THE THEORY OF SEX STRATIFICATION

After Marx's death, Engels formulated a general historical theory of the family. ² This opened up the issue of equality and inequality among men and women and the social causes of these shifting patterns. Engels put forward the concept of sexual property: that the rights of sexual access are appropriated and guarded in just the same way as are the rights to use economic property. At one time, he argued, there was sexual communism in early tribal societies. Then, as private property was introduced in the economy and classes were created, private sexual property was also enforced, with dominant males making sexual property out of women. Engels's model of a series of evolutionary stages is not too accurate, although he did draw on the leading anthropologists of his time -- a period when anthropology was just beginning. Thus, Engels believed there was a stage of matriarchy intervening between primitive communism and the rise of patriarchy. But Engels's attitude about this sort of thing was not dogmatic, and he would have been happy to see his theory modified to fit a better construction of the historical facts.

His theory is nevertheless correct in several important points. Although there almost certainly was no such thing as a universal stage of either primitive sexual communism or of matriarchy, it is true that the kind of sexual property relationships changed from one general type of society to another, though in a more complex fashion. The patriarchal household of the ancient and medieval states was indeed the most maledominated family system that has ever existed, and women's status generally took a sharp decline with the transition from tribal societies to these class-stratified societies. Engels also pointed to an important phenomenon when he noted that the rise of capitalist society and its private household only gave a formal freedom to women; though they were now free to make

-78-

their own marriages, they did so on a marriage '"market" in which they lacked any economic property of their own. Hence, the typical capitalist form of courtship and marriage consisted, of a woman having to trade domestic subordination and sexual favors for a marriage contract with a man who would support her.

Engels also provided an important general explanation of the different systems of sexual stratification by arguing that they are related to the economic system of the surroundingsociety. Engels's theory was thus capable of considerable refinement to fit a better understanding of the complexities of the historical data. It took a long time before his theory was seriously developed in this direction. Max Weber, who was interested in feminism because his wife was a leader in the German feminist movement, took up Engels,s theory, which he criticized for its weaknesses of historical data but praised as a fruitful starting point. Weber developed a comparative theory of the family that also emphasized the variety of economic structures of the household and the form of sexual property within it. Weber characteristically added political factors as a crucial determinant of the kinds of sexual stratification. ³

Most refined theories of sexual stratification have only opened up within the last 20 years, and efforts to put together the various explanatory factors are still being developed. Engels' basic ideas have an important place in this. One line of argument has taken his conception of the economic basis of the family, to argue that women's household labor is part of the capitalist class structure. Women working, as wives and mothers, even though they are not paid for their labor, are a crucial part of the reproduction of the labor force, without which the wage laborers necessary for the capitalist economy would not exist. There is, thus, a hidden economic pressure and a hidden class struggle underneath the more overt class relations of the markplace. Debate still goes on over whether this means that women are a part of the more general working class, or whether homemakers constitute a second, female working' class in implicit struggle with both the capitalist system and the male workers who are their husbands.

This is an application of the economic theory to sex stratifi-

-79-

cation within contemporary society. Another application. is to use the theory to explain the historical differences among societies with different kinds and degrees of sex stratification. Theorists such as Rae Lesser Blumberg and Karen Sacks find a relationship between the degree of women's social power and freedom, and the extent to which they contribute to economic production and manage to control their own economic property. This more refined version of the Engelsian theory does not require a set sequence of evolutionary stages that all societies pass through. Different kinds of tribal societies, for example, can have great male dominance or various degrees of female power, depending on their specific sex-based economies. In the ancient and medieval ("feudal") state societies, women's status tended to drop because they were squeezed out of the core economic production, although some aristocratic women were able to make gains where the system of marital politics gave them control over property. And in our own society, the relative status of men and women within each family is strongly influenced by their own economic positions. Women who have broken into the more lucrative careers have also tended to break the pattern of the traditional marriage market as well.

Engels's theory is pivotal because it emphasized not only economic determinants of family and sexual relationships, but also recognized the phenomenon of sexual property -- the propertylike nature of controls over sexuality itself. This line of analysis has developed somewhat separately from the analysis of economic factors. It has given rise to various theories of the politics of sex. Anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss or Marvin Harris have developed "alliance" theories of the family structures in different tribal societies, analyzing them as ways in which sexual exchanges are used as political strategies to tie groups together militarily and economically. I have applied this type of analysis to the shifting patterns of sexual relationships that have characterized both the patriarchal households of medieval agrarian societies and the "Victorian" period of the early modern marriage market, as well as the sexual transformations that have happened in the twentieth century and are still going on today.

-80-

Sex stratification is a topic that many sociologists, as well as other people, ignored for a long time. No male-female stratification was seen because a male-dominated social order was simply taken for granted. Engels was a pioneer in bringing this to light as a question for theoretical explanation. More than half a century after his death, his line of conflict analysis of the family, economy, and sex has begun to develop into a sophisticated general theory.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 1485