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>Breaking the chains -- The class roots of domestic violence
>
>by Daphne Liddle
>
>LIKE murder or robbery, even in our bourgeois society we find no political
>group or trend that is openly in favour of domestic violence.
>
> Official figures for domestic violence are only partially helpful because
>they can never be accurate. Much of it goes unreported though we have to
>acknowledge some progress since the sixties when it was not taken
>seriously, hardly recorded and there were no refuges for its victims.
>
> Typically in those days, a woman walking into a police station looking
>obviously battered and bruised was told the police could take no action
>because it was a domestic matter. She would be told to go and see the local
>probation officer for advice.
>
> If she tried to take any legal action, she had to live under the same roof
>as her violent husband until the case came to court. Naturally, more often
>than not, she would be coerced into dropping the case. So the police
>claimed they were justified in their assumption that women, irrational
>beings that we, supposedly are, will never stand up in court and give
>evidence against our husbands and secretly really enjoy being treated like
>a punchbag.
>
> It was this lack of any other safe place to go, with children, that kept
>thousands of women imprisoned in very violent relationships. It would have
>been hard enough to find somewhere on her own but with children, and very
>few women would leave their children behind with a violent husband, it was
>impossible.
>
> This is one area where the women's movement of the early seventies has
>made a real difference, making women's the better through the setting up of
>refuges -- though there is still a long way to go.
>
> A recent survey showed that in Britain more than 50,000 women and children
>flee their homes to find shelter in refuges but three quarters find that
>there is no place available. Some have to be moved as far as 80 miles from
>their homes to find a safe bed for the night.
>
> Often those who cannot find a place are declared homeless and given
>emergency accommodation by local authorities, but this option gives little
>security if their partners come to find them.
>
> And we have to acknowledge that not all domestic violence is men beating
>their wives. There are some instances of wives beating husbands, many more
>instances of parents beating children, some children beat their parents and
>an alarming level of elderly relatives being assaulted. These all count as
>domestic violence. They happen within the nuclear family, behind closed
>doors, where people are being hurt and injured by some other member of
>their family.
>
> The vast majority of perpetrators are men but not all. Violence against
>those who have no means of defence and who are vulnerable is deplorable in
>all instances.
>
> But just to say we are against it is not enough. It persists in spite of
>everyone supposedly being against it and it is a form of oppression that
>communists cannot ignore. We must analyse its causes and we cannot simply
>say the problem will be resolved under socialism. We have to call for
>measures now, under capitalism, that will prevent it.
>
> The cause of this misery lies in the structure and nature of the family
>within a class divided society which takes a particular form according to
>the form of class divisions. The three chief kinds of class society that
>have existed in the West are slave, feudal and capitalist. Each has thrown
>up its own kind of state and family structures that have reflected and been
>a part of that state.
>
> Prior to civilisation -- literally living in cities -- family structures
>in Neolithic and early Bronze Age villages happened in a myriad of forms,
>though these forms too reflected the economic basis of the way the village
>got its living.
>
> The earliest forms of marriage were economic alliances between families: a
>whole group of brothers marrying a group of sisters and the children
>recognising all the women as their mother and all the men as their father.
>Thus a whole gang of children who we would call cousins, saw themselves as
>brothers and sisters.
>
> Kinships were complex and detailed with people being far more aware of all
>their cousins to the umpteenth degree and very complex rules governing who
>could many who. There were septs and clans and tribes with umpteen
>different degrees of closeness governing who owed loyalty to who and who
>could marry who.
>
> In most instances the household was based around the women -- the
>grandmothers and their daughters and families staying put in one place, by
>the hearth which they kept going, while bands of brothers would venture out
>into the world, travel about and form group marriages with other households
>of women. But they would still retain a link of loyalty with their own base
>household, with their mothers and sisters.
>
> These group marriage alliances were not necessarily permanent. It was
>generally the women who decided if they were fed up with the arrangement
>and sent the men on their way.
>
> Men took the lead in fighting in intertribal battles but inside the home
>it was often the women who would choose which man should be the battle chief.
>
> Chiefs had no other authority. Most tribal matters were settled bv
>councils of elders -- the oldest and most experienced members of the tribe,
>clan or family.
>
> War chiefs were often chosen for specific periods only and changed if they
>showed signs of ageing or weakness. A challenger could become king by
>demonstrating his superiority and defeating the existing one in combat. It
>was very unlucky to have a weak king or chief.
>
> The women as gatherers and the men as hunters -- though not exclusively,
>this is a generalisation -- would each make a vital economic contribution
>to the dinner table. This was done communally.
>
> The women brought their children up together, communally. Human infants
>are born with their brains still growing at a faster rate than the rest of
>their body -- unlike any other animal. They are the most helpless of
>infants but are infinitely adaptable to whatever environment they find
>themselves in. They take many years to reach adulthood and independence and
>take far more care than just one woman -- or just one woman and a man
>alone, can provide. Babies need wider families or society to survive. There
>is a theory that women live longer than men because babies who did not have
>grandmothers to help and advise their mothers did not survive.
>
> There was no private property. Tools were made and used as needed within
>the family group.
