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12 Nov 09

Original western Art | Ugallery.com - Online Art Gallery

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23 Oct 09

Everex launches a tiny Linux PC - The Everex gPC Mini | Geeky Gadgets

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22 Oct 09

Feminist Must-Reads - The F-Word

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I would like
to see a denouncement of the very notion of virginity itself and the idea that
anyone who has not had conventional penis-in-vagina sex is a virgin. Virginity
is a socially constructed commodity, which is designed to be given away or
taken.

13 Oct 09

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the asymmetrical organization of parenting in
which women mother is the basic cause of significant contrasts between
feminine and masculine identification processes.
he defines
masculinity negatively as that which is not feminine and/or connected
to women, rather than positively.

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My account shows that psychoanalytic theory can also explain how
this family produces women as mothers.

12 Oct 09

Daphne and Celeste - Google Search

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10 Oct 09

Nancy Chodorow - Psychology Wiki

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the child forms its ego in reaction to the dominating figure of the mother. The male child forms this sense of independent agency easily, identifying with the agency and freedom of the father and emulating his possessive interest in the mother/wife. This task is not as simple for the female child. The mother identifies with her more strongly, and the daughter attempts to make the father, her new love object, but is stymied in her ego formation by the intense bond with mom.
the contrast between the dyadic and triadic first love experiences explains the social construction of gender roles, the universal degradation of women in culture, cross-cultural patterns in male behavior, and marital strain in the West after Second Wave feminism

09 Oct 09

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eaks of women's "primary reproductive
drive"

²⁷
and "instinctual need"

²⁸
to fulfill her physiological and emotional
preparedness for mothering. Winnicott suggests that holding
the infant physically in her uterus leads to a mother's identification
with the infant after it is born and therefore to "a very powerful sense
of what the baby needs."

²⁹
Rossi argues that women's maternal instinct
has been genetically prog

SFU Connect: Inbox (540)

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08 Oct 09

Google Reader (1000+)

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Creating comic strips can be a fun way to get kids interested and engaged in writing. Witty Comics provides a simple platform that students can use to create two character dialogues. To use Witty Comics students just need to select the pre-drawn background scenes and the pre-drawn characters they want to feature in their comics. Writing the dialogues is the creative element that is left to the students.

Applications for Education
Witty Comics provides pre-drawn background scenes and characters which leaves students free to focus on the story they're trying to tell. Students only have three frames with which to work in. The three frame limit will make students focus on selecting their words carefully for maximum storytelling effect.

If Witty Comics is too basic for your needs, you may want to explore one of these other great options.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Online Art Activities at the National Gallery of Art
Blogs for Art Teachers

07 Oct 09

Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex, On the Master-Slave Relation 1949

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The advantage of the master, he says, comes from his affirmation of Spirit as against Life through the fact that he risks his own life; but in fact the conquered slave has known this same risk. Whereas woman is basically an existent who gives Life and does not risk her life, between her and the male there has been no combat.
a mode of living bestowed by another entity.’
6 more annotations...
- He it is who opens up the future to which she also reaches out. In truth women have never set up female values in opposition to male values; it is man who, desirous of maintaining masculine prerogatives, has invented that divergence.
- the existent seeks self-justification through transcendence
- What they demand today is to be recognized as existents by the same right as men and not to subordinate existence to life, the human being to its animality.
- The female, to a greater extent than the male, is the prey of the species; and the human race has always sought to escape its specific destiny.
- values the reasons for living above mere life
- Man’s design is not to repeat himself in time: it is to take control of the instant and mould the future. It is male activity that in creating values has made of existence itself a value

Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex, The Point of View of Historical Materialism 1949

