Pat Brewer’s The Dispossession of Women is a short Marxist-feminist pamphlet asking a large, unfashionably concrete question: where did women’s oppression come from?

Brewer works through anthropology, evolutionary theory and Engels to argue that women’s subordination emerged historically alongside changes in production, property and the organisation of labour.

Brewer rejects crude biological accounts of sexual difference, looks at women’s role in early human subsistence, and places considerable weight on the transition from horticulture to plough agriculture, where heavier, increasingly individualised production altered the economic position of women and the family. The argument is schematic and some of the anthropology is now dated, but that is partly what makes it interesting: this is a clear example of materialist feminism trying to locate gender hierarchy in social relations rather than nature, psychology or abstract power alone.

Resistance Books, Sydney, 2000. Paperback pamphlet. First edition. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with minor creasing at corners and edges. Internally clean and firmly bound.