ABSTRACT
LOOKING BACK THROUGH OUR MOTHERS In Heroes and Villains the prospect of infinite nameless things drew attention to names in themselves. In The Social Contract and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the intractable materiality of language insisted upon itself at the very point at which that materiality was concealed and denied by a sleight of philosophical hand. The specific gendering of this move in Engels's text is indicative of a 'crisis' which emerged in the nineteenth century and continues at the end of the twentieth. Engels can no longer assume the function of the feminine as mediator between nature and culture: he must tell us that there is a distinction between the sexual and the social (Engels, 1972: 139). He does move some way towards socializing the sexual in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In chronicling the 'world historical defeat of the female sex' he at least acknowledges that the female sex has a history. What is at stake for Engels, more acutely than for Rousseau, is a recuperation, a recolonization of the prehistorical territory of Woman as the other of history in the service of a new history:
The period from 1800 to 1848 produced as many women writers as had the entire eighteenth century; and the 'women of '48,' the 'socialists of 1880,' and so on began a tradition of feminism in France concerned primarily with the problem of how to provide women with the status of subjects in history.
