We need to teach our daughters to know the difference between:

[RainDog]

51. A theory of this is about the origin of property

It was discredited because of its author, for a while (throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak), but recently has again gained currency because of its long-range view of the issue of property and equality and gender relations. This article is from a while back, but it's online and goes into some of the ideas.

http://www.isreview.org/issues/02/engles_family.shtml

HOW CAN we end women’s oppression? This question can only be answered by posing yet another question: why are women oppressed? Unless we determine the source of women’s oppression, we don’t know who or what needs changing. This, the "woman question," has been a source of controversy for well over a century. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels located the origin of women’s oppression in the rise of class society. Their analysis of women’s oppression was not something that was tagged on as an afterthought to their analysis of class society but was integral to it from the very beginning. When Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, ideas of women’s liberation were already a central part of revolutionary socialist theory...

...The theory put forward in The Origin is based largely upon the pioneering research of the nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan’s research, published in 1877 in a 560-page volume called Ancient Society, was the first materialist attempt to understand the evolution of human social organization. He discovered, through extensive contact with the Iroquois Indians in upstate New York, a kinship system which took a completely different form than the modern nuclear family. Within it, the Iroquois lived in relative equality and women exercised a great deal of authority. This discovery inspired Morgan to study other societies, and, in so doing, he learned that other Native American societies located thousands of miles from the Iroquois used remarkably similar kinship structures. This led him to argue that human society had evolved through successive stages, based upon the development of the "successive arts of subsistence."3 While some of Morgan’s anthropological data is now outdated, a wealth of more recent anthropology has provided ample evidence to support his basic evolutionary framework.

Interestingly, some also argue that the Iroquois were as important as a model for American democracy as any of the western European intellectuals who are given credit for it. In Iroquois society, however, women were not second-class citizens and the Iroquois didn't hold slaves, so their contribution wasn't really given the credit it deserved, since the Constitution didn't include equality for all genders or races. The Iroquois and others had the "Great Treaty of Peace" for hundreds of years before any western nation had a similar constitutional framework. Women had the power to refuse to go to war because women controlled the food supply. They sat in tribal councils regarding the big issues. Benjamin Franklin wrote about the Iroquois in regard to forming the U.S. Constitution, tho, as well as others who were crucial to its construction. But that influence was disappeared along with the Native Americans who stood in the way of private property ownership for the founders.. including human property.

Likewise, Western observers have frequently brought along their own cultural biases (including, often, cultural chauvinism) when they study hunter-gatherer or horticultural societies. Customs are measured using a Western yardstick, rather than trying to understand the unique value system of a particular culture. For example, the common practice among Eskimo women of sleeping with male visitors is often interpreted as an example of Eskimo women’s low status–of women offered up as gifts or property. Yet, this might or might not be true. As Leacock points out, this is an "ethnocentric reading which presumes that a woman does not (since she should not) enjoy sex play with any but her ‘real’ husband and which refuses to recognize that variety in sexual relations is entertaining to women (where not circumscribed by all manner of taboos) as well as to men."9 In and of itself, this sexual custom tells little about women’s status in Eskimo society today, when it is fairly integrated into the capitalist system–much less, what women’s status has been historically.

Interestingly, also, Eskimos have sex much more publicly than western society finds comfortable, because they sleep and have sex together in the same spaces.

But, in its purest form, much of feminist theory rests upon no more than supposition–the range of which is limited only by the imaginations of its authors. Depending upon who is doing the writing, men dominate women because they hold women in contempt for their ability to bear children–or because they are jealous of women’s ability to bear children. Men oppress women because long ago women formed a powerful matriarchy which was overthrown–or because men have always been a tyrannical patriarchy. Gerda Lerner argues in her book, The Creation of Patriarchy, "Feminists, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir… [have explained women’s oppression] as caused by either male biology or male psychology." She goes on to describe a sampling of feminist theories, all of which border on the outlandish:

Thus, Susan Brownmiller sees man’s ability to rape women leading to their propensity to rape women and shows how this has led to male dominance over women and to male supremacy. Elizabeth Fisher ingeniously argued that the domestication of animals…led men to the idea of raping women. She claimed that the brutalization and violence connected with animal domestication led to men’s sexual dominance and institutionalized aggression. More recently, Mary O’Brien built an elaborate explanation of The Origin of male dominance on men’s psychological need to compensate for their inability to bear children through the construction of institutions of dominance and, like Fisher, dated this "discovery" in the period of the discovery of animal domestication.14

Anyway, it's a long article, and its impossible to excerpt the major points here - but the gist is that, by looking at how different societies have existed through different eras (hunter-gatherer, agricultural, etc.) it's possible to find the origin of oppression of women through the "ownership" of women by their husbands - which was law into the 20th century in the U.S. with laws that disallowed women to own property in their own names if they were married, etc.

edit to add - this view also sees marriage and prostitution as two co-existing relationships within societies. when female sexuality is "owned" by their husband through his control of assets that are passed to his children, prostitution is the flip side of the same coin.

so women get upset by what other women are doing and try to control their behavior and focus on that, to the exclusion of changing the economic position of all women - because of the fear that the women will lose their economic power by the loss of their mate.

that's where the statement you talked about comes into play, too.

someone did a recent study that looked at this issue in the form of women bonding together to attack other women who seemed to dress provocatively. that argument overlaps the early argument about the role of wife and prostitute as a social situation. But the study didn't have many participants and some don't like it for whatever reason.