Woman: cannibalism to culture

"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" 

-- SIGMUND FREUD

By Alex P. Vidal 

The research made for over 20 years by Evelyn Reed (1905-1979) on Woman’s Evolution, the book dubbed as “an impressive and absorbing reconstruction of human history” by Sociology, will give us a profound understanding why she became a veteran socialist.

Reed takes us on a million-year expedition through prehistory from cannibalism to culture, and covers the world of the ancient matriarchy.

Tracing the origins of the “incest taboo,” blood rites, marriage, and the family, she reveals the leading role women once played. 

By pinpointing the relatively recent factors that led to patriarchal domination, she offers a fresh insight into the issues raised by today’s feminist movement—and refutes the myth that “human nature” is to blame for the male supremacy, greed, wars, and inequalities of modern society.

According to Reed, the early history of half the human species—womankind—has largely been hidden from view. 

“To bring it to light requires a reinvestigation of anthropology, where the role and accomplishments of women in prehistoric society are buried,” she explains. 

Her book is a contribution to unveiling that remarkable record.

RESURGENCE

She stresses that the resurgence of the women’s liberation movement in the 70’s has thrown the spotlight on certain dubious assumptions and disputed questions regarding the past.

Foremost among these is the subject of the matriarchy. Reed asks, “Was there a period in history when women held a highly esteemed and influential place? 

If so, how did they lose their social eminence and become the subordinate sex in patriarchal society? 

Or is the matriarchy, as some say, a myth that has no historical basis?”

She contends that the matriarchy is one of the most hotly contested issues in a hundred-year controversy between contending schools in anthropology. 

Reed’s book affirms that the maternal clan system was the original form of social organization and explains why. 

It also traces the course of its development and the causes of its downfall. 

Such partisanship on the side of the matriarchy would alone make her book controversial. 

But it contains other challenges to long-held opinions on prehistoric society.

“Disagreements are to be expected in a field that covers so vast a stretch of human evolution, extending from the birth of our species to the threshold of civilization, and where the available data derived from biology, archeology, and anthropology is fragmentary and uncoordinated,” Reed writes.

SCIENCE

Anthropology was founded as a distinct science in the middle of the 19th century. 

Most of the founding fathers (women entered the profession only later) had an evolutionary approach. Reed says Morgan, Taylor, and other pioneers regarded anthropology as the study of the origin of society and the material forces at work in its progress. 

They made brilliant beginnings in illuminating the main stages in human development.

Reed says Morgan delineated three great epochs of social evolution—from savagery through barbarism to civilization. Each was marked off by decisive advances in the level of economic activity. 

The most rudimentary stage, savagery, was based on hunting and food-gathering. 

Barbarism began with food production through agriculture and stock-raising. 

Civilization crowned the development of the ancient world by bringing it to the point of commodity production and exchange.

These three epochs, she explains, were of extremely unequal duration. Savagery is sometimes differentiated into an earlier “primeval” and a later “primitive” stage, both of these rested upon a hunting and gathering economy. Savagery had a span of million-odd years, comprising more than 99 percent of human existence. 

Barbarism began about 8,000 years ago; civilization only three thousand years ago.

SAVAGE

The early investigators of savage society, to their own surprise, came upon a social structure totally different from ours, adds Reed.

“They found a clan and tribal system based on material kinship and in which women played a leading role,” she elaborates. 

“This stood out in sharp contrast with modern society which features the father-family and male supremacy. Although they were unable to tell how far back the maternal system went, we propose to show that it dates from the beginning of humankind.”

They made other astonishing discoveries. 

They observed that savage society had egalitarian social and sexual relations, arising from collective production and communal possession of property.

Reed says these features too were at odds with modern society, based on private property and class divisions. 

Thus the maternal clan system, which gave an honored place to women, was also a collectivist order where the members of both sexes enjoyed equality and did not suffer oppression or discrimination.

“Subsequently, these discoveries evoked doubts and resistance from the schools of anthropology that became dominant in the 20th century,” Reed points out. 

“There arose a deep division between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists that has persisted to the present day. It is only through the evolutionary approach, however, that the concealed history of women –and of men—can be uncovered.”

UNIVERSAL

The principle of universal evolution had already been applied to the problem of the genesis of Homo sapiens with the publication in 1871 of Charles Darwin’s book The Descent of Man.

After he demonstrated that the earliest sub-humans, the hominoids, arose out of the anthropoids, the question was posed: How did this transformation come out? In the following decades, biology, archeology, paleontology, and anthropology jointly assisted in the detective work required to clarify this problem.

Reed’s book adheres to the evolutionary and materialist method in utilizing these findings. 

It also presents a new theory about totemism and taboo, among the most enigmatic institutions of primeval and primitive society. 

Anthropologists of all persuasions have held the view that the ancient taboo on sexual intercourse with certain relatives, like our own taboo, arose out of a universal fear of incest. 

Reed’s book challenges that assumption. The ancient taboo existed—but it was primarily directed against the perils of cannibalism in the hunting epoch.

THEORY

Reed says the elimination of the theory of a universal incest taboo removes one of the most serious obstacles to understanding other savage institutions, such as the classificatory system of kinship, exogamy and endogamy, segregation of the sexes, rules of avoidance, blood revenge, the gift-exchange system, and the dual organization of the tribe. 

It clears the way toward an understanding of how society arose--and why it arose in no other from than the maternal clan system or matriarchy.

“The question of the matriarchy is decisive in establishing whether or not the modern father-family has always existed. The very structure of the material clan system precluded it,” Reed explains. 

“Instead of being the basic social unit from time immemorial, as most anthropologists contend, it is a late arrival in history, appearing only at the beginning of the civilized epoch.”