Barbarism In The 19th Century

Women in the nineteenth century were often seen as the progenitors of family-life: they saw to a child’s education, well-being, and guided them through their first years of life; they were the ‘masters’ of their households, and were therefore seen as little else. Women, particularly wives, were not to venture outside of it nor question its limiting standards, nor was an education beyond the most basic of standards considered necessary. Friedrich Engels defined women’s role as that of a chattel in the house of the man, who by virtue of his property rights and his monopoly over the fruits of labor and food production was afforded a high place within the capitalist bourgeois society. John Stuart Mill, a leading 19th century English philosopher,
These women sit idle—mainly due to their higher economic and social standing—and are the ones who are more favored in society since society has deemed that a work is unbecoming of a woman. Engels states that before the introduction of a surplus economy, when families were small and communal, the rights of men and women were balanced, yet when agricultural surplus came, and the acquisition of food (e.g. hunting) became a luxury, the rights of women so declined. With this and the “pairing marriage,” men began to assert their acquired power (through his ownership of the instruments of labor) to subjugate their wives. As the man’s wealth increased, so did his position in the family, he therefore could exploit his wife since her position within the household was so weakened. Ultimately, the man obtained exclusive control of the household, removing his wife from any form of inheritance, Engels called this “the overthrow of the mother-right.” As a result of this, women’s role in the household became heavily restricted, hence she became “a slave of his [her husband’s] lust” and was seen mainly as the source of child bearing. Women further lost their “state of female lineage, communal property, and sexual freedom.” Coming back to the present, Engels states that “the modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife;” and that women should be put “back into public industry,” and that this in turn