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Human society is an antiphysis – in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf.
woman could not be considered simply as a sexual organism, for among the biological traits, only those have importance that take on concrete value in action. Woman’s awareness of herself is not defined exclusively by her sexuality
28 more annotations...
- her grasp upon the world is less extended than man’s, and she is more closely enslaved to the species.
- grasp upon the world has never been defined by the naked body
- technique may annul the muscular inequality of man and woman
- It is the resistance of the ancient capitalistic paternalism that in most countries prevents the concrete realisation of this equality
- The turning-point of all history is the passage from the regime of community ownership to that of private property, and it is in no wise indicated how this could have come about.
- it is not clear that the institution of private property must necessarily have involved the enslavement of women. Historical materialism takes for granted facts that call for explanation
- the truths that he does reveal are seemingly contingent, incidental. The fact is that we cannot plumb their meaning without going beyond the limits of historical materialism.
- the very concept of personal possession can be comprehensible only with reference to the original condition of the existent. For it to appear, there must have been at first an inclination in the subject to think of himself as basically individual, to assert the autonomy and separateness of his existence.
- The discovery of bronze enabled man, in the experience of hard and productive labour, to discover himself as creator; dominating nature, he was no longer afraid of it, and in the faceof obstacles overcome he found courage to see himself as an autonomous active force, to achieve self-fulfilment as an individual.
- But this accomplishment would never have been attained had not man originally willed it so; the lesson of work is not inscribed upon a passive subject: the subject shapes and masters himself in shaping and mastering the land.
- On the other hand, the affirmation of the subject’s individuality is not enough to explain property: each conscious individual through challenge, struggle, and single combat can endeavour to raise himself to sovereignty.
- the existent succeeds in finding himself only in estrangement, in alienation; he seeks through the world to find himself in some shape, other than himself, which he makes his own.
- Man finds himself in these goods which are his because he has previously lost himself in them; and it is therefore understandable that he places upon them a value no less fundamental than upon his very life.
- an attitude that implies an ontological substructure, a foundation in the nature of his being.
- the limitations of her capacity for labour constituted in themselves a concrete disadvantage only in a certain perspective. It is because man is a being of transcendence and ambition that he projects new urgencies through every new tool
- Woman’s incapacity brought about her ruin because man regarded her in the perspective of his project for enrichment and expansion. And this project is still not enough to explain why she was oppressed; for the division of labour between the sexes could have meant a friendly association.
- this phenomenon is a result of the imperialism of the human consciousness, seeking always to exercise its sovereignty in objective fashion. If the human consciousness had not included the original category of the Other and an original aspiration to dominate the Other
- nor any thought of her own disappearance as a sex – all she asks is that certain sequels of sexual differentiation be abolished.
- In some periods, indeed, it is more useful to produce offspring than to plough the soil. Engels slighted the problem
- Woman’s life is more seriously broken in upon by a demand for children than by regulation of the citizen’s employment
- In the sexual act and in maternity not only time and strength but also essential values are involved for woman. Rationalist materialism tries in vain to disregard this dramatic aspect of sexuality; for it is impossible to bring the sexual instinct under a code of regulations.
- it does not permit of integration with the social, because there is in eroticism a revolt of the instant against time, of the individual against the universal. In proposing to direct and exploit it, there is risk of killing it, for it is impossible to deal at will with living spontaneity as one deals at will with inert matter; and no more can it be obtained by force, as a privilege may be.
- There is no way of directly compelling woman to bring forth: all that can be done is to put her in a situation where maternity is for her the sole outcome
- it is impossible to regard woman simply as a productive force: she is for man a sexual partner, a reproducer, an erotic object – an Other through whom he seeks himself.
- the erotic experience remains one in which generality is always regained by an individuality. And for a democratic socialism in which classes are abolished but not individuals, the question of individual destiny would keep all its importance – and hence sexual differentiation would keep all its importance. The sexual relation that joins woman to man is not the same as that which he bears to her; and the bond that unites her to the child is sui generis, unique. She was not created by the bronze tool alone; and the machine tool alone will not abolish her. To claim for her every right, every chance to be an all-round human being does not mean that we should be blind to her peculiar situation.
- Underlying all individual drama, as it underlies the economic history of mankind, there is an existentialist foundation that alone enables us to understand in its unity that particular form of being which we call a human life.
- The virtue of Freudianism derives from the fact that the existent is a body: what he experiences as a body confronted by other bodies expresses his existential situation concretely. Similarly, what is true in the Marxian thesis is that the ontological aspirations – the projects for becoming – of the existent take concrete form according to the material possibilities offered, especially those opened up by technological advances.
- In our attempt to discover woman we shall not reject certain contributions of biology, of psychoanalysis, and of historical materialism; but we shall hold that the body, the sexual life, and the resources of technology exist concretely for man only in so far as he grasps them in the total perspective of his existence.

Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex, The Psychoanalytic Point of View 1949

