Capitalism, Property and Gender Relations

Thus far it has been argued that it is the specificity of property and class relations, and thus the historical specificity of production and reproduction as a dialectical totality, rather than a theory of 'patriarchy' that can explain male bias in the history of English property relations. I now want to consider the implications of this bias in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England. In so doing it will be suggested that the masculinised structuring of property relations both prior to and under feudalism, may, under conditions of capitalism, have been conducive to the fractionalisation of class among the lines of gender.

In the Grundrisse, discussing the matrix of social relations internal to modes of production, i.e. the relationship between 'community', 'family, and the 'individual', and referring to the Germanic form of property Marx notes that,

Here the commune member is neither as such a co-possessor of the communal property...This individual is thus only a possessor. What exists is only communal property and only private possession... 'Among the Germanic tribes, the agerpublicus (the communal or people's land) appears...merely as a complement to individual property...Individual property does not appear mediated by the commune; the existence of the commune and of communal property appear as mediated by. i.e. as a relation of, the independent subjects to one another.. .The commune exists only in the interrelations among these individual landed proprietors as such...the commune is presupposed in itself prior to the individual proprietors as a communality of language, blood etc.. but it exists as a presence...only in its real assembly for communal purposes, and to the extent that it has a particular economic existence in the hunting and grazing lands for communal use it really is the common property of the individual proprietors, not of the union of these proprietors endowed with a existence separate from themselves...'""

Marx points out that the basic unit of ownership in medieval society was the household, not the individual.

the economic totality is, at bottom, contained in each individual household...in the Germanic world, the totality is the individual residence, which itself appears as only a small dot on the land belonging to it, and which is not a concentration of many proprietors, but the family as independent unit.'"'

Feudal titles were not the same as modern private ownership of estates. Feudal property rights usually referred to rights to a revenue¹⁰² in the form of services, produce or money. Property relations did not usually involve rights to things. Property rights were usually limited to certain uses of land not freely disposable. Different

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people could have different rights in the same piece of land which was not fully disposable either by sale or bequest.¹⁰³ A quote from Marc Bloch is apposite here:

The word ownership as applied to landed property, would have been almost meaningless...The tenant who from father to son, as a rule ploughs the land, and gathers in the crops: his immediate lord, to whom he pays dues and who, in certain circumstances, can resume possession of the land; the lord of the lord, and so on, right up the feudal scale - how many persons are there who can say, each with as much justification as the other That is my field!' Even this is an understatement. For the ramifications extended horizontally as well as vertically and account should be taken of the village community, which normally recovered the use of the whole of its agricultural land as soon as it was cleared of crops: of the tenants family, without whose consent the property could not be alienated; and of the families of the successive lords.¹⁰⁴

However, with the development of capitalism in England, feudal property was transformed into modern individualistic ownership. Property became a right in or to material things, or even as things themselves. Property becomes an absolute right, and is exactly the sort of property required to facilitate the development of a capitalist market economy.¹⁰⁵ Property as the right of legal individuals involves the right to exclude others.¹⁰⁶

We can see this shift occurring quite clearly in England. By the 1640's, for the more prosperous Yeoman, Merchants, Gentry and Peers, instead of being primarily a source of service, loyalty or followers, land was becoming more clearly a profit yielding investment, i.e. capital.¹⁰⁷ By 1652 Zouche defined property as,

Common right to things, is that which is agreeable to the law of Nations, as Property which is the right of enjoying and disposing of a thing at pleasure, and is gained by Industry.¹"⁸

And in a republican work in 1670,

So that it seems it is called the king's highway, because of the privilege that the king hath in it for his people to pass and repass through it, and not in respect of any property he hath in the soil itself; yet divers, as of Mannors do claim the soil as part of their waste.¹⁰⁸

Implications for Gender Relations

The development of individualised property rights associated with the transition from feudalism to capitalism may well have had implications of some significance for gender relations. Consider for a moment the long historical construction of masculinised property relations. In this context consider the contradictory nature of gender relations within barbarian chiefdoms and corporate kin groups, and

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their transformation into a fully developed feudal society where women became much more clearly dependent on an individual man as head of a nuclear family, for access to resources. Then consider the implications of a further transition to the individualistic and absolute form of property characteristic of capitalism. It is likely that both the historical construction and the historical specificity of property relations laid the basis for the fractionalisation of class along the lines of gender.

