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	International Communist Workers Party
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International Women’s Day has been celebrated on March 8 since 1913, most significantly in 1917, when a mass demonstration by women workers in St. Petersburg helped start the Russian Revolution.
For more than a century, the old movement fought sexism by fighting for reforms, from voting to higher pay. But capitalism, by perpetuating class society, has also perpetuated the special oppression of women.
This year, in celebration of International Working Women’s Day, we are initiating an occasional series of articles about the history of the fight against sexism.  We hope these articles will lead to discussion and more writing. Please send us your letters, comments and articles about history, experiences, struggles, and how communism will abolish sexism. 

Women’s Work in Pre-Class Societies
How do we know what life was like in pre-class societies, before cities, ruling elites, and organized religion? This period is often called prehistoric, referring to the absence of written—historical—records.   To understand what life was like we must use data provided by archaeological discoveries. This data can be combined with observations of societies like that of the !Kung people in southwest Africa who maintained an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society into the se-cond half of the twentieth century.  When we do this, we learn that the sexism we have always known is not basic to human nature, but a product of class society.
In the Paleolithic period, before the invention/discovery of agriculture and the domestication of animals, most people lived in small groups of less than 50 people. They were nomadic, following the migrations of animals and the ripening of food plants on a yearly basis. Although these societies are usually called hunter-gatherer societies, it was the gathering of fruits, nuts and tubers—work done primarily by women—that provided the mainstay of the diet of the people. Later historians, looking back on these societies with the sexist bias of class society, called them hunter-gatherer—as if hunting was their most important feature.
This work, and the production of the earliest textiles such as string gathering bags, was compatible with nursing babies and toddlers—the one task that only women can do. 
The earliest symbolic artifacts that we have of these societies are called “Venus figures.” They show women who are fat enough to be fertile, and indicate a reverence for women as the creators of new life. They also show some of the earliest woven garments—women’s skirts and belts with fertility symbols.
Burial evidence also tells us how a society saw the worth or status of an individual.  It is only after  the beginnings of class society that we see differences in the way people are buried.  The earliest societies adorned graves with flowers, and later beads, but without distinction between the graves of men and women. 
Studying pre-class society teaches us that the division of labor along sexual lines, necessary for  nursing mothers, did not result in differences in status. Women did necessary tasks, as did men, and their contributions were valued, as they will be in a communist society.

“All History Must be Studied Afresh”
In the 19th century, scholars knew very little about the social organization of prehistoric peoples. Archaeology was not well developed as a science. The treatment of pre-class society in Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is largely based on Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization, 1877.  Engels’ work suffers from an uncritical use of Morgan, including his use of racist terms such as “savagery” and “barbarism.”
 This is not to dismiss Engels, who wrote this work as part of his and Marx’s commitment to the emancipation of women in a communist society. But many communists since have taken Engels as the last word on the subject.  In contrast, Engels himself wrote in 1890, “ All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of the existence of the different formations of society must be individually examined before the attempt is made to deduce from them the… notions corresponding to them. Only a little has been done here up to now.” 
We hope that readers will help us to study history afresh, and learn the lessons that can help us win the fight for a communist society that will free women and men workers from sexist divisions.

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