Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 3 Private versus public sphere: the origins of household and kin group.
'The almost complete separation of the husband's and wife's means and belongings, which was very frequent
especially where social differentiation was low, seems to point in this direction, as does the occasional custom
according to which man and wife were seated back to back during their meals or even took their meals
separately, and the fact that within the political group there existed independent organizations of women with
female chieftains alongside the men's organizations
.'
29
The question or the origins of these separate women's and men's organizations -
'matriarchy' and 'men's house' - again is not answered, except by the cryptic statement that
this 'primitive condition' can not be said to have been 'individualistic'
30
, because it was
ordered in a military way.
31
To complicate matters further, Weber comes up with an independent *'household' authority
of 'matrons' in agricultural societies, which could have been based on 'woman's function as
the oldest agent of the basic economy, that is, the continuous provision of food through land
cultivation and food processing.'
32
(it. mine). He here deviates from Weber-Schnitger's axiom
that the work women do lowers their status
33
and seems to steer the argument against in the
direction of 'matriarchy' or 'matrilinear kinship' theories. Moreover, in the section where he
deals with the influence of masculine military groups, Weber follows up this point by stating
that in agricultural societies women have the collective property of the agricultural land,
which therefore is inherited through the maternal line.
34
He does not mention, however, that the economic function of women exists in other non-
technical economies as well, and in particular in those economies where women lived
without 'a technically well-advanced agriculture', but gathered what they needed: 'fruit, nuts
and roots'
35
and which formed the staple diet of all non-agricultural peoples in reasonably
warm climates. Though Weber mentions only 'foraging' ('okkupatorische Nahrungssuche') in
29
See also ES p. 1009, WG p. 582: 'Sometimes patriarchal power has been split; for example, the independent
authority of a matron may be found next to the normally superordinated authority - a condition that has always
been connected with the oldest typical division of labor, the division between the sexes. The female chiefs among
the sachems of American Indians, and occasional subchiefs, such as the lukokesha in the realm of Mwata
Yamvo, who wielded independent authority in their own area, usually owed their existence to woman's function
as the oldest agent of the basic economy, that is, the continuous provision of food through land cultivation and
food processing; or they owe it to the complete separation from the household of all men capable of bearing
arms, a separation which occurs in certain kinds of military organization.' See also ES p. 1153, WG p. 685.
In itself is not illogical to consider some matrilinear kinship formations as later developments, or even as
'secondary' to other institutions; for example in the hard life of the working class during the industrial revolution,
family and kinship ties became matrilinear because the men were not to be depended on; see Young and Wilmott
(1965).
30
I would have supposed this to be self-evident, because he speaks about a political group with independent
women's organizations; but perhaps he is attacking Hobbes' 'war of all against all', or Bachofen's 'hetaerism'; it is
also possible that he means to say that a society in which women are free is 'individualistic' and thus no society
at all.
31
'Rather, conditions that are due to a certain type of military organization, such as the man's absence from the
house for his military service, lead to a "manless" household management by the wives and mothers.' Ibid.
32
The translation 'patriarchal' suggests that this authority is derived from some patriarch, the 'normal
superordinated authority'; the German text is less explicit: it speaks of 'die Abspaltung von Teilen der
Hausgewalt'.
33
Although on ES p. 372, WG p. 224 he repeats Weber-Schnitger's opinion that only formal marriage caused the
liberation of women from wealthy from their position as 'chattel'.
34
See below no 5 and Ch. 4,1.
35
as Engels describes on the first page of his summary of prehistorical development in The Origins.
58
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