It has been argued that primogeniture for example was not intended as a patriarchal inheritance strategy. First and foremost, it was a strategy designed to maintain and further relations of class power. Nonetheless, it did structure relations between the sexes -and it did so across the social spectrum. Although there were debates and campaigns against primogeniture during the 16th, 17th and 19th centuries, the law did not change until 1925."° Meanwhile the practise of partible inheritance amongst co-heirs could be found amongst the peasantry. It was also practised amongst small landowners during the 19th century, facilitating the development of new capitals.¹" Partible inheritance did little to challenge the masculinised construction of property relations. Indeed, by dividing property between several men, rather than concentrating it in the hands of one man, it might have even furthered it. At the same time, we have seen that the law of coverture enabled a husband to exercise a degree of control his wife's property.

Might not this historical structuring of property along the lines of gender, albeit for reasons of class and kinship, have contributed to the emergence of the ideology of the male breadwinner? This ideology was played out amongst the propertied and the propertyless. During the 19th century for example the ideology of female domesticity, underpinned by the ideology of the male breadwinner, was mobilised amongst the middle classes. At the same time, although the individual referred to before the later 19th century with respect to property rights was the legal civic individual - Locke for example equated property ownership with rational citizenship - the legal civic individual would usually be the male householder. In this context, despite her use of the term 'patriarchy', Diana Leonard Barker is nonetheless instructive:

The dominant interpretation of Individualist philosophy in the 19th century itself would be better named Familialism - or simply Patriarchy. It envisaged full legal citizenship extended to all heads of household and 'individual obligation' as being between household heads. The possibility of dependants (married women and children - and at an earlier date, servants) being seen as rational contract-making, independent individuals was not considered in most political thought of Maine's day'.'' '²

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The 19th century also witnessed the mobilisation of the ideology of the male breadwinner around demands for a 'family wage', i.e. an income sufficient for a husband to support his wife and children. The significance of the family wage for feminist analysis has been hotly debated. Some arguments suggest that the family wage system should be seen as the reconstitution of corporate kin relations. Humphries for example argues that the family wage system provided a non-degrading form of support for non-labouring members of the working class in the absence of the welfare state. At the same time she argues that the family wage system gave the working class a lever on the supply of labour, enabling it to resist a fall in the value of labour power. Indeed Humphries argues that the family wage system was conducive to the development of a militant class consciousness amongst workers.'¹³

Meanwhile Barrett and Mclntosh suggest a coincidence of interests between the capitalist class and a patriarchally structured working class. They point out that the extraction of absolute surplus value during the 19th century was incompatible with the reproduction of the working class. They argue that it was imperative for capital, and indeed for labour, that the life and health of the working class be protected. There thus emerged a coincidence of interests, between bourgeois philantropists and the bourgeois state on the one hand and the working class movement on the other. This coincidence of interest was manifest in the Factory Acts of the 1840's limiting the length of the working day, and protective legislation, for example, the 1842 Mines Act excluding women from work at the pit face.¹¹⁴

More recently Brenner and Ramas have argued that the material basis for the family wage system was rooted in the realities of reproduction under conditions of 19th century capitalism. They argue that under capitalism the biological facts of reproduction, i.e. pregnancy, childbirth and lactation are not readily compatible with the production process which is increasingly separated from the household. Because of the threat to the rate of profit, capital was unwilling to outlay the necessary expenditure to overcome this incompatibility. They conclude that '...historically developed capitalist class relations of production, in combination with the biological facts of reproduction, set up a powerful dynamic toward the family-household system, assuring women's continued subordination to men and their exaggerated vulnerability to capitalist exploitation...'''⁵

Whatever position is adopted within these debates, we still need a much broader historical perspective than one which focuses on the 19th century to account for the construction of the ideology of the male breadwinner. We surely need to look back to the historically specific forms of property and the implications of successive shifts