It is as elements of social structure--conventional facts--that leisure
and ownership are matters of interest for the purpose in hand. An
habitual neglect of work does not constitute a leisure class; neither
does the mechanical fact of use and consumption constitute ownership.
The present inquiry, therefore, is not concerned with the beginning
of indolence, nor with the beginning of the appropriation of useful
articles to individual consumption. The point in question is the origin
and nature of a conventional leisure class on the one hand and the
beginnings of individual ownership as a conventional right or equitable
claim on the other hand.
The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a leisure
and a working class arises is a division maintained between men's and
women's work in the lower stages of barbarism. Likewise the earliest
form of ownership is an ownership of the women by the able bodied men
of the community. The facts may be expressed in more general terms, and
truer to the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it
is an ownership of the woman by the man.
There was undoubtedly some appropriation of useful articles before the
custom of appropriating women arose. The usages of existing archaic
communities in which there is no ownership of women is warrant for such
a view. In all communities the members, both male and female, habitually
appropriate to their individual use a variety of useful things; but
these useful things are not thought of as owned by the person who
appropriates and consumes them. The habitual appropriation and
consumption of certain slight personal effects goes on without
raising the question of ownership; that is to say, the question of a
conventional, equitable claim to extraneous things.
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