>Radical upshot: If gender oppression is not eliminated no oppression will be eliminated.
>Diane
Very true but incomplete. If class oppression is not eliminated, no oppression will be eliminated. If racial and national oppressions are not eliminated, no oppressions will be eliminated. If queer/transgender oppressions are not eliminated, no oppressions will be eliminated. If disability oppressions are not eliminated, no oppressions will be eliminated. And so forth. And until we can eliminate these oppressions reducing them or mitigating any one of them helps to reduce or mitigate all oppressions.
Incidentally, there is some (highly disputed) evidence that the beginning of oppression was not the neolithic, but the late Paleolithic. Basically the process is not unlike the one Engel, but somewhat earlier...
Here is the process (I'm not claiming it is necessarily true - it is a hypothesis I find appealing):
1) In the early Paleolithic humans had spears, and fire, but not weapons at a distance. As a result humans were prey more often than predator - foragers, and scavengers with hunting a minor source of anything. Like other victims of predation, there was some gender distinction - the less important men were the outer ring of the tribe - to guard the more important women and children if possible, to be victims and thus save the tribe as a whole if not. While there may have been some gender distinction there was no gender separation. You could not have had the men going out hunting in one direction while the women went out foraging in another, because that would have left them unguarded. So foraging, scavenging, and what little hunting they did was together. Probably both men and women foraged. Some hunting (the drive a herd off a cliff method) was also done by both men and women. Because men were on "guard" duty women probably did the majority of foraging. If any hunting too place other than driving herd off cliffs, it was probably done by the men when the troop wandered onto an opportunity. In general, women probably provided the majority of calories, men doing the guarding and dying. Women probably had as high a death rate as the men thanks to childbirth. So the sacrifice and effort was pretty equal - even though there were distinct gender roles. We have no of knowing what degree of gender hierarchy was involved in this. But there is nothing in the situation that required it to be a severe one. None of this is established fact: but is seems to be a substantial minority position
2) Sometime in the mid to late Paleolithic the bow was invented. This changed the balance. Predators could be fought off with a fair degree of success. This is the beginning of the first human caused mass extinction. Quite understandably, once the bow was invented early humans set out to slaughter the creatures that tended to eat them. I have to admit I find the lack of sabre tooth tigers a positive feature of the world. They also set out wipe out herds prey animals over and above what they needed for their own diet - so as not leave a food source for the big cats, and other predators that threatened humans. (The evidence for this is somewhat stronger; it seems to be a majority opinion but not indisputable fact)
3) Two consequences of this was that there was a gender separation rather than merely gender roles in works , and it was a separation where men ended up with most the weapons. So when the Sabre tooths etc. were either wiped out or reduced to a non-threatening level there was suddenly not a whole lot of work for the men to do. Women's foraging provoked the majority of the food. Hunting, except in the coldest of climates, provided luxury food, rather that a staple. And hunting with distance weapons is a lot less dangerous than childbirth. So you have bunch of unemployed hunters looking for a new role.
4) There is one dangerous creature out there still to hunt - other men. All sorts of excuses are available for hunting them - religious tokens, hunting territory, taking offense at some imagined insult.. So you end up as I said with pretty much the situation Engels described. The women have nothing to gain in this, protest it and are over-ruled by force. The winning hunters, probably the ones who come up with idea, probably soon come up with idea of capturing women from enemy tribes. So now they have wives who are enemies - and treat them as slaves (which in fact they are). And they probably encourage their sons to think of women that way too. And it is not just women who end up as slaves ; as the American Indians show, you can have non-agricultural people who take enemies captives and make them slaves. So if class oppression mixed with tribal oppression does not happen immediately, it begins so close to the beginning of women's oppression as to happen at the same time.
The only real difference between this and what Engels suggested is that the material condition is not the invention of agriculture, but the invention of the bow, and the subsequent extermination of the most threatening non-human predators.
You can find this outlined with evidence, much better explained in more detail in Barbara Ehrenreich "Blood Rites"