Men, being more mobile, tended to undertake the tasks associated with hunting larger game and the food-gathering further afield.

Women’s child-bearing capacity influenced the development of a division of labour in which women were primarily responsible for childcare and for associated tasks. Women and men lived in relations of equality. This form of social organisation, which he termed “savage societies” later developed into “barbarism,” in which there was no possibility of the private accumulation or appropriation of goods or labour. Tasks were carried out collectively and the products distributed among the group for immediate consumption. However, such criticisms do not disprove Engels’s thesis nor undermine his historical method.Įngels starts from the position that pre-class, subsistence societies were characterised by simple foraging, hunting and “group marriage” organisation. Much is made of the shortcomings of the anthropological evidence employed by Engels who drew much of his empirical material from two 19th-century anthropologists, Morgan and Bachofen.

THE great significance of Friedrich Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property & the State is that it is one of the first Marxist analyses of development of family and origins of women’s oppression (the first was August Bebel’s Women & Socialism, 1879) - a subject in which most men were uninterested.

Engels origin of the family