Abstract:
Friedrich Engels and other classical Marxists believe that women’s subjection is the result
of private property ownership. According to them, class divergence was emerged due to
the private property ownership. Therefore, every class society has private property
ownership, except socialist society or proletariat dictatorship which will be created after
the proletarian revolution, economic resources and private property ownership possesses
to the male who represents the ruling class. According to them, that is why every class
society consists of male supremacy and female suppression. This context can be
conceptualized as structural oppression. According to classic Marxism, it is compulsory to
fight with male dominancy and class divergences to emancipate from female suppression.
Then, it leads to create class conflicts in society as well as interpersonal conflicts within
the family. On the other hand, globalization expands new opportunities such as
international labour migration and job opportunities for skilled and unskilled women
labour. Therefore, women were able to access economic resources and have private
property ownership. In this theoretical and empirical milieu, this study primarily
concerns to question Friedrich Engels’s Theory on the Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State with emphasizing political empowerment of migrant women of Sri
Lanka in the context of Globalization. Do women have political empowerment in private
and public domain after achieving sole breadwinner position of the family by migration in
the context of globalization? This is a qualitative study which is based on post-positivist
research methodology and ethnography as a research method. The sample of the study is
consisted of 60 households of women migrant workers. They were selected by applying
purposive sampling method. Further, with the aim of maintaining gender mainstreaming
phenomena in the data collection process, the sample of households is equally divided
into two categories such as female headed households and the male headed households.
Then, there were thirty (30) female headed households and thirty (30) male headed
households. Findings of the study have proven that the economic factor does not acquire
timeless universal value. It depends on the factors of time and space. Though the economy
is the supreme factor in the time of industrial revolution and capitalist accumulation, it
does not acquire same value in every society in the world, especially Asian counties like
Sri Lanka. The number of other factors such as patriarchal form of governance, cultural
hegemony, institutionalized sexual violence within the sphere of family, domestic
violence, elderliness vs. youngest syndrome or the concept of being a ‘’balaya’’ can be
seen as the crucial factors behind the women economic and political empowerment or
disempowerment in the context of globalization, except economic factors.
