes RESPONDS to tears Caliban And The Witch Review (Font Size Claims DEBUN...
i began to laugh seeing that he philosophized in a horse and mule fashion
--
The Myth of Man-the-Hunter
Women's productivity is the precondition of all other human productivity, not only in the sense that they are always the producers of new men and women, but also in the sense that the first social division of labour, that between female gatherers (later also cultivators) and predominantly male hunters, could take place only on the basis of a developed female productivity.
Female productivity consisted, above all, in the ability to provide the daily subsistence, the guarantee of survival, for the members of the clan or band. Women necessarily had to secure the ‘daily bread’, not only for themselves and their children, but also for the men if they had no luck on their hunting expeditions, because hunting is an ‘economy of risk’.
It has been proved conclusively, particularly by the critical research of feminist scholars, that the survival of mankind has been due much more to ‘woman-the-gatherer’ than ‘man-the-hunter’, in contrast to what social-Darwinists of old or of new preach. Even among existing hunters and gatherers, women provide up to 80 per cent of the daily food, whereas men contribute only a small portion by hunting (Lee and de Vore, 1976, quoted by Fisher, 1979: 48). By a secondary analysis of a sample of hunters and gatherers from Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, Martin and Voorhies have proved that 58 per cent of the subsistence of these societies was provided by gathering, 25 per cent by hunting, and the rest by hunting and gathering done together (1975: 181). Tiwi women, in Australia, who are both hunters and gatherers, got 50 per cent of their food by gathering, 30 per cent by hunting and 20 per cent by fishing. Jane Goodale, who studied the Tiwi women, said that bush-hunting and collecting was the most important productive activity:
…the women not only could but did provide the major daily supply of a variety of foods to members of their camp … Men’s hunting required considerable skill and strength, but the birds, bats, fish, crocodiles, dugongs and turtles they contributed to the household were luxury items rather than staples (Goodale, 1971: 169)
It is obvious from these examples that, among existing hunters and gatherers, hunting does by no means have the economic importance which is usually ascribed to it and that the women are the providers of the bulk of the daily staple food. In fact, all hunters of big game depended on the supply by their women of food which is not produced by hunting, if they want to go on a hunting expedition. This is the reason why the old Iroquois women had a voice in the decision-making on war and hunting expeditions. If they refused to give men the necessary supply of food for their adventures, the men had to stay at home (Leacock, 1978; Brown, 1970).
Elisabeth Fisher gives us further examples of still existing foraging peoples among whom women are the main providers of the daily food, particularly in the temperate and southern zones. But she also argues that the gathering of vegetable food was more important for our early ancestors than hunting. She refers to the study of coprolites, fossile excrement, which reveals that the groups that lived 200,000 years ago on the southern French coast mainly survived on a diet of shellfish, mussels and grains, not meat. Twelve-thousand-year-old coprolites from Mexico suggest that millet was the main staple food in that area (Fisher, 1979: 57-58).
Though it is obvious from these examples, as well as from common sense, that humanity would not have survived if man-the-hunter’s productivity had been the base for the daily subsistence of the early societies, the notion that man-the-hunter was the inventor of the first tools, the provider of food, inventor of human society and protector of women and children persists not only in popular literature and films, but also among serious social scientists, and even among Marxist scholars.
The man-the-hunter hypothesis has been popularized particularly by anthropologists, and behaviourists and recently by sociobiologists who follow the line of evolutionist thinking developed by Raymond Dart, a South African anthropologist, who maintained that the first hominids had made their first tools out of the bones of slain members of their own kind (Fisher, 49-50). Following this hypothesis, Konrad Lorenz (1963), Robert Ardrey (1966, 1976), Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox (1971) argue that hunting was the motor of human development and that the existing relationship of dominance between women and men originates in the ‘biological infrastructure’ of stone-age hunters (Tiger and Fox, 1971). According to these authors, the (male) hunter is not only the inventor of the first tools – which of course are weapons – but also of the upright gait, because man-the-hunter needed to have his hands free for the throwing of projectiles. According to them, he is also the ‘breadwinner’, the protector of weak and dependent women, the social engineer, the inventor of norms and hierarchical systems which have only one aim, namely to curb the biologically programmed aggressiveness of the males in their fight for control over the sexuality of the females. They draw a direct line from the observed behaviour of some of them primates to the behaviour of the human male, and maintain that the male primates strive to come to the top of the male hierarchy in order to be able to subject the females for their own sexual satisfaction.
