Sexuality and Socialism. Sherry Wolf

between men and women in pre-class societies, but there is no evidence to suggest that women were systematically oppressed—and in some societies, women were afforded an even higher status than men.¹⁵

      Anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock provided detailed studies on early societies, particularly the Montagnais-Naskapi of the Labrador Peninsula, to argue, “With regard to the autonomy of women, nothing in the structure of egalitarian band societies necessitated special deference to men.”¹⁶ Women made decisions alongside men on where and when to move, whether to join or leave a mate, and about the distribution of food—all central to daily life and survival. Even the sexual division of labor is called into question by Leacock and other anthropologists who examined societies in which women did the hunting and men took on roles like child-rearing as often as they performed tasks modern society conceives of as appropriate to their genders.

      The oppression of women corresponded with the rise of the first class divisions in society and the creation of the monogamous family unit. Prior to humans’ ability to store food and other goods as a surplus, there was no “wealth” to be hoarded, precluding the possibility of class inequality between different groups of people. Classes arose when human beings found new ways of sustaining a livelihood. New methods of production required that some people were needed to labor, while others needed to be freed from that labor to coordinate the organization of the group and ensure the storage of a surplus for times when crops failed or the group grew in size. As socialist Chris Harman describes, “The ‘leaders’ could begin to turn into ‘rulers,’ into people who came to see their control over resources as in the interests of society as a whole…. For the first time social development encouraged the development of the motive to exploit and oppress others.”¹⁷

      Since there was no surplus wealth prior to classes, there was nothing to be passed on from one generation to the next. But with the development of a surplus and classes came the impetus for those who had control over a surplus to hold onto it and pass it to their own children. With the appearance of social classes and the possibility of passing wealth in the form of inheritance from those who had it to their offspring arose the desire for monogamy, at least imposed on women, so that male leaders could ensure the veracity of their own bloodline. The rise of the patriarchal family was a consequence of these changes.

      The initial meaning of the word “family” is a far cry from Norman Rockwell’s images of domestic bliss. Early Romans used the term famulus to describe household slaves, and familia to refer to the “total number of slaves belonging to one man.”¹⁸ For the early feudal aristocracy, marriage was an economic, not emotional, relationship—a means to transfer land wealth or to secure peaceful relations between landed estates. Over time, men were increasingly drawn into production and women were increasingly isolated in the role of reproduction, or child-rearing.

      Until the rise of capitalism, the peasant family was both a unit of production and reproduction. Peasant women were not only in charge of child-rearing, cooking, and cleaning, but they were also expected to make clothes, churn butter, milk the cows, make beer, spin cloth, etc.; unlike the modern nuclear family, which is purely a reproductive unit. Women were unequal to men and had gender-defined jobs in the feudal family, but with the rise of markets and industry that came to dominate Western societies in the nineteenth century, productive work like brewing and the manufacture of textiles was removed from the realm of the family.

      The changing economic structure of society drastically altered attitudes toward both women and sexuality. Imposing monogamy—for women only—afforded the means through which wealthy men’s property could be inherited by children whom the father could be certain were his own. Monogamous marriage, in essence, developed as the agency through which ruling-class men could establish undisputed paternity.¹⁹ As Engels wrote,

      The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others.²⁰

      Among the middle classes and landowning peasants under European feudalism, the patriarchal household dominated. Although landless peasants possessed no wealth of their own, the institution of the family was nevertheless legally established as the norm for all sectors of society. Feudal communities usually arranged marriages between poor peasants. Family life was filled with grinding work for all family members, and childbirth often ended in death for either mother or infant, or both.

      In these societies, sexual repression took a form different from what we know today. Severe sanctions were enforced against all sexual behaviors that were non-procreative. In 1533, for example, Britain’s King Henry VIII—whose obsession with producing a male heir led to six marriages—introduced the Buggery Act, which would put men to death for “buggery,” the catchall term of the day for non-procreative sex that was considered a crime against nature.²¹ The act coincided with other laws in the same period punishing “vagabonds,” i.e., peasants forced off the land with nowhere to go. Buggery was included in the Articles of War beginning in the seventeenth century in Britain and was punished the same as mutiny and desertion.

      The households of European colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were independent units of both production and reproduction in which all family members worked together on a plot of land to supply virtually all of the family’s needs. In the New England colonies, “solitary living” was forbidden. Servants and apprentices had to live with the households for which they worked, but even without legal constraints, economic survival in colonial times was inconceivable outside the family structure.²²

      The need for labor in the colonies fueled efforts by New England churches and courts to outlaw and punish adultery, sodomy, incest, and rape. Extramarital sex by women, who were considered incapable of controlling their passions, was punished more severely than extramarital sex by men. Sodomy could mean either sex between two people of the same gender or any “unnatural” acts such as anal or oral intercourse that couldn’t result in procreation, even between married couples. In a society that prized productivity, to the Puritans sodomy was wasted time. Though officially punishable by death from 1607 to 1740, sodomy was more often punished by lashings. Some cases of “lewd behavior” between women were punished by whippings, though no one was executed for sodomy in the colonies during the eighteenth century, probably due to the legal requirement of proof of penetration and two eyewitnesses.²³ The dominance of the church and the lack of any means to care for children born out of wedlock drove neighbors’ zealous watch over the sexual mores of their community.

      As historian Jonathan Ned Katz explains, “The operative contrast in this society was between fruitfulness and barrenness, not between different-sex and same-sex eroticism…. In these colonies, erotic desire for members of a same sex was not construed as deviant because erotic desire for a different sex was not construed as a norm.”²⁴

      With the rise of urban centers and industrial production methods in the late-nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America, wage labor became much more common. Compared with farm life, there was an increased separation of home from work so the family became much more exclusively a center for reproduction. Over the decades, the growth of industry created a new kind of family ideal, as a haven from a changing, often hostile world. But the relationship between the family and capitalism was fraught with contradictions from the beginning. John D’Emilio’s groundbreaking essay, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” uses the historical materialist method developed by Marx and Engels to analyze these contradictions. He writes,

      On the one hand, capitalism continually weakens the material foundation of family life, making it possible for individuals to live outside the family, and for a lesbian and gay male identity to develop. On the other, it needs to push men and women into families, at least long enough to reproduce the next generation of workers. The elevation of the family to ideological preeminence guarantees that a capitalist society will reproduce not