Appendix Three Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property

Arab Women in Israeli Politics: Aspirations for Fundamental Equality or Preservation of Gender Inequality?

“…Class theories use class concepts to describe inequality between men and women in the political domain. The dominance of men is explained by their exclusive control of property and income, and thus the gender disparity in political participation is attributed to the disparity in the ownership of resources (Sacks, 1974). This paper focuses on the underrepresentation of Arab women in Israeli politics.…”

Self-Determination and Women's Rights in Muslim Societies

“…However, the form taken by that alliance and the rules governing it are believed to be determined by the specific structuring factors predominant in a given society, such as the social division of labor, property relations, and subsistence technologies (Collier 1988;Coontz and Henderson;Leacock 1972;Reed 1975;Sacks 1975). This approach to the historically changing relationship between marriage and society is based on the social evolutionism of nineteenth-century kinship theorists such as Johann Bachofen (1992), Friedrich Engels (1972), andJohn McLennan (2001) and twentieth-century sociocultural evolutionists such as V. Gordon Childe (1951) and Leslie White (1959).…”

“…Drawing on the ethnographic and historical record of prestate, pre-agricultural societies, this approach has suggested a structural tie between the lack of agriculture -which produces the first storable accumulated surplus in human history -and loose, relatively gender-equal, marital bonds. Whether the postulated instrument for the rise of gender inequality is inheritance and patrimony (Engels 1972), the existence of commodifiable male property (Sacks 1975), scarcity of women (McLennan 2001), sedentarism (Draper 1975), or the greater politico-economic power of polygyny (accumulating women through marriage) over polyandry (accumulating men through marriage) when women's agricultural labor is the basis of the social surplus (Coontz 1986), virtually all schools of thought in this approach see a connection between agriculture, property, and changing family forms that, in various ways, control women -the first producers of surplus. This worldwide historical change is seen as contrasting agrarian societies with hunter-gatherer societies, in which there is little value to be gained by controlling the labor of women since they produce no storable surplus that can be accumulated -and for the same reason, there is little to be gained in controlling their children, whose future labor and social alliances also will not produce significant storable or accumulated surpluses.…”

Feminismo, teoría y práctica de una arqueología científica

“…Históricamente, y a pesar de una relación amor-odio conocida -por ejemplo en torno a la discusión sobre la opresión de las mujeres a través de relaciones de clase o de estatus-, el feminismo, en una parte importante, se basa en la epistemología marxista (Harding 1987: 185;Hartsock 1987). Esta asociación es consistente además en las ciencias sociales [Haug 1983;Strathern 1983;Leacock 1972(en Moore 1988]), 1978Sacks 1974Sacks , 1976de Miguel 1993] (11).…”