Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 2 The Weber's private, sex defined values.
46
such thing as individual motherhood: all women of a generation were 'mothers' or
'grandmothers' to all children, which were
all of them brothers and sisters; all adult men were uncles of all children; all men could 'take
their wives' from another gens in the same clan. However, in modern times relations had
been individualized: a woman's children were only those she herself had given birth to; these
were brothers and sisters; her brother was their uncle; but property was still held collectively
in the mother's clan and sexual relationships between women and men were loose and
temporary, having few social consequences
68
.
Morgan, having been summarized by Bebel in his Die Frau und der Sozialismus and by
Engels in his Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats, influenced
both socialism and feminism
69
. Engels, who carried on Marx' ethnological studies
70
after the
death of the latter, used Morgan's theory - which maintained that women became enslaved
because of the invention of private property, since men wished to transmit their property
after their deaths to sons and therefore acquired women to bear those sons - to create a
connection between socialism and feminism. He suggested that feminism is impossible
without socialism and that women have to fight alongside with socialist men, to be liberated
from the patriarchate only when socialism will be established.
71
In his book Engels therefore gave a summary of Morgan's successive stages of the
development of society: first there was the 'consanguine family' - classificatory kinship - then,
after the invention of agriculture by the women, there was the transition to relations of
individual property and wealth and thus to patriarchal laws of succession, marriage, slavery,
and war: the stage of 'barbarism', out of which 'civilization' developed. His rendering of
Morgan's theory of the matrilinear origins of society tries to break down all dichotomies
between public and private, between universalist and sex-defined, between historical and
biological concepts - except where his utterly uncritical use of the concept of 'race' is
concerned. He calls into question much of the ordinary notions of his time concerning the
opposition of 'individuality' to 'collectivity', of 'masculinity' to 'femininity', of 'public' to 'private'
life, and therefore his book could be called a valiant attempt at a humanitarian view of the
relations between women and men, although of course he retains many masculinist notions.
68
Later feminist cultural anthropologists have emphasized the sexual autonomy of women in these
circumstances; see for instance Ruth Benedict (1934) and Evelyn Reed (1975). See on this standpoint Schnitger,
EuM, p. 8/9, cited in note 72.
69
Weber-Schnitger writes in her notes on p. 80 of EuM that the fact that today these books 'dominate the heads
of a part of the women's world, proves that critical study and practical social work are difficult to combine.' See for
a recent discussion Sayers a.o. (1987) and the introduction of Michèle Barret to Engels (1884), who shares
Weber-Schnitger's opinions on the scientific efforts of Morgan and Engels, but judges them to contain questions
which are still important.
70
Marx was very much interested in Morgan's book, and in the theories of other ethnologists like Phear, Maine
and Lubbock. When we read his Ethnological Notebooks (Krader 1974), however, and in particular his
annotations of Morgan's Ancient Society, it appears that his attention is focused on the relations between m e n
in tribal society: on masculine democracy. Engels shifted the focus of the argument to the position of women; he
considered Morgan's discovery of the matriarchal gens of the same historical importance as the discoveries of
Darwin in the field of biology and of Marx on political economy.
71
Engels does not say, though, that under socialism the matriarchy, or the general generation kinship, will be
reinstated: he thinks that monogamy is the safest relationship for women.
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