Date: Thu, 2 Jan 1997 14:01:48 +0100 (MET)
Subject: M-G: Engels on ancient Greece & split between sexes


Engels on ancient Greece & split between sexes 
[Posted: 02.01.97]

INTRO NOTE:

Present-day putrefuing bourgeois-imperialist society i.a. is trying 
to exacerbate a split between men and women, is conducting a 
campaign *against* normal ordinary sex and *for* all kinds of
perversions. In an article in December 1996 on the nasty 
Dutroux-affair in Belgium, the German ex-Marxist group the 
Klasberries, <klasber-AT-aol.com>, basically correctly attacked the 
latter part of that campaign while at the same time not seeing the 
former but in fact in part supporting it. 

My supporting that point in the Klasberries' article in which they
opposed the recent idea by some bourgeois states, massively
supported by the ultra-reactionary media, of instituting so-called 
"same-sex marriages", as part of those man-woman splitting 
activities of theirs, was attacked by some writers. They, or some
of them, argued that homosexuality, which I had written that I, 
concurring with the (today essentially conservative-bourgeois) 
Klasberries and also with i.a. Engels as well as with the great
majority of workers, held to be a very negative phenomenon, 
was not so at all but was to be considered a "normal human
activity" which there "had always been and would always be".

But this phenomenon in reality has certain causes in society and
culture, above all that split between the sexes that was one
by-product of the institution, in ancient history, of the family 
system instead of that other basic system that existed more or
less everywhere on earth before it.

Some writers also held that the characterization of sodomy as
a negative thing had "nothing to do with" or even was "opposed
to" Marxism. They are wrong on this point too. Historically,
the phenomeon arose (as far as I understand) as one result of 
that suppression of women which was caused by the newly 
emerging family system.

To support what I'm arguing here, I shall quote some lines from
Engels' well-known book "The Origin of Private Property, the
State and the Family": I hold that on a couple of points in this  
work, Engels is not right, as shown on one of them by the later
research reported (e.g.) in Evelyn Reed: "The Development
of Woman", USA, 1974. Btw, my own knowledge of the historical 
facts involved here is more or less limited to what I've read in 
those two books. To the below I have no objection:

[Quited from "Origin..." on Net Marx-Engels archives,
http://csf.colorado.edu/psu/marx
chapter 2 "The Family", last part - file Ch02d]

[Engels:]

The position is quite different among the Ionians; here Athens is

typical.  Girls only learned spinning, weaving, and sewing, and at 
most a little reading and writing.  They lived more or less behind 
locked doors and had no company except other women.  The women's 
apartments formed a separate part of the house, on the upper floor 
or at the back, where men, especially strangers, could not easily
 enter, and to which the women retired when men visited the house.  
They never went out without being accompanied by a female slave; 
indoors they were kept under regular guard.  

Aristophanes speaks of Molossian dogs kept to frighten away 
adulterers, and, at any rate in the Asiatic towns, eunuchs were 
employed to keep watch over the women-making and exporting

eunuchs was an industry in Chios as early as Herodotus' time, and,

according to Wachsmuth, it was not only the barbarians who bought 
the supply.  In Euripides a woman is called an oikourema, a thing 
(the word is neuter) for looking after the house, and, apart from 
her business of bearing children, that was all she was for the 
Athenian -- his chief female domestic servant.  

The man had his athletics and his public business, from which 
women were barred; in addition, he often had female slaves at his 
disposal and during the most flourishing days of Athens an 
extensive system of prostitution which the state at least favored.  
It was precisely through this system of prostitution that the only 
Greek women of personality were able to develop, and to acquire that 
intellectual and artistic culture by which they stand out as high 
above the general level of classical womanhood as the Spartan 
women by their qualities of character.  But that a woman had to be 
a hetaira before she could be a woman is the worst condemnation 
of the Athenian family.



This Athenian family became in time the accepted model for domestic 
relations, not only among the lonians, but to an increasing extent 
among all the Greeks of the mainland and colonies also.  But, in 
spite of locks and guards, Greek women found plenty of opportunity
for deceiving their husbands.  The men, who would have been ashamed 
to show any love for their wives, amused themselves by all sorts of 
love affairs with hetairai; but this degradation of the women was 
avenged on the men and degraded them also, till they fell into the 
abominable practice of sodomy and degraded alike their gods and 
themselves with the myth of Ganymede.

[So far Engels in "Origin..."]

Rolf M.









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