ABCedaire E | Page 4

E E Everyday life: Engels: Friedrich Engels located the origins of female alienation in domestic space in the slow formation of the nuclear family. In his analysis, he described how in a context of prosperity, men could overthrow the system of matrilineal inheritance and would assume authority for the transmission of private property. Here Engels makes explicit how the validity of the class system would have allowed the development of an unequal sharing of resources and means of production between men and women. “More the everyday life and its speech bury life by negating death, the better they are consolidated within ambiguity and a generalized compromise: between life and death, between presence and absence, between thought and non-thought, between the will of will and the thought of thought, between the inventive and the repetitive, between the desire and the non-desire, between sublime attitudes and abyssal deepness.” ‘Critique of the everyday life’, Tome III – Henri Lefebvre Friedrich Engels