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He assumes that woman feels that she is a mutilated man. But the idea of mutilation implies comparison and evaluation.
the concept of the Electra complex is very vague, because it is not supported by a basic description of the feminine libido.
47 more annotations...
- If it is admitted that the Electra complex has only a very diffuse emotional character, then the whole question of emotion is raised, and Freudianism does not help us in defining emotion as distinguished from sexuality. What deifies the father is by no means the feminine libido (nor is the mother deified by the desire she arouses in the son); on the contrary, the fact that the feminine desire (in the daughter) is directed towards a sovereign being gives it a special character. It does not determine the nature of its object; rather it is affected by the latter. The sovereignty of the father is a fact of social origin, which Freud fails to account for
- ‘It could not have been patriarchal authority, since it is just this authority which progress conferred upon the father’
- for Adler man appears to be aiming at certain goals; for the sexual urge he substitutes motives, purposes, projects.
- in every individual there is a will to power, which, however, is accompanied by an inferiority complex; the resulting conflict leads the individual to employ a thousand ruses in a flight from reality
- It is not the lack of the penis that causes this complex, but rather woman’s total situation; if the little girl feels penis envy it is only as the symbol of privileges enjoyed by boys.
- everything confirms her in her belief in masculine superiority.
- She reacts through the ‘masculine protest’: either she endeavours to masculinise herself, or she makes use of her feminine weapons to wage war upon the male. Through maternity she may be able to find an equivalent of the penis in her child. But this supposes that she begins by wholly accepting her role as woman and that she assumes her inferiority. She is divided against herself much more profoundly than is the male.
- every urge poses a motive, but the motive is apprehended only through the urge
- the human story is to be explained by the interplay of determinate elements.
- She will find her recompense in maternity, since that will afford her a new kind of independence. This drama would seem to be endowed with an energy, dynamism, of its own; it steadily pursues its course through any and all distorting incidents, and every woman is passively swept along in it.
- by superposing an inverse Oedipus complex upon the Oedipus complex, by disclosing desire in all anxiety, success has been achieved in integrating with the Freudian system the very facts that appear to contradict its validity.
- the concept of a simple association of elements is unacceptable, for the psychic life is not a mosaic, it is a single whole in every one of its aspects and we must respect that unity. This is possible only by our recovering through the disparate facts the original purposiveness of existence. If we do not go back to this source, man appears to be the battleground of compulsions and prohibitions that alike are devoid of meaning and incidental.
- All psychoanalysts systematically reject the idea of choice and the correlated concept of value, and therein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system.
- He endeavoured to replace the idea of value with that of authority; but he admits in Moses and Monotheism that he has no way of accounting for this authority.
- The human unity appears to be disrupted, there is no thoroughfare from the individual to society
- values are involved in sexuality itself
- The existent is a sexual, a sexuate body, and in his relations with other existents who are also sexuate bodies, sexuality is in consequence always involved. But if body and sexuality are concrete expressions of existence, it is with reference to this that their significance can be discovered.
- There is no need of taking sexuality as an irreducible datum, for there is in the existent a more original ‘quest for being’, of which sexuality is only one of the aspects.
- the primary truth regarding man is his relation with his own body and with the bodies of his fellows in the group; but man has a primordial interest in the substance of the natural world which surrounds him and which he tries to discover in work, in play, and in all the experiences of the ‘dynamic imagination’.
- it is his admiration for integrity that renders virginity precious.
- It is at once in their light and in the light of these erotic experiences that the individual exercises his power of choice. But only an ontological point of view, a comprehension of being in general, permits us to restore the unity of this choice.
- It is this concept of choice, indeed, that psychoanalysis most vehemently rejects in the name of determinism and the ‘collective unconscious’; and it is this unconscious that is supposed to supply man with prefabricated imagery and a universal symbolism.
- To speak of liberty would be to deny oneself the possibility of explaining these disturbing conformities. But the idea of liberty is not incompatible with the existence of certain constants.
- there are in every individual case certain factors of undeniable generality: situations and behaviour patterns constantly recur, and the moment of decision flashes from a cloud of generality and repetition.
- ‘The body is generality.’
- Existence is all one, bridging the gaps between individual existents; it makes itself manifest in analogous organisms, and therefore constant factors will be found in the bonds between the ontological and the sexual. At a given epoch of history the techniques, the economic and social structure of a society, will reveal to all its members an identical world, and there a constant relation of sexuality to social patterns will exist; analogous individuals, placed in analogous conditions, will see analogous points of significance in the given circumstances.
- Symbolism did not come down from heaven nor rise up from subterranean depths – it has been elaborated, like language, by that human reality which is at once Mitsein and separation; and this explains why individual invention also has its place
- It is impossible to account for it without taking our departure from an existential fact: the tendency of the subject towards alienation. The anxiety that his liberty induces in the subject leads him to search for himself in things, which is a kind of flight from himself.
- The penis is singularly adapted for playing this role of ‘double’ for the little boy – it is for him at once a foreign object and himself
- ‘an alter ego ordinarily more artful, more intelligent, and more clever than the individual’.
- The penis is regarded by the subject as at once himself and other than himself, because the functions of urination and later of erection are processes midway between the voluntary and involuntary, and because it is a capricious and as it were a foreign source of pleasure that is felt subjectively.
- The individual’s specific transcendence takes concrete form in the penis and it is a source of pride. Because the phallus is thus set apart, man can bring into integration with his subjective individuality the life that overflows from it.
- Not having that alter ego, the little girl is not alienated in a material thing and cannot retrieve her integrity. On this account she is led to make an object of her whole self, to set up herself as the Other.
- the absence of the penis prevents her from being conscious of herself as a sexual being.
- the phallus assumes such worth as it does because it symbolises a dominance that is exercised in other domains. If woman should succeed in establishing herself as subject, she would invent equivalents of the phallus; in fact, the doll, incarnating the promise of the baby that is to come in the future can become a possession more precious than the penis. There are matrilineal societies in which the women keep in their possession the masks in which the group finds alienation; in such societies the penis loses much of its glory. The fact is that a true human privilege is based upon the anatomical privilege only in virtue of the total situation.
- a life is a relation to the world, and the individual defines himself by making his own choices through the world about him. We must therefore turn towards the world to find answers for the questions we are concerned with. In particular psychoanalysis fails to explain why woman is the Other.
- They seem to ignore the fundamental ambivalence of the attraction exerted on the female by the male.
- we should regard as an original fact this blending of urgency and apprehension which is female desire: it is the indissoluble synthesis of attraction and repulsion that characterises it.
- The notion of a ‘passive libido’ is baffling, since the libido has been defined, on the basis of the male, as a drive, an energy
- We would more fully encompass reality if instead of defining the libido in vague terms of ‘energy’ we brought the significance of sexuality into relation with that of other human attitudes – taking, capturing, eating, making, submitting, and so forth; for it is one of the various modes of apprehending an object.
- she has the power to choose between the assertion of her transcendence and her alienation as object; she is not the plaything of contradictory drives; she devises solutions of diverse values in the ethical scale.
- we are told that such and such a transference, this or that sublimation, has not taken place in them; it is not suggested that perhaps they have refused to undergo the process, perhaps for good reasons of their own
- the individual is always explained through ties with his past and not in respect to a future towards which he projects his aims.
- ‘to identify oneself’ with the mother or with the father is to alienate oneself in a model, it is to prefer a foreign image to the spontaneous manifestation of one’s own existence, it is to play at being.
- to be a woman would mean to be the object, the Other – and the Other nevertheless remains subject in the midst of her resignation.
- The thing to do, then, is to see what possibilities are opened up for her through what are called the virile and the feminine attitudes.
- To paint, to write, to engage in politics – these are not merely ‘sublimations’; here we have aims that are willed for their own sakes. To deny it is to falsify all human history.

