Producers and Reproducers
Yes, it was women who, aside from
reproducing the human race also became the first producers. The renowned US sociologist W.I. Thomas (1863-1947)
wrote concerning the early life of women and men in what Evelyn Reed described
in her famous book “Women’s Evolution”
as the Matriarchal Commune”…
“Men did the hunting
and fighting. He was attached to the
woman but he was not steady. He did not
stay at home. The woman and the child were the core of society, the fixed
point, the point to which man came back.
There consequently grew up a sort of dual society and duel activity. Man represented the more violent and
spasmodic activities, involving motion and skilled coordination, as well as
organization for hunting and fighting, while woman carried on the steady,
settled life…her attention was turned to industries, since these were compatible
with settled and stationary habits.
And then Thomas goes on to describe
these women centered activities…
“Agriculture, pottery,
weaving, tanning, and all the industrial processes involved in working up the
by-products of the chase, were developed by her. She domesticated man and assisted him in
domesticating the animals. She built her
house, and it was hers. She did not go
to her husband’s group after marriage.
The child was hers and remained a member of her group. The germ of social organization was, indeed,
the woman and her children and her children’s children. The old women were the heads of civil
society, though the men had developed a fighting organization and technique
which eventually swallowed them up. (Sex and Society, pp.
227-29).
This version of early family
groupings (called “exogamy” which means young people must mate or marry outside
their own grouping) seems to be generally accepted by most anthropologists. And if we look around at the global situation
today we see that W.I. Thomas was also right about another thing…The fighting
organizations and techniques that men have developed are indeed swallowing up
the world big time.
And the women alive today are much the worse
for it as are their children. Even women
in the developed world are losing ground as their work efforts are increasingly
being made to pay for men’s war machines, and in many countries the children
women have always tried to protect, are being killed and maimed by these guns, killing
machines, and bombs developed and deployed by men. The men who design and produce these
destructive weapons grow grossly rich and stuffed with money while women,
children and poorer men suffer and die.
The same male in-group attraction to
aggression and assault also design and deploy dangerous weapons that are used
against the earth to extract equally dangerous substances that continue to
threaten our entire race to extinction. Under the cloud of this unspeakable
threat women are struggling to become economically independent as producers in
the market place on smaller wages, while fulfilling their biological role as
reproducers of the human race, an activity that brings much debt along with
great love. Women today stand as producers and reproducers while they get very
little respect with even less decision making power.
To have a special day set aside to honour
mothers seems almost an affront when male in-groups are still dictating to
women how and what women can produce in the labour market, but even more
tellingly, also how they can reproduce.
Both areas are rife with the outrageous disrespect and contempt for
mothers that women live with every day.
I believe the day will come when there will no longer be a Mother’s Day
(or Father’s Day) because respect for women (and men who rear children) will be
built into society’s bones. In the meantime, a happy mother’s day to all
mothers everywhere.