>
> When herding became a way of life for some families, following the natural
>migration paths of the animals, typically sheep and goats in the middle
>east to begin with, the tribes that adopted this became nomadic. This
>undermined the power base of the settled hearth and meant women's
>opportunity to make a big economic contribution was restricted. You can't
>grow crops if you are always on the move.
>
> Other tribes, in much the same area, began to develop the planting of
>useful vegetables and wild grasses which eventually became corn. Here the
>women's economic contribution was enhanced and their control over family
>economics increased.
>
> In both cases apparent skill with magic, especially rain making, was a
>vital quality of tribal leadership. It was an early attempt to understand
>the laws of nature, according to the evidence available, and make predictions.
>
> The science we have today evolved from this trying to interpret nature,
>inventing theones to explain things, finding them proved wrong when tested
>and moving on to a better theory.
>
> The two ways of life in the same area lead to many clashes which are
>illustrated in the Old Testament. The Israelites were patriarchal nomads
>and clashed with the settled, matriarchal Canaanites.
>
> Use of the term matriarchal can be misleading, it implies rule by women.
>In those ancient communal villages there were none of the power structures
>such as came in with civilised, class society. There was no need for rule
>of any kind. Tradition had an enormous binding effect and generally it was
>older people -- more experienced at coping with crises -- who made the
>important decisions and these tended to be mostly women because women on
>average live longer than men.
>
> And in the settled, arable farming communities women had far more economic
>clout. Communally they could support themselves and did not depend on men,
>whereas the men depended on finding a household that would accept them if
>they did not want to live rough all their lives.
>
> The tradition of men marrying into their wives' household is better termed
>matrilocalism.
>
> When the Hebrew Jacob married into a Canaanite family, he married two
>sisters and was expected to be a husband -- literally someone taken on to
>look after or husband the livestock. When he ran off with his wives, their
>family regarded it as kidnap and pursued them. He got away with it but he
>did adopt the Canaanite practice of taking on the name of his favourite
>wife. In Canaanite, the name Israel literally means Rachel's man or husband.
>
> The two economic strands -- nomadism and arable culture -- developed
>different marriage customs. What property there was descended in the female
>line because, with marriage still not a permanent arrangement, children
>were not always certain who their father was. Men achieved wealth and
>authority by marrying into high status families.
>
> When, in Bronze Age Greece, Paris captured Helen of Troy from Sparta he
>took away the embodiment bf the city state authority. Menelaus could only
>be king of Sparta because he was married to Helen. Without her, no one
>could be king of Sparta. No wonder it caused a war.
>
> Wealthy households with much to protect set difficult challenges for
>would-be husbands, none more so than tribal chiefs or kings. Here we have
>the fairy tale tradition of the poor adventurer marrying the princess after
>being set various seemingly impossible tasks to perform. Skill in science
>would have been vital and the hero was often aided by magic totem animals
>or spirits.
>
> Meanwhile, the nomadic tribes were building the numbers of their stocks to
>swap and trade for other goods. Money was invented to make this easier, the
>earliest coins having the figure of a cow on them to show they represented
>the value of one cow.
>
> Instead of spending hours making tools themselves they could now buy the
>work of others who were better skilled. Market places arose and then towns
>where skilled artisans could live solely by producing commodities for sale
>and did not have to take part in farming.
>
> Suddenly everything had a value, even people. Wars between villages had
>been small affairs but wars between market towns were more serious because
>prisoners could become slaves. At the same time, war leaders became more
>important. The concept of a king with absolute authority, not only in
>battle but within the tribe, began to emerge.
>
> As soon as money was invented, so was debt. Debtors and their families
>could be sold into slavery.
>
> All the previous, thousands-year-old family tribal traditions were
>undermined as soon as a man could buy a slave instead of having to marry
>into his in-laws' household. He also now had private property he wanted to
>keep in his own family and paternity was now better understood. He felt a
>need to control the sexual activity of his wife.
>
> If women now wanted to marry at all, they had to compete with slaves and
>endure much the same terms and conditions. They had to quit their own
>hearths and households and go into their husband's. And often her family
>would have to provide a dowry to entice him into the match.
>
> The very word family is based on the Latin familia, which means not just
>man, wife and children but all the house hold slaves. He was the
>householder and owned everything in the house, including all the people. He
>literally had the power of life and death over all of them.
>
> When his wife, or his slave, had a child, he made the decision as to
>whether it would live or die, based on its health and the economic state of
>the house, and how many mouths there were already to feed. Slaves and
>wives, like pets, sometimes had good masters and sometimes bad but there
>was little they could do about it.
>
> If a slave rebelled and killed the owner, the whole household of slaves
>had to be killed. The Romans regarded rebellion as we regard BSE --
>contagious. It had to be eradicated by wiping out all those who could
>possibly be infected. There was even state compensation to cover the
>economic loss to the heir.
>
> Under feudalism, women were not much better off. Access to the land, the
>only means of production, was governed from the top down. The king allowed
>the big lords access to large tracts so long as they swore loyalty in time
>of war and governed it properly and paid taxes.
>
> They in their turn let it out in bits to lower lords in return for loyalty
>and taxes. At the bottom, the peasants were tied to the land, whoever was
>
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