05 Oct 09

Origins of the Family-- Chapter VIII

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Except when Greek offered
resistance, all natural languages had been forced to yield to a debased
Latin; there were no more national differences, no more Gauls,
Iberians, Ligurians, Noricans; all had become Romans. Roman
administration and Roman law had everywhere broken up the old kinship
groups, and with them the last vestige of local and national
independence. The half-baked culture of Rome provided no substitute;
it expressed no nationality, only the lack of nationality.
he enormous mass of humanity in the whole enormous territory was held
together by one bond only: the Roman state; and the Roman state had
become in the course of time their worst enemy and oppressor. The
provinces had annihilated Rome; Rome itself had become a provincial
town like the rest
18 more annotations...
- That was what the Roman state had achieved
  with its world rule. It gave as the justification of its existence
  that it maintained order within the empire and protected it against the
  barbarians without. But its order was worse than the worst disorder,
  and the citizens whom it claimed to protect against the barbarians
  longed for the barbarians to deliver them.
- the policy of Roman rule had been ruthlessly to exploit
  the provinces; the empire, far from abolishing this exploitation, had
  organized it. The more the empire declined, the higher rose the taxes
  and levies, the more shamelessly the officials robbed and extorted.
  The Romans had always been too occupied in ruling other nations to
  become proficient in trade and industry; it was only as usurers that
  they beat all who came before or after. What commerce had already
  existed and still survived was now ruined by official extortion;
- slavery
  was still common enough to make all productive labor appear to be work
  for slaves, unworthy of free Romans -- and everybody was a free Roman
  now.
- Slavery no longer paid; it was for that reason it died out. But in
  dying it left behind its poisoned sting-the stigma attaching to the
  productive labor of freemen. This was the blind alley from which the
  Roman world had no way out: slavery was economically impossible, the
  labor of freemen was morally ostracized.
- hey were soon discontinued in the Roman provinces and the individual
  lots became alienable private property, allodium. Woods and pastures
  remained undivided for common use; the provisions regulating their
  common use, and the manner in which the divided land was to be
  cultivated, were settled in accordance with ancient custom and by the
  decision of the whole community.
- The longer the gens remained settled
  in its village and the more the Germans and the Romans gradually
  merged, the more the bond of union lost its character of kinship and
  became territorial.
- the gentile constitution changed imperceptibly into a local
  constitution and thus became capable of incorporation into the state.
  But it nevertheless retained that primitive democratic character which
  distinguishes the whole gentile constitution, and thus even in its
  later enforced degeneration and up to the most recent times it kept
  something of the gentile constitution alive, to be a weapon in the
  hands of the oppressed.
- transform
  the military leadership into kinship
- the old assembly of the people continued to exist
  in name, but it also increasingly became a mere assembly of military
  leaders subordinate to the king, and of the new rising nobility.
- first, that the social stratification
  and the distribution of property in the declining Roman Empire
  completely correspond to the level of agricultural and industrial
  production at that time, and had therefore been inevitable; secondly,
  that this level of production had neither risen nor fallen
  significantly during the following four centuries and had therefore
  with equal necessity again produced the same distribution of property
  and the same classes in the population.
- Though at
  the end we find almost the same main classes as at the beginning, the
  human beings who formed these classes were different. Ancient slavery
  had gone, and so had the pauper freemen who despised work as only fit
  for slaves. Between the Roman colon-us and the new bondsman had stood
  the free Frankish peasant.
- The social classes of
  the ninth century had been formed, not in the rottenness of a decaying
  civilization, but in the birth-pangs of a new civilization.
- one great product they did leave: the modern
  nationalities, the new forms and structures through which west European
  humanity was to make coming history.
- The Germans, especially at that time, were a highly gifted
  Aryan tribe, and in the full vigor of development. It was not,
  however, their specific national qualities which rejuvenated Europe,
  but simply - their barbarism, their gentile constitution.
- If they recast the ancient form of monogamy, moderated the supremacy of
  the man in the family, and gave the woman a higher position than the
  classical world had ever known, what made them capable of doing so if
  not their barbarism, their gentile customs, their living heritage from
  the time of mother-right?
- they carried over into the feudal state a genuine
  piece of gentile constitution, in the form of mark communities, thus
  giving the oppressed class, the peasants, even under the harshest
  medieval serfdom, a local center of solidarity and a means of
  resistance
- a form of servitude which,
  as Fourier first stressed, gives to the bondsmen the means of their
  gradual liberation as a class
- All the vigorous and creative life which the Germans infused into the
  Roman world was barbarism. Only barbarians are able to rejuvenate a
  world in the throes of collapsing civilization. And precisely the
  highest stage of barbarism, to which and in which the Germans worked
  their way upwards before the migrations, was the most favorable for
  this process.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter VII

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assembly of the people, council of the chiefs of the gentes, military
leader, who is already striving for real monarchic power. It was the
highest form of constitution which the gentile order could achieve