The efforts of the human primate to get to the top of the male hierarchy, which apparently is only slightly, but in fact fundamentally, different from that of the apes, aim at gaining control over the female members of his own group in order to exchange them against the women of another group (emphasis Tiger and Fox). Thus, he gets for himself sexual satisfaction and political advantages (Tiger and Fox, 1971).
The ‘cultural’ achievement of these human hunter-primates seems to be that they have risen (or ‘evolved’) from the stage of Rape to the stage of Exchange of Women. The exploitative dominance relationship between men and women has been ingrained into the ‘biological infrastructure’ of the hunting behaviour; men are the providers of meat, for which women have a craving. Therefore, the hunters were able to subject and subordinate the women permanently as sexual objects and worker bees. What gave the hunters this tremendous advantage over women was, according to these authors, the ‘bonding principle’, which evolved out of hunting in groups. Tiger already advanced the idea of the ‘male bonding’ principle as the root cause of male supremacy in his book Men in Groups (1969), when the US were in the middle of another adventure of man-the-hunter, the Vietnam War. Although he knew, as Evelyn Reed points out, that meat eating constituted only a tiny proportion of the baboon diet, he claims that hunting and meat eating constitute the decisive factor in pre-human primate evolution, and that male bonding patterns reflect and arise out of man’s history as a hunter.
So, in the hunting situation, it was the entire hunting group – male-plus-male-plus-male – which ensured the survival of the entire productive community. Thus was the male-male bond as important for hunting purposes as the male-female bond was important for productive purposes, and this is the basis for the division of labour by sex (Tiger, 1969: 122, 126).
The man-the-hunter model as the paradigm of human evolution has been the basis of numerous scientific works on human affairs and has been popularized by the modern media. It has influenced the thinking of millions of people, and is still constantly advanced to explain the causes of social inequalities. Feminist scholars challenged the validity of this model on the basis of their own research and that of others. They unmasked this model, including its basic premises of the male bonding principle, the importance of meat as food, etc., as a sexist projection of modern, capitalist and imperialist social relations into pre-history and earlier history. This projection serves to legitimize existing relations of exploitation and dominance between men and women, classes and people as universal, timeless and ‘natural’. Evelyn Reed has rightly denounced the hidden fascist orientation behind this model, particularly in the writings of Tiger and his glorification of war (Reed, 1978).
Though we are able to de-mystify the man-the-hunter hypothesis and show that the great hunters would not have been able even to survive had it not been for the daily subsistence production of women, we are still faced with the question why women, in spite of their superior economic productivity as gatherers and early agriculturalists, were not able to prevent the establishment of a hierarchical and exploitative relation between the sexes.
If we ask this question in this way, we assume that political power automatically emerges from economic power. The foregoing discussion has shown that such an assumption cannot be upheld, because male supremacy did not arise from their superior economic contribution.
In the following, I shall try to find an answer to the above question by looking more closely at the various tools invented and used by women and men.
Women’s Tools, Men’s Tools
The man-the-hunter model is, in fact, the latest version of the man-the-toolmaker model. In the light of this model, tools are above all weapons, tools to kill.
The earliest tools of mankind, the stone axes, scrapers and flakes, were of an ambivalent character. They could be used to grind, smash and pulverize grains and other vegetable food, and to dig out roots, but they could also be used to kill small animals, and we can assume that they were used by men and women for both purposes. However, the invention of arms proper, of projectiles, of the bow and arrow, is an indication that the killing of animals had become a major specialization of one part of society, mainly of men. The adherents to the hunter hypothesis are of the opinion that the first tools were invented by men. They ignore women’s inventions connected with their subsistence production. But, as was previously discussed, the first inventions were most probably containers and baskets made of leaves, bark and fibres and later jars. The digging stick and the hoe were the main tools for gathering as well as for early agriculture. Women must have continued with their technology while some men developed specialized hunting tools.
What is important here is to note that women's technology remained productive in the true sense of the word: they produced something new. The hunting technology, on the other hand, is not productive, that is, hunting equipment proper cannot be used for any other productive activity - unlike the stone axe. The bow and arrow and spears are basically means of destruction. Their significance lies in the fact that they cannot only be used to kill animals, they can also be used to kill human beings. It is this characteristic of the hunting tools which became decisive in the further development of male productivity as well as of unequal, exploitative social relations, not the fact that hunters as providers of meat were able to raise the standard of nutrition of the community.
