Dear Editor,

During my postgraduate years at University College Cardiff, I taught a course on ‘Women in Socialist Societies’, and Frederick Engels’ ‘The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State’ (1884) provided a Marxist perspective. Using the framework of his materialist conception of history and some notes left by Karl Marx, Engel sought to explain the rise and future of the modern state.  He concluded that this state will inevitably fail and be consigned “… into the museum of antiquity, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.”  My intention, here, is to use his study of the family to contribute to the present discourse on domestic violence.

Engels’ research was pretty extensive but in brief, he argued that human development has seen essentially four kinds of families: the ‘consanguine’, the ‘punaluan,’ the ‘pairing’ and the ‘monogamous.’ At the ‘consanguine’ stage, parents and children and brothers and sisters practiced sexual intercourse with one another.  However, by the ‘punaluan’ stage, parents were excluded and it is during this stage that sexual relations between sisters and brothers also ceased. This latter “advance was infinitely more important … for there can be no question that the tribes among whom inbreeding was restricted …were bound to develop more quickly and more fully than those among whom marriage between brothers and sisters remained the rule and the law”.  According to Engels, it was perhaps families at these stages of development that, in 55 BCE, Julius Caesar found in Britain, where he reported that: “every ten or twelve have wives in common, especially brothers with brothers and parents with children.”

He argued that with economic, social and population developments, traditional sexual relations became oppressive and humiliating for women and they demanded the ‘pairing family’. The greater they felt this oppression, “… the greater their longing for the right of chastity, of temporary or permanent marriage with one man only, as a way of release. It is highly unlikely that this advance originated with the men if only that it would never have occurred to them to renounce the pleasures of actual group marriage. Only when the women had brought about the transition to pairing marriage did men introduce strict monogamy — though indeed only for women”.

As regards property, starting from a point where it was all communal, by the ‘pairing’ stage, most acquired property belonged to the man but: “His property had to remain within the gens. … When the owner of the herds died therefore, his herds would go first to his brothers and sisters and to his sisters’ children, or to the issue of his mother’s sisters. But his own children were disinherited.” Only as ‘mother rights’ gave way to ‘father rights’ and monogamy became the norm did the male-dominated system of property ownership and inheritance develop.

Engels’ historiography is presented only to indicate that the development of the modern family structure has been much more complex than some would have us believe. (Why do men behave the way they do? KN: 29/04/09). Lenin would later describe “The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State” as “one of the fundamental works of modern socialism”, and it is perhaps for this reason that in my early working life I had a large poster in my office with a quote from his 1920 “Statement to the Working Women” in which he proclaimed that “The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.”

Monogamy, then, is only about as old as what we think of as civilization and undoubtedly partly because, as Engels indicated, of its inequitable application to women but not men, in all cultures there have been massive concerted propaganda and actions to devalue and subordinate women and keep them in subjection.

For example, speaking of our Judeo-Christian tradition, in an article “What’s God to do with it? Church and State Collaboration in the Subordination of Women”, Rutgers Law Review (2007), Linda L. Ammonds argued that as the Christian church expanded, women, who had been among its founders, were marginalized and disrespected. A woman unable to prove her virginity could be stoned to death or a wife could be mutilated if on coming to the rescue of her husband, she touched the genitals of her husband’s assailant.

My favourite picture of women though, is that painted by the twelfth century Abbot Conrad of Marchtal:

“Recognizing that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world and that there is no anger like that of women, and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, [we] have unanimously decreed for the safety of our souls, no less than for that of our bodies and goods that we will on no account receive any more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like poisonous animals”!
We may have come a long way since Abbot Conrad, but the scourge of gender-based domestic violence is still very much with us and there are many theories, approaches and attitudes to dealing with it. Take a few examples.

Firstly, one theory argues that the current process of male and female socialisation, which makes private relations a close cousin of property relationships with all the inherent implications for ownership and control, inevitably has a huge impact on domestic relations. Indeed, this might partly explain why, though mainly so, domestic violence is not directed only against women.

Secondly, the following conclusion by Manuela Angelucci, (“Love on the Rocks: Alcohol Abuse and Domestic Violence in Rural Mexico,” IZA, 2007), is pregnant with suggestions of possible approach in the search for solutions. She claimed to have found that: “A 20 dollar monthly transfer to the wife – a 35% increase in the income of both spouses – decreases alcohol abuse by 15%, and that this reduces aggressive behavior by 21%. … The extra income is managed by the woman, increases her freedom and security, does not crowd out transfers from the husband, and it is spent on goods that increase both spouses’ utility.”

Finally, sometimes the precise nature of the agenda can be blurred by contrasting attitudes. A few day ago, as some Caribbean people bemoaned the fact the Michelle Obama did not accompany her husband to the region, (Disappointment that Michelle Obama did not come to the region: SN 21/04/09) according to The Week (London, April 2009), Heather Stewart in The Observer wanted to know: “…what on earth is she doing trailing her husband around the globe like a piece of political arm candy? What, for that matter, were any of the so-called “G20 Wags” doing in London? Angela Merkel’s husband stayed at home: a professor of chemistry, he had a job to do, and he rightly surmised that she was capable of speaking for her country without being chaperoned. There is no reason why Mrs. Obama and the rest of the “first wives” – most of them “capable, intelligent operators in their own right” – should not have followed suit. It would surely have been preferable to being turned into “brightly coloured news confetti”, their outfits hogging the headlines, as if the sole purpose of women  were still “to prettify the place while the chaps got down to business.”

As a start, in 1996, on the initiative of a group of women, I introduced and piloted the Domestic Violence Act and found accommodation for Help & Shelter. Today, Priya Manickchand continues to do her best. While at a policy level we must grasp and account for the multidimensional nature of the problem, what we are essentially dealing with is learned behaviour and the overriding concern must be to end domestic violence now: obfuscations are impermissible.

Yours faithfully,
Henry B Jeffrey