Origins of the Family-- Chapter V

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The smooth functioning of the organs of the gentile constitution was
thus thrown so much out of gear that even in the heroic age remedies
had to be found.
instead
of neighboring tribes forming a simple confederacy, they fused together
into one single nation. Hence arose a common Athenian civil law, which
stood above the legal customs of the tribes and gentes.
24 more annotations...
- The Athenian citizen, as such, acquired definite rights and new
  protection in law even on territory which was not that of his tribe.
  The first step had been taken towards undermining the gentile
  constitution; for this was the first step to the later admission of
  citizens who did not belong to any tribe in all Attica, but were, and
  remained, completely outside the Athenian gentile constitution.
- divided into three classes: eupatridai, or
  nobles, geomoroi, or farmers, and demiourgoi, or artisans
- these families, already powerful
  through their wealth, were beginning to form groupings outside their
  gentes as a separate, privileged class, and that the state now taking
  form sanctioned this presumption.
- It shows further that the division
  of labor between peasants and artisans was now firmly enough
  established in its social importance to challenge the old grouping of
  gentes and tribes. And, finally, it proclaims the irreconcilable
  opposition between gentile society and the state;
- The gentile constitution is absolutely irreconcilable
  with money economy
- Hence the money rule
  of the aristocracy now in full flood of expansion also created a new
  customary law to secure the creditor against the debtor and to sanction
  the exploitation of the small peasant by the possessor of money.
- Their mode of producing the necessities of life,
  unvarying from year to year, could never generate such conflicts as
  were apparently forced on the Athenians from without; it could never
  create an opposition of rich and poor, of exploiters and exploited.
  The Iroquois were still very far from controlling nature, but within
  the limits imposed on them by natural forces they did control their own
  production.
- one result there could never be -- social
  upheavals that no one had ever intended, sundering of the gentile
  bonds, division of gens and tribe into two opposing and warring
  classes.
- The rise of private property in herds and
  articles of luxury led to exchange between individuals, to the
  transformation of products into commodities. And here lie the seeds of
  the whole subsequent upheaval. When the producers no longer directly
  consumed their product themselves, but let it pass out of their hands
  in the act of exchange, they lost control of it.
- no society can permanently retain the mastery of its own production and
  the control over the social effects of its process of production unless
  it abolishes exchange between individuals.
- when men invented money, they did not think
  that they were again creating a new social power, the one general power
  before which the whole of society must bow.
- The new groups formed
  by the division of labor, first between town and country, then between
  the different branches of town labor, had created new organs to look
  after their interests; official posts of all kinds had been set up.
- the first time it divided the people for public purposes,
  not by groups of kinship, but by common place of residence.
- All revolutions hitherto have been revolutions to protect
  one kind of property against another kind of property.
- all so-called political revolutions have
  been made to protect property -- of one kind; and they have been
  carried out by confiscating, also called stealing, property -- of
  another kind. The plain truth is that for two and a half thousand
  years it has been possible to preserve private property only by
  violating property.
- However, the assessment of political rights on a property basis was not
  an institution indispensable to the existence of the state. In spite
  of the great part it has played in the constitutional history of
  states, very many states, and precisely those most highly developed,
  have not required it.
- Athenians were
  growing more enlightened. Instead of exploiting their fellow citizens
  in the old brutal way, they exploited chiefly the slaves and the
  non-Athenian customers.
- Movable property, wealth in the form of money,
  of slaves and ships, continually increased, but it was no longer a mere
  means to the acquisition of landed property, as in the old slow days:
  it had become an end in itself.
- immigrants, who had indeed
  acquired rights of citizenship, but had not been adopted into any of
  the old kinship organizations; in addition, there was the steadily
  increasing number of foreign immigrants who only had rights of
  protection.
- Not the people, but the territory was
  now divided: the inhabitants became a mere political appendage of the
  territory.
- We saw that an essential characteristic of the state is the existence
  of a public force differentiated from the mass of the people.
- The free Athenian considered police duty so
  degrading that he would rather be arrested by an armed slave than
  himself have any hand in such despicable work. That was still the old
  gentile spirit. The state could not exist without police, but the
  state was still young and could not yet inspire enough moral respect to
  make honorable an occupation which, to the older members of the gens,
  necessarily appeared infamous.
- The class opposition on
  which the social and political institutions rested was no longer that
  of nobility and common people, but of slaves and free men, of protected
  persons and citizens.
- Necessarily, in the circumstances,
  they did the latter, and, as they formed the majority, they thereby
  brought about the downfall of the whole Athenian state. The downfall
  of Athens was not caused by democracy, as the European lickspittle
  historians assert to flatter their princes, but by slavery, which
  banned the labor of free citizens.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter 3

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he gens is an institution common to all barbarians until their entry
into civilization and even afterwards (so far as our sources go up to
the present)
Gens in Latin and genos in
Greek are, however, used specifically to denote the form of kinship
organization which prides itself on its common descent (in this case
from a common ancestral father) and is bound together by social and
religious institutions into a distinct community
2 more annotations...
- Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to
  strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens,
  and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power
  established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself
  unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action.
- The lowest interests -- base greed, brutal appetites, sordid
  avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth -- inaugurate the new,
  civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means -- theft,
  violence, fraud, treason -- that the old classless gentile society is
  undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the
  two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything
  else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the
  great exploited and oppressed majority;

Origins of the Family-- Chapter IV

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gens, phratry, tribe, confederacy of tribes. The phratry
might be absent, as among the Dorians, and the confederacy of tribes
was not necessarily fully developed everywhere as yet; but in every
case the gens was the unit.
Mother-right has given way to
father-right; increasing private wealth has thus made its first breach
in the gentile constitution. A second breach followed naturally from
the first. After the introduction of father-right the property of a
rich heiress would have passed to her husband and thus into another
gens on her marriage, but the foundation of all gentile law was now
violated and in such a case the girl was not only permitted but ordered
to marry within the gens, in order that her property should be retained
for the gens.
1 more annotations...
- riches
  praised and respected as the highest good and the old gentile order
  misused to justify the violent seizure of riches. Only one thing was
  wanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquired
  riches of individuals against the communistic traditions of the gentile
  order, which not only sanctified the private property formerly so
  little valued, and declared this sanctification to be the highest
  purpose of all human society; but an institution which set the seal of
  general social recognition on each new method of acquiring property and
  thus amassing wealth at continually increasing speed; an institution
  which perpetuated, not only this growing cleavage of society into
  classes, but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the
  non-possessing, and the rule of the former over the latter.
  
  And this institution came. The state was invented.