Hence, we conclude that the significance of hunting does not lie in its economic productivity as such, as is wrongly assumed by many theoreticians, but in the particular object-relation to nature it constitutes. The object-relation to nature of man-the-hunter is distinctly different from that of woman-the-gatherer or cultivator. The characteristics of this object-relation are the following:
- a. The hunters' main tools are not instruments to produce life but to destroy life. Their tools are not basically means of production, but means of destruction, and they can be used as means of coercion also against fellow human beings.
- b. This gives hunters a power over living beings, both animals and human beings, which does not arise out of their own productive work. They can appropriate not only fruits and plants (like the gatherers) and animals, but also other (female) producers by virtue of arms.
- c. The object-relation mediated through arms, therefore, is basically a predatory or exploitative one: hunters appropriate life, but they cannot produce life. It is an antagonistic and non-reciprocal relationship. All later exploitative relations between production and appropriation are, in the last analysis, upheld by arms as means of coercion.
- d. The object-relation to nature mediated through arms constitutes a relationship of dominance and not of cooperation. This relationship of dominance has become an integral element in all further production relations which men have established. It has become, in fact, the main paradigm of their productivity. Without dominance and control over nature, men cannot conceive of themselves as being productive.
- e. 'Appropriation of natural substances' (Marx) now becomes a process of one-sided appropriation, in the sense of establishing property relations, not in the sense of humanization, but in the sense of exploitation of nature.
- f. By means of arms, hunters could not only hunt animals, but they could also raid communities of other subsistence producers, kidnap their unarmed young and female workers, and appropriate them. It can be assumed that the first forms of private property were not cattle or other foods, but female slaves who had been kidnapped (Meillassoux, 1975; Bornemann, 1975).
This means that the emergence of a specialized hunting technology only implies the possibility of established relationships of exploitation and dominance. It seems that, as long as the hunters remained confined to their limited hunting-gathering context, they could not realize the exploitative potential of their predatory mode of production. Their economic contribution was not sufficient; they remained dependent for their survival on their women's subsistence production.
Pastoralists
Though there may have been inequality between men and women, the hunters were not able to establish a fully-fledged dominance system. The 'productive forces' of the hunters could be fully released only when pastoral nomads, who domesticated cattle and women, invaded agricultural communities. This means that the full realization of the 'productive' capacity of this predatory mode of production presupposes the existence of other really productive modes, like agriculture.
Elisabeth Fisher is of the opinion that a dominance relationship between men and women could be established only after men had discovered their own generative capacities. This discovery, according to her, went hand in hand with the domestication - and particularly the breeding - of animals as a new mode of production. The pastoralists discovered that one bull could impregnate many cows, and this may have led to the castration and elimination of weaker animals. The main bull was then used at periods the pastoral nomads considered to be the most appropriate to impregnate the cows. Female animals were subjected to sexual coercion. This means that the free sexuality of wild animals was subjected to a coercive economy, based on breeding, with the object of increasing the herds. It is plausible that the establishment of harems, the kidnapping and raping of women, the establishment of patriarchal lines of descent and inheritance were part of this new mode of production. Women were also subjected to the same economic logic and became part of the movable property; they became chattels.
This new mode of production, however, was made possible by two things: the monopoly of men over arms, and the long observation of the reproductive behaviour of animals. As men began to manipulate the reproductive behaviour of animals, they discovered their own generative functions. This led to a change in their relation to nature as well as to change in the sexual division of labour. For pastoral nomads, women are no longer very important as producers or gatherers of food, as is the case among hunters. They are needed as breeders of children, particularly of sons. Their productivity is now reduced to their 'fertility' which is appropriated and controlled by men (cf. Fisher, 1979: 248ff).
In contrast to the hunters' and gatherers' economy, which is mainly appropriative, the economy of the pastoral nomads is a 'productive economy' (Sohn-Rethel). But it is obvious that this mode of production presupposes the existence of means of coercion for the manipulation of animals and human beings, and for the extension of territory.
Agriculturists
It is, therefore, most probably correct to say that the pastoral nomads were the fathers of all dominance relations, particularly that of men over women. But there are enough data which suggest that the exploitative relations between men and women also existed among agriculturists, not only after the introduction of the plough, as Esther Boserup believes (1970), but also among hoe-cultivators in Africa, where even today farming is done mainly by women. Meillassoux (1974) points out that in such societies, which he characterized as 'économies domestiques', the old men were in a position to establish a relationship of dominance over younger men and women because they could acquire more wives to work for them only. The marriage system was the mechanism by which they accumulated women and wealth, which in fact were closely related. Meillassoux, following Lévi-Strauss, takes the existence of an unequal system of exchange for granted, and mentions only passingly the probable roots of this system, namely, the fact that, due to the ongoing subsistence production of the women, the men were free to go from time to time on hunting expeditions. Hunting was for the men in these domestic economies a sporting and political activity rather than an economic one. On such expeditions, the men also kidnapped isolated gathering women and young men of other villages or tribes.
