Description
The persvasive gender inequality of modern society is not “natural”. Women have not always been an oppressed sex. In fact, the earliest human communities did not know private property, class diiion and state – or the subordination of women.
Frederick Engels’s pioneering 1884 work “The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State”, provided a sciantific explanation of the origins of women’s oppression. Advances in rcheology and anthropology since then have confirmed the Marxist contention about the egalitarian nature of early human society.
However, Engels cold not explain some key aspets of te transition from pre-class to class society. Recent scientific evidence enables these gaps to be filled in and fully coherent explanation to be developed. That is the subject of this pamphlet.
This tremendous importance to the fight for women’s rights today, a key task of which is to combat all those reactionary ideas which seek to present women’s current social position as “normal” and therefore unchangable.