Origins of the Family. Chapter 2 (IV)

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its decisive victory is one of the signs that civilization is
beginning. It is based on the supremacy of the man, the express
purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such
paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into
their father’s property as his natural heirs.
It is distinguished from
pairing marriage by the much greater strength of the marriage tie,
which can no longer be dissolved at either partner’s wish.
44 more annotations...
- It is the existence
  of slavery side by side with monogamy, the presence of young, beautiful
  slaves belonging unreservedly to the man, that stamps monogamy from the
  very beginning with its specific character of monogamy for the woman
  only, but not for the man. And that is the character it still has
  today
- The Spartan
  women and the elite of the Athenian hetairai are the only Greek women
  of whom the ancients speak with respect and whose words they thought it
  worth while to record.
- 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.
- oikourema, a thing (the word
  is neuter)
- 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.
- This is the origin of monogamy as far as we can trace it back among the
  most civilized and highly developed people of antiquity. It was not in
  any way the fruit of individual sex-love, with which it had nothing
  whatever to do; marriages remained as before marriages of convenience.
  It was the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on
  economic conditions – on the victory of private property over
  primitive, natural communal property.
- Thus when monogamous marriage first makes its appearance in history, it
  is not as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the
  highest form of such a reconciliation. Quite the contrary. Monogamous
  marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the
  other; it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the
  whole previous prehistoric period.
- “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for
  the propagation of children.” And today I can add: The first class
  opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of
  the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the
  first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the
  male.
- It is the
  cellular form of civilized society,
- Surrender for money was at
  first a religious act; it took place in the temple of the goddess of
  love, and the money originally went into the temple treasury.
- wage-labor appears sporadically side by side with slave
  labor, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the
  professional prostitution of free women side by side with the forced
  surrender of the slave.
- just as everything
  civilization brings forth is double-edged, double-tongued, divided
  against itself, contradictory
- a second contradiction thus develops within monogamous marriage
  itself.
- With
  monogamous marriage, two constant social types, unknown hitherto, make
  their appearance on the scene – the wife’s attendant lover and the
  cuckold husband.
- ogether with
  monogamous marriage and hetaerism, adultery became an unavoidable
  social institution
- wherever the monogamous family remains true to its historical
  origin and clearly reveals the antagonism between the man and the woman
  expressed in the man’s exclusive supremacy, it exhibits in miniature
  the same oppositions and contradictions as those in which society has
  been moving, without power to resolve or overcome them, ever since it
  split into classes at the beginning of civilization.
- A Roman considered that his power of life and death over his wife
  sufficiently guaranteed her conjugal fidelity. Here, moreover, the
  wife equally with the husband could dissolve the marriage at will. But
  the greatest progress in the development of individual marriage
  certainly came with the entry of the Germans into history, and for the
  reason that the German – on account of their poverty, very probably –
  were still at a stage where monogamy seems not yet to have become
  perfectly distinct from pairing marriage.
- thirdly, women were greatly respected
  among the Germans, and also influential in public affairs, which is in
  direct contradiction to the supremacy of men in monogamy. In almost
  all these points the Germans agree with the Spartans, among whom also,
  as we saw, pairing marriage had not yet been completely overcome.
  Thus, here again an entirely new influence came to power in the world
  with the Germans. The new monogamy, which now developed from the
  mingling of peoples amid the ruins of the Roman world, clothed the
  supremacy of the men in milder forms and gave women a position which,
  outwardly at any rate, was much more free and respected than it had
  ever been in classical antiquity. Only now were the conditions
  realized in which through monogamy-within it, parallel to it, or in
  opposition to it, as the case might be-the greatest moral advance we
  owe to it could be achieved: modern individual sex-love, which had
  hitherto been unknown to the entire world.
- It most decidedly did not spring from the legendary virtue
  and wonderful moral purity of the German character, which was nothing
  more than the freedom of the pairing family from the crying moral
  contradictions of monogamy.
- Among all historically active classes-that is, among
  all ruling classes-matrimony remained what it had been since the
  pairing marriage, a matter of convenience which was arranged by the
  parents. The first historical form of sexual love as passion, a
  passion recognized as natural to all human beings (at least if they
  belonged to the ruling classes), and as the highest form of the sexual
  impulse-and that is what constitutes its specific character-this first
  form of individual sexual love, the chivalrous love of the middle ages,
  was by no means conjugal.
- This is why the French bourgeois
  is as much horrified by the dullness of the German novel as the German
  philistine is by the “immorality” of the French.
- the marriage is conditioned by the class
  position of the parties and is to that extent always a marriage of
  convenience.
- only differs from the ordinary
  courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece-work as a
  wage-worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery.
- Here
  there is no property, for the preservation and inheritance of which
  monogamy and male supremacy were established; hence there is no
  incentive to make this male supremacy effective. What is more, there
  are no means of making it so. Bourgeois law, which protects this
  supremacy, exists only for the possessing class and their dealings with
  the proletarians. The law costs money and, on account of the worker’s
  poverty, it has no validity for his relation to his wife. Here quite
  other personal and social conditions decide.
- The
  proletarian family is therefore no longer monogamous in the strict
  sense, even where there is passionate love and firmest loyalty on both
  sides, and maybe all the blessings of religious and civil authority.
  Here, therefore, the eternal attendants of monogamy, hetaerism and
  adultery, play only an almost vanishing part.
- The labor contract is to be freely entered into by both
  partners. But it is considered to have been freely entered into as
  soon as the law makes both parties equal on paper.
- In regard to marriage, the law, even the most advanced, is fully
  satisfied as soon as the partners have formally recorded that they are
  entering into the marriage of their own free consent. What goes on in
  real life behind the juridical scenes, how this free consent comes
  about – that is not the business of the law and the jurist.
- The legal inequality of the two partners,
  bequeathed to us from earlier social conditions, is not the cause but
  the effect of the economic oppression of the woman.
- Household management lost its public
  character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private
  service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all
  participation in social production.
- The
  democratic republic does not do away with the opposition of the two
  classes; on the contrary, it provides the clear field on which the
  fight can be fought out. And in the same way, the peculiar character
  of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the
  necessity of creating real social equality between them, and the way to
  do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess
  legally complete equality of rights.
- We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic
  foundations of monogamy as they have existed hitherto will disappear
  just as surely as those of its complement-prostitution.
- But by transforming by far the greater portion,
  at any rate, of permanent, heritable wealth – the means of production
  – into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a
  minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting. Having
  arisen from economic causes, will monogamy then disappear when these
  causes disappear?
  