In a recent study on slavery in pre-colonial Africa, edited by Meillassoux, one finds numerous examples that show that such hunters not only kidnapped and appropriated people whom they surprised in the jungle, but they also organized regular razzias into other villages to kidnap women. The women thus appropriated did not become members of the community, but were usually privately appropriated by the leader of the expedition, who would either use them as slaves to work for him, or sell them against bridewealth to other villages. These kidnapped women thus became a direct source for the accumulation of private property.
Slavery, hence, obviously did not emerge out of trade, but out of the male monopoly over arms. Before slaves could be bought and sold, they had to be captured, they had to be appropriated by a master by force of arms. This predatory form of acquisition of labour power, both for work on 'private' plots and for sale, was considered to be the most 'productive' activity of these warrior-hunters, who, it has to be kept in mind, were no longer hunters and gatherers, but lived in an economic system based on women's productive agricultural work; they were the 'husbands' of female agriculturalists. Their productivity was described by an old man of the Samos in Upper Volta as the productivity of bow and arrow, by which all other products - millet, beans, etc., and women - could be obtained:
Our ancestors were born with their hoe, their axe, their bow and arrow. Without a bow you cannot work in the jungle. With the bow you acquire the honey, the peanuts, the beans, and then a woman, then children and finally you can buy domestic animals, goats, sheep, donkeys, horses. These were the riches of old. You worked with bow and arrow in the jungle, because there could be always someone who could surprise and kill you.
According to this old man there were 'commandos' of five or six men who would roam through the jungle trying to surprise and kidnap women and men who were alone. The kidnapped were sold (Heritier in Meillassoux, 1975: 491).
This passage shows clearly that the Samo men conceived of their own productivity in terms of arms, that they surprised lonely gatherers in the jungle in order to sell them. The reason for this was: what had been captured by surprise in the jungle was property (private property). This private property was appropriated by the lineage of the hereditary chief (formerly the rain-makers' lineage), who then sold these captives to other lineages, either as wives against bride price (in this case, against cowrie shells as money), or as slaves for agricultural work, or they were returned against ransom money back to their own village. These raids were thus a means for some men to accumulate more wealth than other men.
Female slaves were preferred, and fetched a higher price because they were productive in two ways: they were agricultural workers and they could produce more slaves. The Samo usually killed the men in these inter-village raids because they were of no economic use to them. But women and children were captured, made slaves and sold.
Jean Bazin, who studied war and slavery among the Segu, calls the capture of slaves by warriors the 'most productive' activity of the men of this tribe.
The production of slaves is indeed a production ... in the whole of the predatory activity this is the only activity which is effectively productive, because pillage of goods is only a change of hands and place. The dominant moment of this production is the exercise of violence against the individual in order to cut her/him off from the local and social networks (age, sex, relatives, alliances, lineage, clientele, village)(Bazin in Meillassoux, 1975: 142)
On the basis of his studies among the Tuareg, Pierre Bonte draws the conclusion that slavery was the precondition for the expansion of the 'économies domestiques' into a more diversified economy, where there is a great demand for labour. He sees slavery as the 'result and the means of unequal exchange' (Bonte in Meillassoux, 1975: 54).
The examples from pre-colonial Africa make clear that the predatory mode of production of men, based on the monopoly of arms, could become 'productive' only when some other, mostly female, production economies existed, which could be raided. It can be characterised as non-productive production. They also show the close link between pillage, loot and robbery on the one hand, and trade on the other. What was traded and exchanged against money (kauri shells) was not the surplus produced over and above the requirements of the community; but what was stolen and appropriated by means of arms was, in fact, defined as surplus.
In the last analysis, we can attribute the asymmetric division of labour between women and men to this predatory mode of production, or rather appropriation, which is based on the male monopoly over means of coercion, that is, arms, and on direct violence by means of which permanent relations of exploitation and dominance between the sexes were created and maintained.
