The Dispossession of Women

A Marxist Examination of New Evidence on the Origins of Women

The pervasive 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 division and the state — or the subordination of women.

Frederick Engels’ pioneering 1884 work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, provided a scientific explanation of the origins of women's oppression. Advances in archaeology and anthropology since then have confirmed the Marxist contention about the egalitarian nature of early human society.

However, Engels could not explain some key aspects of the transition from pre-class to class society. Recent scientific evidence enables these gaps to be filled in and a fully coherent explanation to be developed. That is the subject of this pamphlet.

This is of 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 unchangeable.