  One might answer, not without reason: far from disappearing, it will,
  on the contrary, be realized completely. For with the transformation
  of the means of production into social property there will disappear
  also wage-labor, the proletariat, and therefore the necessity for a
  certain – statistically calculable – number of women to surrender
  themselves for money. Prostitution disappears; monogamy, instead of
  collapsing, at last becomes a reality – also for men.
  
  In any case, therefore, the position of men will be very much altered.
  But the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant
  change. With the transfer of the means of production into common
  ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society.
- Can prostitution disappear without
  dragging monogamy with it into the abyss?
- Love relationships in the modern sense
  only occur in antiquity outside official society.
- Our sexual love differs essentially from the simple sexual desire, the
  Eros, of the ancients. In the first place, it assumes that the person
  loved returns the love; to this extent the woman is on an equal footing
  with the man, whereas in the Eros of antiquity she was often not even
  asked. Secondly, our sexual love has a degree of intensity and
  duration which makes both lovers feel that non-possession and
  separation are a great, if not the greatest, calamity; to possess one
  another, they risk high stakes, even life itself. In the ancient world
  this happened only, if at all, in adultery. And, finally, there arises
  a new moral standard in the judgment of a sexual relationship. We do
  not only ask, was it within or outside marriage? But also, did it
  spring from love and reciprocated love or not?
- One
  would suppose that this manner of marriage exactly suited it, and so it
  did. And yet – there are no limits to the irony of history –
  capitalist production itself was to make the decisive breach in it. By
  changing all things into commodities, it dissolved all inherited and
  traditional relationships, and, in place of time-honored custom and
  historic right, it set up purchase and sale, “free” contract.
- But a contract requires people who can dispose freely of their persons,
  actions, and possessions, and meet each other on the footing of equal
  rights. To create these “free” and “equal” people was one of the main
  tasks of capitalist production. Even though at the start it was
  carried out only half-consciously, and under a religious disguise at
  that, from the time of the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation the
  principle was established that man is only fully responsible for his
  actions when he acts with complete freedom of will, and that it is a
  moral duty to resist all coercion to an immoral act.
- To the outward and the inward eye of man opened an
  infinitely wider horizon.
- love
  marriage was proclaimed as a human right
- The ruling class remains dominated by the familiar economic influences
  and therefore only in exceptional cases does it provide instances of
  really freely contracted marriages, while among the oppressed class, as
  we have seen, these marriages are the rule.
- Full freedom of marriage can therefore only be generally established
  when the abolition of capitalist production and of the property
  relations created by it has removed all the accompanying economic
  considerations which still exert such a powerful influence on the
  choice of a marriage partner. For then there is no other motive left
  except mutual inclination.
- sexual love is by its nature exclusive
- the equality of woman thereby
  achieved will tend infinitely more to make men really monogamous than
  to make women polyandrous.
- what will quite certainly disappear from monogamy are all the
  features stamped upon it through its origin in property relations;
  these are, in the first place, supremacy of the man, and, secondly,
  indissolubility.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter 2 (III)