This concept of surplus goes beyond the concept of surplus developed by Marx and Engels. The existence of a surplus constitutes, according to them, the crucial material-historical precondition for the development of exploitative social relations, for class-relations. They ascribe this emergence of a surplus to the development of more 'productive' means of production. In those societies which could produce more than they needed for their own subsistence, some groups of people could appropriate this surplus and thus establish long-lasting class relations, based on property relations. What is left unanswered in this concept is the question how and by which means this appropriation of surplus took place. We have enough empirical evidence from ethnological sources to show that the existence of surplus per se does not yet lead to a one-sided appropriation by one group or class of people (cf. the potlatch or sacrifices). Obviously, the definition of what is 'necessary' and what is 'surplus' is not a purely economic question, but a political and/or cultural one.
Similarly, 'exploitation', following this analysis, is not only the one-sided appropriation of the surplus produced over and above the necessary requirements of a community, but also the robbery, pillage and looting of the necessary requirements of other communities. This concept of exploitation, therefore, always implies a relationship created and held up in the last resort by coercion or violence.
From this follows that the establishment of classes, based on one-sided appropriation of 'surplus' (as I have defined it), is intrinsically interwoven with the establishment of patriarchal control over women, as the main 'producers of life' in its two aspects.
This non-productive, predatory mode of appropriation became the paradigm of all historical exploitative relations between human beings. Its main mechanism is to transform autonomous human producers into conditions of production for others, or to define them as 'natural resources' for others. It is important to stress the historical specificity of this patriarchal paradigm. Patriarchy was not developed universally all over the globe but by distinctive patriarchal societies. They include the Jews, the Arians (Indians and Europeans), the Arabs, the Chinese, and their respective great religions. The rise and universalization of all these civilizations, but particularly the Judeo-European one, is based on conquest and war. Europe was not invaded by Africans, but Africa was invaded by predatory Europeans. This also means that a concept of a unilinear, universal process of history that evolves in successive stages everywhere from Primitive Communism, over Barbary, Feudalism, Capitalism to Socialism and Communism may have to be given up in our analysis of patriarchy.
'Man-the-Hunter' under Feudalism and Capitalism
The full potential of the predatory mode, based on a patriarchal division of labour could be realized only under feudalism and capitalism.
The patriarchal predatory mode of appropriation of producers, products and means of production was not abolished totally when new, and apparently more 'non-violent' modes of production replaced older ones. It was rather transformed and dialectically preserved, in the sense that it reappeared under new forms of labour control.
Similarly, so far new forms of the patriarchal sexual division of labour have not replaced the old forms, but only transformed them, according to the requirements of the new modes of production. None of the modes of production, which emerged later in the history of civilization, did away with predatoriness and violent acquisition by non-producers of producers, means of production and products. The later production-relations have the same basic structure of being asymmetric, and exploitative relations. Only the forms of dominance and appropriation have changed. Thus, instead of using violent raids and slavery for acquiring more women as workers and producers than were born in a community, hypergamous marriage systems were evolved, which made sure that the BIG MEN could have access not only to more women of their own community or class, but also to the women of the Small Men. Women became a commodity in an asymmetric or unequal marriage market, because control over more women meant accumulation of wealth (Meillassoux, 1975). The BIG MEN (the state) then became the managers of social reproduction as well as of production. In all patriarchal civilizations, the relationship between men and women maintained its character of being coercive and appropriative. The asymmetric division of labour by sex, once established by means of violence, was then upheld by means of institutions like the patriarchal family and the state and also by means of powerful ideological systems, above all by patriarchal religions, law, medicine, which have defined women as part of nature which has to be controlled and dominated by man.
The predatory mode of acquisition saw a renaissance during the period of European feudalism. Feudalism as a specific mode of production based on ownership of land was built up with extensive use of violence and warfare. In fact, had there been but the endogenous processes of class differentiation in peasant societies, feudalism might not have evolved at all, at least not in its European version which figures as the 'model' of feudalism. The predatory form of acquisition of new lands and the large-scale use of pillage and looting by the armed feudal class form an inseparable part of and a precondition for the rise and maintenance of this mode of production (Elias, 1978; Wallerstein, 1974).
Later, not only new lands were thus acquired, but with the lands, the means or conditions of production - the peasants - were also appropriated and tied to the feudal lord in a specific production-relation, which did not allow them to move away from that land. They were seen as part of the land. Thus, not only the women of these peasants, but also the male peasants themselves, were 'defined into nature', that is, for the feudal lord they had a status similar to that of women: their bodies no longer belonged to themselves, but to the lord, like the earth. This relationship is exactly preserved in the German term with which the serf is described, he is Leibeigener, that is, someone who body (Leib) is the property (Eigentum) of someone else. But, in spite of this change-over from direct violent acquisition and the peasants who worked on it, to a 'peaceful' relation of structural violence, or, which is the same, to a dominance relations between lord and serf, the feudal lords never gave up their arms or their military power to expand and defend their lands and their wealth, not only against external enemies, but also against rebellions from within. This means that even though there were 'peaceful' mechanisms of effective labour control, actually under feudalism these production relations were established and maintained through the monopoly over the means of coercion which the dominant class enjoyed. The social paradigm of man-the-hunter/warrior remained the base and the last resort of this mode of production.
