Written by Keith Hart
2. The agrarian phase of peasant patriarchy and the anomaly of slavery
Families based on a sexual division of labor can never be self-sufficient, even in annual food provisioning, never mind defense, manufactures, ritual, adjudication of disputes and the rest. They must cooperate regularly or less so; they are always involved in complex distributional arrangements; and they are incorporated into wider political units, hierarchies, and social “bodies”. The ordinary material of domestic reproduction is shaped by social institutions of broader scope that define specific roles associated with gender, age, and kinship categories.10 Authority and property relations in a matrilineal society give some precedence to mother’s brothers over fathers. The reproduction of society thus takes place through families, structures of physical procreation made up of the lives, union, and deaths of spouses, parents, children, siblings etc. These structures are always historically and culturally particular, according to the strength and character of the social forces that shape them.
The great nineteenth-century anthropologists—Morgan, Engels, Bachofen—often believed that the invention of agriculture and especially herding generated an event in our species history that they dubbed “the world-historic defeat of the female sex.”11 Domestication of food production removed the need for male mobility, one original plank of the sexual division of labor, by permitting human groups to settle down. At the same time, agriculture expanded the power of society through higher population density, escalation of inter-group violence (war), and new opportunities for wealth accumulation (especially animals). Domestic life is always at base matrifocal, being built around the continuity of women as mothers. Men everywhere have more opportunity to spend time roaming outside home with the boys, opportunities that are relatively speaking denied to women and children. What varies is the strength of public attachment to the dominance of male family heads over their dependents—women, children, slaves, animals, and other members of the household.
Why should agriculture and herding be associated with increased dominance of some men over women? Domestication means bringing animals and plants within the protection of human society. Human labor is accordingly substituted for natural fertility to control their growth. In hunter-gatherer societies, human labor was minimized and nature did most of the work. This phase is wistfully symbolized in the myth of the Garden of Eden. Industrialization likewise substitutes machines and inanimate energy for human labor. Agricultural societies could only raise output by making people work harder for diminished returns. Since it is not usually in people’s interests to work harder for less reward, agriculture requires coercion at the core of its social organization; and families as always take their character from the wider society.
Tribal societies were content to subordinate the labor of women and young men to the control of elders who managed to stay collectively free from overrule. Cities and states depended on coercing a food surplus from rural populations whose degrees of freedom were curtailed as a result.12 Hence, the predominant forms of agriculture were based on kinship hierarchy in stateless societies and in stratified societies on varieties of unfree peasantry and, even worse, serfdom and slavery.
Top-down social organization (centralized states) encountered a persistent contradiction.13 Agricultural populations tend to spread out to take advantage of the land’s fertility. Control by the center was always limited by the means of realizing a liquid surplus to feed the cities. This forced rulers to delegate powers to landowners who relied on peasant patriarchs to keep their families in line. Women in all agrarian societies are regarded as fertility machines, in contrast with hunter-gatherers and industrial populations where family limitation is normal. Agrarian ruling interests have always privileged a large population as a source of revenue and recruits for the army. Patriarchy was built into agrarian societies at all levels, from God the Father and the king as father of his people, through landlords and priests down to wife-beating peasant dictators of households reflecting society in microcosm—as in the Bible and Qur’an).
Slavery was the main exception to this pattern. Strong states and effective markets made possible to organize production through slave labor.14 Conquest generated captives stripped of their collective identities and family ties; and traders made links to the sources of final demand—plantations, mines, great houses. Denial of the opportunity to reproduce made slaves even more dependent of their masters; in the extreme, peasant households were replaced by single-sex barracks. Master-slave relations are still conducted in the patriarchal idiom, and when they are not being treated at recalcitrant children, slaves are the “speaking tool” (instrumentum vocale) of their owner’s estate.15 The slaves must be deprived of any vestige of male authority, and if they breed, mothers must do without legitimate union with men of their own kind.16 There is no sexual division of labor here, beyond gender differentiation introduced to satisfy the master’s sensibilities concerning appropriate work for men and women.
Sometimes, slaves retain vestiges of family life and eventually, as serfs, are allowed to reconstitute the model of peasant patriarchy.17 In these cases, any weakening of state and market organization will force owners to restore some elements of family life and self-reproduction to their dependent workers. The resilience of slaves in reasserting their humanity must also have modified these strategies of dehumanization. We should not, however, allow short-term perspectives to Obscure the long-run contrast between peasant and slave poles of agrarian “civilizations.”
