The machine cancelled physical-force differences, enabling women’s return to productive work

Evidence

But it is not these theoretical debates that influenced the course of events; they only timidly reflected them. Woman regains the economic importance lost since prehistoric times because she escapes the home and plays a new role in industrial production. The machine makes this upheaval possible because the difference in physical force between male and female workers is canceled out in a great number of cases. As this abrupt industrial expansion demands a bigger labor market than male workers can provide, women’s collaboration is necessary. This is the great nineteenth-century revolution that transforms the lot of woman and opens a new era to her. Marx and Engels understand the full impact this will have on women, promising them a liberation brought about by that of the proletariat. In fact, “women and workers both have oppression in common,” says Bebel. And both will escape oppression thanks to the importance their productive work will take on through technological development. Engels shows that woman’s lot is closely linked to the history of private property; a catastrophe substituted patriarchy for matriarchy and enslaved woman to the patrimony; but the Industrial Revolution is the counterpart of that loss and will lead to feminine emancipation. He writes: “Woman cannot be emancipated unless she takes part in production on a large social scale and is only incidentally bound to domestic work. And this has become possible only within a large modern industry that not only accepts women’s work on a grand scale but formally requires it.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 258

Categorization

• XREF: The materialist claim that industrial machinery neutralized the physical-force argument directly foreshadows and is challenged by Beauvoir’s own later existentialist refusal of biological determinism — a core dialectic in this reading. — connects to: Technological development can cancel out women’s physical disadvantage relative to men — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 142; Capitalist economic change, not feminism, drove women into the workforce — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 303
• DEFINE: Engels’ causal framework: private property → patriarchy, and industrial production → emancipation; this is the materialist baseline Beauvoir complicates.

Broader Connections

• Capitalist economic change, not feminism, drove women into the workforce #corroborates (0.85) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 303