When militant feminism was still rational : Evelyn Reed lecture

[ " But so long as collectivist relations prevailed and women continued to participate in social production, the original equality between the sexes more or less persisted. The whole community continued to sustain the pairing units, just as each individual member of these units made his and her contribution to the labor activities. Consequently, the pairing family, which appeared at the dawn of the family system, differed radically from the nuclear family of our times. In our ruthless competitive capitalist system, every tiny family must sink or swim through its own efforts - it cannot count on assistance from outside sources. The wife is dependent upon the husband while the children must look to the parents for their subsistence, even if the wage-earners who support them are stricken by unemployment, sickness or death. In the period of the pairing family, however, there was no such system of dependency upon “family economics,” since the whole community took care of each individual’s basic needs from the cradle to the grave. This was the material basis for the absence, in the primitive commune, of those social oppressions and family antagonisms with which we are so familiar." ]