The Barbarian Status Of Women Veeblen Summary

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The purpose of this review is to discuss the emergence of predatory life and the consequence it had in human relationships, as Veblen has written about it in “The Barbarian Status of Women”.

According to Veblen, is probable that when mankind reached a point where their skillful use of tools provided a more productive industry it made possible four important outcomes that transform human’s societies from a peaceful life to a predatory life. The first one was the capability to support more population; without the exponential growth in population, communities would not have even considered being antagonistic to each other. The second outcome was the capacity to create better tools for hunting; this gave man leverage against large game and brought …show more content…

Women were the ones who performed the humiliating employments, therefore became depreciated in the community by the man in power. However, other women in the community were captured as trophies from war and became something to be own and exploit by their capturers. In time, the appropriation of women was an accepted practice in predatory life and created a new coercive-marriage relationship between man and woman. This costume runs into problems as the community continued to grow because there were not enough woman to be married that could be attain by capture. The solution was to institutionalize the coercive-marriage relationship. Man and woman within the community started to be married. The ceremony would mimic the same bonds of coercion between man (master) and woman (subject) as previously done with the trophy wives. The result is a patriarchal household society. This type of social structure was dominant in societies, which adopted predatory lifestyle in the early stages of their economic development. However, in societies who adopted predatory life when their economic development was already in a more advance stage, the ownership-marriage relationship did not take hold in the same manner. Some societies gave woman important roles in their communities for a long period of time in their evolution before adopting predatory life, to the extent that they became primordially matriarchal

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