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these customary pairings were
bound to grow more stable as the gens developed and the classes of
"brothers" and "sisters" between whom marriage was impossible became
more numerous. The impulse given by the gens to the prevention of
marriage between blood relatives extended still further.
The increasing complication of these prohibitions made group
marriages more and more impossible; they were displaced by the pairing
family. In this stage, one man lives with one woman, but the
relationship is such that polygamy and occasional infidelity remain the
right of the men, even though for economic reasons polygamy is rare,
while from the woman the strictest fidelity is generally demanded
throughout the time she lives with the man, and adultery on her part is
cruelly punished. The marriage tie can, however, be easily dissolved
by either partner; after separation, the children still belong, as
before, to the mother alone.
37 more annotations...
- Tribes with gentile constitution were thus bound to gain supremacy over
  more backward tribes, or else to carry them along by their example.
- Thus the history of the family in primitive times consists in the
  progressive narrowing of the circle, originally embracing the whole
  tribe, within which the two sexes have a common conjugal relation. The
  continuous exclusion, first of nearer, then of more and more remote
  relatives, and at last even of relatives by marriage, ends by making
  any kind of group marriage practically impossible.
- what a
  small part individual sex-love, in the modern sense of the word, played
  in the rise of monogamy.
- Whereas in the
  earlier forms of the family men never lacked women, but, on the
  contrary, had too many rather than too few, women had now become scarce
  and highly sought after. Hence it is with the pairing marriage that
  there begins the capture and purchase of women
- the conclusion of a marriage is the affair, not of the two
  parties concerned, who are often not consulted at all, but of their
  mothers.
- The pairing family, itself too weak and unstable to make an independent
  household necessary or even desirable, in no wise destroys the
  communistic household inherited from. earlier times.
- Communistic
  housekeeping, however, means the supremacy of women in the house; just
  as the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing to the
  impossibility of recognizing the male parent with certainty, means that
  the women -- the mothers -- are held in high respect.
- Among all
  savages and all barbarians of the lower and middle stages, and to a
  certain extent of the upper stage also, the position of women is not
  only free, but honorable.
- They did not hesitate, when
  occasion required, "to knock off the horns," as it was technically
  called, from the head of a chief, and send him back to the ranks
  of the warriors.
- The reports of travelers and missionaries, I may add, to
  the effect that women among savages and barbarians are overburdened
  with work in no way contradict what has been said. The division of
  labor between the two sexes is determined by quite other causes than by
  the position of woman in society.
- the widespread
  transitional form between group marriage and pairing.
- This penance consists in a limited
  surrender:
- the transition from what he calls "Hetaerism" or "Sumpfzeugung" to
  monogamy was brought about primarily through the women. The more the
  traditional sexual relations lost the native primitive character of
  forest life, owing to the development of economic conditions with
  consequent undermining of the old communism and growing density of
  population, the more oppressive and humiliating must the women have
  felt them to be, and the greater their longing for the right of
  chastity, of temporary or permanent marriage with one man only, as a
  way of release.
- The pairing family is the form characteristic of
  barbarism, as group marriage is characteristic of savagery and monogamy
  of civilization.
- Natural selection, with its
  progressive exclusions from the marriage community, had accomplished
  its task; there was nothing more for it to do in this direction.
  Unless new, social forces came into play, there was no reason why a new
  form of family should arise from the single pair. But these new forces
  did come into play.
- Up to the lower stage of barbarism, permanent
  wealth had consisted almost solely of house, clothing, crude ornaments
  and the tools for obtaining and preparing food -- boat, weapons, and
  domestic utensils of the simplest kind. Food had to be won afresh day
  by day. Now, with their herds of horses, camels, asses, cattle, sheep,
  goats, and pigs, the advancing pastoral peoples
- had acquired
  property which only needed supervision and the rudest care to reproduce
  itself in steadily increasing quantities and to supply the most
  abundant food in the form of milk and meat. All former means of
  procuring food now receded into the background
- at the threshold
  of authentic history we already find the herds everywhere separately
  owned by heads of families, as are the artistic products of barbarism
  -- metal implements, luxury articles and, finally, the human cattle --
  the slaves.
- At this stage human labor-power still does
  not produce any considerable surplus over and above its maintenance
  costs. That was no longer the case after the introduction of
  cattle-breeding, metalworking, weaving and, lastly, agriculture. just
  as the wives whom it had formerly been so easy to obtain had now
  acquired an exchange value and were bought, so also with the forces of
  labor, particularly since the herds had definitely become family
  possessions. The family did not multiply so rapidly as the cattle.
- this wealth dealt a severe blow to the
  society founded on pairing marriage and the matriarchal gens. Pairing
  marriage had brought a new element into the family. By the side of the
  natural mother of the child it placed its natural and attested father
- According to the division of labor within the family
  at that time, it was the man's part to obtain food and the instruments
  of labor necessary for the purpose. He therefore also owned the
  instruments of labor, and in the event of husband and wife separating,
  he took them with him, just as she retained her household goods.
- When the owner of the herds
  died, therefore, his herds would go first to his brothers and sisters
  and to his sister's children, or to the issue of his mother's sisters.
  But his own children were disinherited.
- Thus, on the one hand, in proportion as wealth increased, it made the
  man's position in the family more important than the woman's, and on
  the other hand created an impulse to exploit this strengthened position
  in order to overthrow, in favor of his children, the traditional order
  of inheritance.
- that it
  did take place is more than sufficiently proved by the abundant traces
  of mother-right which have been collected,
- Man's innate casuistry! To change things by changing their names!
  And to find loopholes for violating tradition while maintaining
  tradition, when direct interest supplied sufficient impulse.
  (Marx.)
- The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the
  female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was
  degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and
  a mere instrument for the production of children.
- Its essential characteristic is not polygyny, of
  which more later, but "the organization of a number of persons, bond
  and free, into a family, under paternal power, for the purpose of
  holding lands, and for the care of flocks and herds
- Its essential features are the incorporation of unfree persons, and
  paternal power
- among the Romans it dl'd not at first even
  refer to the married pair and their children, but only to the slaves.
  Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the total number of
  slaves belonging to one man.
- The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus),
  but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to
  agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the
  contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state.
- In order to make certain of the wife's fidelity and
  therefore of the paternity of the children, she is delivered over
  unconditionally into the power of the husband
- the economic unit was originally not the single
  family in the modern sense, but the "house community," which consisted
  of several generations or several single families, and often enough
  included unfree persons as well.
- The Roman family is now also
  considered to have originated from this type, and consequently the
  absolute power of the father of the house, and the complete absence of
  rights among the other members of the family in relation to him, have
  recently been strongly questioned.
- In any case, the patriarchal
  household community with common ownership and common cultivation of the
  land now assumes an entirely different significance than hitherto. We
  can no longer doubt the important part it played, as a transitional
  form between the matriarchal family and the single family, among
  civilized and other peoples of the Old World. Later we will return to
  the further conclusion drawn by Kovalevsky that it was also the
  transitional form out of which developed the village, or mark,
  community with individual tillage and the allotment, first periodical
  and then permanent, of arable and pasture land.
- Both forms
  can only be exceptions, historical luxury products, as it were, unless
  they occur side by side in the same country, which is, of course, not
  the case.
- Polygyny on the part of one individual
  man was, in fact, obviously a product of slavery and confined to a few
  people in exceptional positions.
- marriage-club system