Gerda Lerner

In the initial stages of my research, I was greatly aided by a Guggenheim Foundation grant in 1980-81, which gave me a year in which to read in anthropology and feminist theory and to study the problem of the origin of slavery. One result of that year’s work was the chapter “The Slave Woman,” which I presented at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians at Vassar College in June 1981.

The Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has supported my research on this book with a summer research grant in 1981 and with grants for project assistants. My appointment as Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Senior Distinguished Research Professor in 1984 gave me a semester free from teaching obligations, which enabled me to do final revisions and complete the book. I am deeply grateful not only for the tangible support, but for the encouragement of my work implicit in it.

The term “oppression of women” inevitably conjures up comparison with the other oppressed groups and leads one to think in terms of comparing the various degrees of oppression as though one were dealing with similar groups.

The word “oppression” implies victimization; indeed, those who apply it to women frequently conceptualize women-as-a-group primarily as victims. This way of thinking of women is misleading and ahistorical.

As formerly subordinate groups, such as peasants, slaves, proletarians, have risen into positions of power or at least inclusion in the polity, their experiences have become part of the historical record. That is, the experiences of the males of their group; females were, as usual, excluded. The point is that men and women have suffered exclusion and discrimination because of their class. No man has been excluded from the historical record because of his sex, yet all women were.

The contradiction between women’s centrality and active role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process of interpretation and explanation has been a dynamic force, causing women to struggle against their condition. When, in that process of struggle, at certain historic moments, the contradictions in their relationship to society and to historical process are brought into the consciousness of women, they are then correctly perceived and named as deprivations that women share as a group. This coming-into-consciousness of women becomes the dialectical force moving them into action to change their condition and to enter a new relationship to male-dominated society.

Quite apart from its dubious biological claims of male physical superiority, the man-the-hunter explanation has been disproven by anthropological evidence concerning hunting and gathering societies. In most of these societies, big-game hunting is an auxiliary pursuit, while the main food supply is provided by gathering activities and small-game hunting, which women and children do.

When feminist anthropologists have reviewed the data or done their own field work, they have found male dominance to be far from universal. They have found societies in which sexual asymmetry carries no connotation of dominance or subordination. Rather, the tasks performed by both sexes are indispensable to group survival, and both sexes are regarded as equal in status in most aspects. In such societies the sexes are considered “complementary”; their roles and status are different, but equal.

Nevertheless, traditionalists expect women to follow the same roles and occupations that were functional and species-essential in the Neolithic.

Lévi-Strauss sees in the incest taboo a universal human mechanism, which lies at the root of all social organization.

The prohibition of incest is less a rule prohibiting marriage with the mother, sister or daughter, than a rule obliging the mother, sister, or daughter to be given to others. It is the supreme rule of the gift.