Lees and Overing take this point from Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. (New York, 1972), one of the keynote texts in Marxist political and social theory. Recent applications cited by Lees and Overing are Rayne R. Reiter, ed. Towards an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975) and S. Ortner and H. Whitehead, eds., Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. (Cambridge, 1981). {See Lees and Overing page 52, note 30.}
Lees and Overing point out that early Anglo-Saxon society was not centralized but that it was rather a collection of kinship-based kingdoms. In such societies, many scholars believe, women exerted far more influence than they did in more fully developed states. This idea supports the widely-held view that women in the Old English (Anglo-Saxon period) were far freer and more powerful than they were in, say, the fourteenth century. "The evidence which has survived from Anglo-Saxon England indicates that women were then me nearly the equal companions of their husbands and brothers than at any other period before the modern age," Doris Stenton has written. For this quote and further discussion. See Christine FellWomen in Anglo-Saxon England page 13 (on reserve).
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