The New World after Columbus was anticipated in some ways by the opening of the western Mediterranean by eastern Mediterranean societies in the first millennium BCE. To an extent, today’s contrast between the New and Old Worlds of the Americas and Europe echoes the division between West and East in the ancient world.18 In each case, the two regions relied on peasant and slave labor respectively. The drive of Phoenicians (Carthaginians), Greeks, Etruscans to open the sparsely populated western Mediterranean served mercantile expansion and the absorption the captives of wards generated by a slave mode of production. The case of the Roman Empire’s growth and decline is particularly instructive.19
Rome appropriated its Italian neighbors’ lands, turning the peasants into soldiers colonizing foreign conquests on Rome’s behalf. Captives were used as slaves on commercial plantations established by Roman aristocrats first in Italy and then in Gaul and Spain. A sharp legal distinction was drawn between slaves (without self-reproduction) and coloni (peasant-warrior heads of households). The closing of the Empire’s frontiers around 150 CE spelled the beginning of this system’s end. Slaves were now in short supply and the masters allowed them to raise families since needed their children. This required them to be given some guarantees of livelihood and landed property. The slaves become more like peasants. Meanwhile, the colonial peasantry lost their freedom along with their military role and became more servile. The two types of labor converged as a form of serfdom.
The Roman state was forced to raise taxes on trade and agriculture to pay for its stretched mercenary armies and top-heavy bureaucracy. This encourages a flight by some nobles from this cash-tax nexus into self-sufficient armed camps in the countryside (villas), thereby launching the trend for what we now associate with manorial feudalism. It took another four centuries for Roan civilization to collapse in the West, a process aided by the spread of Christianity promoting family life and individual identity among the mass of working people, thereby reinforcing their escape into self-subsistent peasant economy under threat from armed thugs.
Slavery was a precocious, unstable attempt to subordinate the principles of agrarian society—based on the self-sufficiency of dispersed families ruled by peasant patriarchs—to a system based on a strong state and the market. Industrial wage labor is based on a much stronger penetrations of states and markets into family life. The shift from peasant to industrial labor releases social reproduction from dependence on archaic family forms—a move that was partially replicated by earlier attempts to install an industrial system based on slave labor.20 A cursory familiarity with western history shows that subversion of peasant economy by wage labor was not the first experiment in industrial capitalism.
3. Sex divisions in modern British history
The sexual division of labor in Britain is an outcome of a drawn-out process of commercial and industrial growth from a base in feudalism and peasant patriarchy. When the state and markets were weak, rural economy reverted to greater self-sufficiency and households were absorbed into larger groups capable of meeting their annual needs—the manor and extended family ties. European family forms tended to be nucleated—drawing a boundary around the conjugal pair and their dependent children—as early as the sixth to ninth centuries CE.21 The nuclear family was commonplace in Britain long before the industrial revolution, where it became general at the expense of remaining extended families.22
If conjugal families aspire to a high degree of independence, they must conform to quite stringent conditions. They must be able to supply their needs with only occasional resort to wider cooperative groups. This requires an abundant environment, restricted needs, and low population density (hunter-gatherers and swidden agriculture) or a more elastic range of eclectic wants and needs satisfied by specialization in a market secured by state laws. Extended families are a response of reproduction under agricultural conditions of high population density and weak markets. In Britain’s medieval southern heartlands around London, the state and market were strong enough by the fourteenth century to sustain a highly commercial peasantry and a growing market for wage labor. This added an unusual degree of individualism and nuclear families under peasant patriarchy. The British model of the family was thus a single household united under its male head.23 This precocious structure clearly facilitated Britain’s breakthrough to industrialization.
The industrial revolution saw at first the wholesale of Celtic migrant families into Lancashire’s cotton textile factories.24 Capitalists, driven to reduce their absolute labor costs, turned increasingly to women and children as factory workers. The condition of women deteriorated in Victorian Britain, as Engels insisted (Note 11). Public commitment to patriarchy reached an unprecedented level, while women were herded into domestic service, wage labor and prostitution.
Social pressure gradually built up against the early abuses of the factory system. Machines made it relatively more profitable to raise labor productivity than to cheapen its absolute cost. Karl Marx called these twin tendencies of capital accumulation “relative and absolute surplus value.”25 They persist to the extent that industrial capitalism has not been replaced by rent-seeking. The decades leading up to the First World War saw a second industrial revolution with the emergence of new heavy industries such as steel, chemicals, and shipbuilding.26 Adding to the social pressure to remove women and children from the wage labor force, this consolidated the power of male monopoly unions in key industries where high labor productivity generated wages sufficient in principle to support whole families.27
This is where the “breadwinner/housewife” model of sex divisions came from that Western feminists are now seeking to dismantle. Before the 1880s, only upper- and middle-class women, supported by servants, limited their preoccupations to the home—Jane Austen’s “economist” as a good housekeeper.28 A major plank of Labour Party and union policy then became to seek similar privileges for working-class women. The same was true of Europe’s main Marxist party, Germany’s SPD; when the International Labour Office was founded, it sought to spare women the burdens of wage labor.29 This coincided with a fall in the birth rate and the rise of family planning—quality of children before quantity. Suffragettes agitating for women’s political rights added to the fervor. There are many precedents in peasant societies of men converting a newfound relative affluence into seclusion of their wives. Britain’s lower-middle and upper-working classes made this their favorite model of family life, especially after the men screwed the lid back on in the 1950s after women found the freedom of industrial wage labor during the war. The rich and poor were untouched by this trend.
