facts of social structure.

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