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.
is: without orientation to sexual pleasures - as a consequence of their growing up in 'caring-
communities' consisting of the siblings of the women who bore the children.
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His analysis
denies the fact that in the 'caring community' a social formation ('Verband') is created, which
remains unbroken even when its members one day are able to find food for themselves.
If individual women would have wandered away when adult, taking their children, they would
have lost their mothers, their sisters and their brothers, and would have had to care for the
children alone, since their male sexual partners were not dependable. This would not have
been practical. However, if the siblings would have stayed and worked together as adults,
the children of the siblings would have grown up together, and would have come to be, in
Weber's own definition, siblings of each other. Kinship ties and rules then would be 'tradition'
in the literal sense - as always having been the same, and as being without any individual
personal focus that could be called 'legitimate domination'. The result would have been a
general system of generation kinship which eventually led to the formation of 'the tribe'.
Weber, however, denies 'bristerhood' - non-sexual relations between adult women and men
based on a common past and on common activities - and only recognizes 'siblinghood'
relations between children, he cannot conceptualize kinship relations between men and
women as a social-economic order: as an order which defines what now would be called
'public' and 'private' life both. He can conceptualize only sexual, patriarchal, irrational,
'private' relations between adult women and men; and so his 'universalist' concepts on
'public' life come to concern only men.
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50
According to Mitzman (1970) and Green (1974), however, his marriage to his cousin Marianne Schnitger did
not include a sexual relationship.
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For those who study kinship relations an important question is how the differentiation between sexual and non-
sexual relations came into being, since non-sexual relations between women and men exist side by side with
sexual relations. This is the question of the origins of the 'incest-taboo'. If no such taboo existed, motherhood and
sibling relationships - sexual or not - would be the only relationships possible, and the group could be extended
infinitely, all groups in the region being kin. Now, it is well known that tribal people just do not live in this way; an
opposition of those with whom sex is forbidden and those with whom it is allowed appears to be one of the
fundamental principles of their societies. On the question of why and how this antithesis originated, speculation is
rife; as, of course, it is on the question of how and why the social differentiation between women and men, that is
to say: the separate social formations of women and men, like sororities and fraternities, came into being; see for
instance Evelyn Reed (1975) for a theory based on the assumption of cannibalist males. In Geschiedenis van de
Vrouwentoekomst Marijke Ekelschot and I conjectured that humanity developed from a kind of primates where
the males, like chimpanzees, exhibited all kinds of aggressive display, disturbing the tranquillity and the relations
between females and between females and young; when circumstances changed, as was the case when the
African woods receded, this behavior threatened survival, so the females excluded the male from the center of
their group and formed social relations based on division of labor between old and young adult females and the
young. We did not view these events as constituting a biological evolution; we saw them as a breach with animal
existence, with nature, which produced consciousness. We thus supposed an original identity of the first division
of labor - in which the new humans cared for the young of others - and the matrilinear generational kinship
system, to which the groups of men were linked as brothers, although they remained marginal to the group. From
this social opposition between men and women in time divisions of labor between women and men could
develop, depending on circumstances; the differentiation between gathering - which is in most climates the base
of survival - and hunting is the most important of these divisions of labor. We supposed that women did the
everyday work, feeding the men because they provided -if the hunt succeeded - variety in the diet and with their
hunting stories also entertainment.
I still like this hypothesis, if only because it is a metaphor for radical feminism. However, after we wrote GvdV we
have come to understand the influence of biologism in feminist thinking; and so we saw that, although we did
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