For the young, the austerity and repression of the 1940s and 50s gave way to the libertarian moment of the 1960s, when the postwar economic boom was at its peak.30 Many of the legal underpinnings of patriarchy had already been removed from the statute books—the right of reasonable chastisement, unequal voting and property rights etc. With Commonwealth immigration falling off and the economic boom at its height, women were the last great labor reserve to which employers could now turn.31 Their mass re-entry into the labor market led to struggles for equal treatment in the face of discrimination. These are by no means over.
In the 1970s, feminists realized that economism hid deeper disabilities rooted in culture itself—the construction of gender in language, sexuality, and education.32 They found allies in the gay movement for whom cultural categories were no less oppressive. A separatist women’s commune movement found resonance in self-reproduction with only token male involvement such as frozen sperm banks. By now, British feminism engaged in dismantling the sexual division of labor itself, identified as reproductive specialization entailing different economic roles and the inevitable interdependence of women and men in marriage.
The government played a crucial part in these developments by emphasizing individual citizenship at the expense of traditional family roles. An army of professionals now supervise how the young enter society—doctors, teachers, social workers, and lawyers have powers to override parental control of children and they exercise them often. There is, of course, considerable resistance to this erosion of family responsibilities. All western countries harbor large conservative factions profoundly opposed to feminism and other tendencies taken to be subversive of “natural” traditional values, a.k.a. white racist patriarchy. The US Equal Rights Amendment divides women into matched factions with social conservatism reinforced by fundamentalist Christianity. Confusing struggles to shape the future of the family are sharply illuminated in the political and legal football of abortion. Conservatives evoke state and federal laws to protect fetuses (prospective individual citizens?) from the will of their own mothers. In Britain and similar western industrial countries, the sexual division of labor has been weakened, if not yet decisively broken. This general conflict is always culturally particular to individual countries.
(…to be continued)
Sources:
10. J. Goody (ed), The Development Cycle in Domestic Groups (Cambridge, 1958).
11 F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (London, 1884); J.J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (Basel, 1862).
12 V.G. Childe, Man Makes Himself (London, 1936).
13 M. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol 1 (Berkeley, 1978: 237-241).
14 M. Weber, Chapter 12 (Note 13).
15 M. Finley, Ancient Economy (London, 1973).
16 O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge MA, 1982); E. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York, 1965).
17 B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834. (Cambridge, 1976).
18 M. Weber, The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations (London, 1976); P. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, 1974).
19 M. Weber’s brilliant essay on “The social causes of the decline of ancient civilization” in The Agrarian Sociology (Note 18).
20 C.L.R. James, in The Black Jacobins (London, 1938), suggested that Caribbean slaves might be thought of as the first proletarians.
21 J. Goody, The Development of Marriage and the Family in Europe (Cambridge, 1983).
22 M. Segalen, Historical Anthropology of the Family (London, 1986); P. Laslett and R. Wall (eds), Household and Family in Past Time (London, 1972); R.T. Smith (ed), Land, Kinship and Life Cycle (London, 1985).
23 A. Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (New York, 1978).
24 N. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1959).
25 K. Marx, Capital Volume 1 (1867).
26 J. Foreman-Peck, A History of the World Economy (New Jersey, 1983).
27 K. Hart, “Commoditization and the standard of living,” in G. Hawthorn (ed), The Standard of Living (Cambridge, 1987).
28 J. Austen, Mansfield Park (1817).
29 E. Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (New York, 1970).
30 A.N. Klein, Counterculture and cultural hegemony: some notes on the youth rebellion of the 1960s,” in D. Hymes (ed), Reinventing Anthropology (New York 1974: 312-334).
31 W.A. Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913 (London, 1978: Chapter 9).
32 D. Bouchier, The Feminist Challenge (London, 1983).
For complete article: https://johnkeithhart.substack.com/p/the-sexual-division-of-labor-b7f?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
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