Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/117

 impulses and virtues have effect till it embraces finally the whole of humanity, it at the same time creates not only private interests within society which are capable of considerably diminishing the effect of these social impulses for the time, but also special classes of society, which, while within their own narrow circle greatly intensifying the strength of the social instincts and virtues, at the same time, however, can materially injure their value for the other members of the entire society, or at least for the opposing sections or classes.

The formation of classes is also a product of the division of labour. Even the animal is no homogeneous formation. Among them there are already various groups which have a different importance in and for the community. Yet the group formation still rests on the natural distinctions. There are, in the first place, those of sex and of age. Then there are the groups of the children, the youths of both sexes, the adults, and, finally, the aged. The discovery of the tool has at first the effect of emphasising still more the separation of certain of these groups. Thus it came about that hunting and war fell to the men, who were more easily able to get about than the women, who are continually burdened with children. That, and not any inferior power of self-defence, it was, probably, which made hunting and fighting a monopoly of man. Wherever in history and fable we come across female huntresses and warriors, they are always the unmarried. Women do not lack in strength, endurance, or courage, but maternity is not easily to be reconciled with the insecure life of the hunter and warrior. As, however, motherhood drives the women rather to continually stay in one place, those duties fall to her which require a settled life, the planting of field fruits, the maintenance of the family hearth, etc.

According to the importance which hunting and war, or, on the other side, agriculture and domestic life, attain for society, and according to the part which each of the two sexes play in either, the importance and relative respect paid to the man and woman in the social life also changes. But even the