The same can be said of capitalism. When capital accumulation became the dominant motor of productive activity in contrast to subsistence production, wage labour tended to become the dominant form of labour control. Yet these apparently 'peaceful' production-relations, based on mechanisms of economic coercion (structural violence), could be easily built up only on the base of a tremendous expansion of the predatory mode of acquisition. Direct and violent acquisition of gold and silver and other products, mainly in Hispanic America, and of producers - first the Indians in Latin America and later African slaves - proved to be the most 'productive' activity in what has been described as the period of 'primitive accumulation'.
Thus capitalism did not do away with the former 'savage' forms of control over human productive capacity, it rather reinforced and generalized them: 'Large scale slavery or forced labour for the production of exchange value is prominently a capitalist institution, geared to the early pre-industrial stages of a capitalist world economy' (Wallerstein, 1974: 88).
This institution was also based on the monopoly over effective weapons and the existence of breeding grounds of enough 'human cattle' which could be hunted, appropriated and subjugated. This involves a re-definition of the rising European bourgeoisie's relation to nature and to women. Whereas under pre-capitalist production-relations based on ownership of land, women and peasants were/are defined as 'earth' or parts of the earth, as nature was identified with Mother Earth and her plants, under early capitalism slaves were defined as 'cattle' and women as 'breeders' of this cattle. We have seen that pastoral nomads also defined women mainly as breeders, not of labour-power, but of male heirs mainly. But what fundamentally distinguishes the early pastoral patriarchs from the early capitalist patriarchs is the fact that the latter are not at all concerned with the production of the labour force and the 'breeders' of this labour force. In the first instance, the capitalist is not a producer, but an appropriator, who follows the paradigm of predatory acquisition, the precondition for the development of capitalist productive forces. Whereas the ruling classes among the pastoralists and the feudal lords were still aware of their own dependence on nature, including women (which they, therefore, tried to influence by magic and religion), the capitalist class saw itself right from the beginning as the master and lord over nature (cf. Merchant, 1983). Only now a concept of nature arose which generalized man-the-hunter's dominance-relation to nature. The division of the world which followed defined certain parts of the world as 'nature', that is, as savage, uncontrolled and, therefore, open for exploitation and civilizing efforts, and others as 'human', that is, already controlled and domesticated. The early capitalists were only interested in the muscle-power of the slaves, their energy to work. Nature for them was a reservoir of raw material and the African women an apparently inexhaustible reserve of human energy.
The change-over from production relations based on a master-servant pattern to one of a contractual character between capital and wage labour would not have been possible without the use of large-scale violence, and the 'definition into exploitable nature' of vast areas of the globe and their inhabitants. It enabled the capitalists 'to take off' and to give concessions to the European workers out of the loot of the colonies and the exploitation of slaves.
...
To summarize, we can say that the various forms of asymmetric, hierarchical divisions of labour, which have developed throughout history up to the stage where the whole world is now structured into one system of unequal division of labour under the dictates of capital accumulation, are based on the social paradigm of the predatory hunter/warrior who, without himself producing, is able by means of arms to appropriate and subordinate other producers, their productive forces and their products.
This extractive, non-reciprocal, exploitative object-relation to nature, first established between men and women and men and nature, remained the model for all other patriarchal modes of production, including capitalism which developed it to its most sophisticated and most generalized form. The characteristic of this model is that those who control the production process and the products are not themselves producers, but appropriators. Their so-called productivity pre-supposes the existence and subjection of other - and, in the last analysis, female - producers. As Wallerstein puts it: '...crudely, those who breed manpower sustain those who grow food who sustain those who grow other raw materials who sustain those involved in industrial production' (Wallerstein, 1974: 86). What Wallerstein forgets to mention is that all those sustain the non-producers who control this whole process, ultimately by means of arms, because at the heart of this paradigm lies the fact that non-producers appropriate and consume (or invest) what others have produced. Man-the-hunter is basically a parasite, not a producer.
Edited by swampman ()