Morgan, who spent the greater part of his life among the Iroquois in the
State of New York and who had been adopted into one of their tribes, the
Senecas, found among them a system of relationship that was in
contradiction with their actual family relations. Among them existed
what Morgan terms the syndyasmian or pairing family, a monogamous state
easily dissolved by either side. The offspring of such a couple was
identified and acknowledged by all the world. There could be no doubt to
whom to apply the terms father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister.
But the actual use of these words was not in keeping with their
fundamental meaning. For the Iroquois addresses as sons and daughters
not only his own children, but also those of his brothers; and he is
called father by all of them. But the children of his sisters he calls
nephews and nieces, and they call him uncle. Vice versa, an Iroquois
woman calls her own children as well as those of her sisters sons and
daughters and is addressed as mother by them. But the children of her
brothers are called nephews and nieces, and they call her aunt. In the
same way, the children of brothers call one another brothers and
sisters, and so do the children of sisters. But the children of a sister
call those of her brother cousins, and vice versa. And these are not
simply meaningless terms, but expressions of actually existing
conceptions of proximity and remoteness, equality or inequality of consanguinity.
These conceptions serve as the fundament of a perfectly elaborated
system of relationship, capable of expressing several hundred different
relations of a single individual. More still, this system is not only
fully accepted by all American Indians—no exception has been found so
far—but it is also in use with hardly any modifications among the
original inhabitants of India, among the Dravidian tribes of the Dekan
and the Gaura tribes of Hindostan.
The terms of relationship used by the Tamils of Southern India and by
the Seneca-Iroquois of New York State are to this day identical for more
than two hundred different family relations. And among these East Indian
tribes also, as among all American Indians, the relations arising out of
the prevailing form of the family are not in keeping with the system of kinship.
How can this be explained? In view of the important role played by
kinship in the social order of all the savage and barbarian races, the
significance of such a widespread system cannot be obliterated by phrases.
A system that is generally accepted in America, that also exists in Asia
among people of entirely different races, that is frequently found in a
more or less modified form all over Africa and Australia, such a system
requires a historical explanation and cannot be talked down, as was
attempted, e. g., by McLennan. The terms father, child, brother, sister
are more than mere honorary titles; they carry in their wake certain
well-defined and very serious obligations, the aggregate of which
comprises a very essential part of the social constitution of those
nations. And the explanation was found. In the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii)
there existed up to the first half of the nineteenth century a family
form producing just such fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters,
uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, as the old Indo-American system of
kinship. But how remarkable! The Hawaiian system of kinship again did
not agree with the family form actually prevailing there. For there all
the children of brothers and sisters, without any exception, are
considered brothers and sisters, and regarded as the common children not
only of their mother or her sisters, or their father and his brothers,
but of all the brothers and sisters of their parents without
distinction. While thus the American system of kinship presupposes an
obsolete primitive form of the family, which is still actually existing
in Hawaii, the Hawaiian system on the other hand points to a still more
primitive form of the family, the actual existence of which cannot be
proved any more, but which must have existed, because otherwise such a
system of kinship could not have arisen. According to Morgan, the family
is the active element; it is never stationary, but in progression from a
lower to a higher form in the same measure in which society develops
from a lower to a higher stage. But the systems of kinship are passive.
Only in long intervals they register the progress made by the family in
course of time, and only then are they radically changed, when the
family has done so. "And," adds Marx, "it is the same with political,
juridical, religious and philosophical systems in general." While the
family keeps on growing, the system of kinship becomes ossified. The
latter continues in this state and the family grows beyond it. With the
same certainty which enabled Cuvier to conclude from some bones of
Marsupialia found near Paris that extinct marsupialia had lived there,
with this same certainty may we conclude from a system of kinship
transmitted by history that the extinct form of the family corresponding
to this system was once in existence.
The systems of kinship and forms of the family just mentioned differ
from the present systems in that every child has several fathers and
mothers. Under the American system to which the Hawaiian system
corresponds, brother and sister cannot be father and mother of the same
child; but the Hawaiian system presupposes a family, in which, on the
contrary, this was the rule. We are here confronted by a series of
family forms that are in direct contradiction with those that were
currently regarded as alone prevailing. The conventional conception
knows only monogamy, furthermore polygamy of one man, eventually also
polyandry of one woman. But it passes in silence, as is meet for a
moralizing philistine, that the practice silently but without
compunction supersedes these barriers sanctioned officially by society.
The study of primeval history, however, shows us conditions, where men
practiced polygamy and women at the same time polyandry, so that their
children were considered common to all; conditions that up to their
final transition into monogamy underwent a whole series of
modifications. These modifications slowly and gradually contract the
circle comprised by the common tie of marriage until only the single
couple remains which prevails to-day.
In thus constructing backward the history of the family, Morgan, in
harmony with the majority of his colleagues, arrives at a primeval
condition, where unrestricted sexual intercourse existed within a tribe,
so that every woman belonged to every man, and vice versa.
Much has been said about this primeval state of affairs since the
eighteenth century, but only in general commonplaces. It is one of
Bachofen's great merits to have taken the subject seriously and to have
searched for traces of this state in historical and religious
traditions. To-day we know that these traces, found by him, do not lead
back to a stage of unlimited sexual intercourse, but to a much later
form, the group marriage. The primeval stage, if it really ever existed,
belongs to so remote a period, that we can hardly expect to find direct
proofs of its former existence among these social fossils, backward
savages. Bachofen's merit consists in having brought this question to
the fore.[7]
It has lately become a fashion to deny the existence of this early stage
of human sex life, in order to spare us this "shame." Apart from the
absence of all direct proof, the example of the rest of animal life is
invoked. From the latter, Letourneau (Evolution du mariage et de la
famille, 1888) quoted numerous facts, alleged to prove that among
animals also an absolutely unlimited sexual intercourse belongs to a
lower stage. But I can only conclude from all these facts that they
prove absolutely nothing for man and the primeval conditions of his
life. The mating of vertebrates for a lengthy term is sufficiently
explained by physiological causes, e. g., among birds by the
helplessness of the female during brooding time. Examples of faithful
monogamy among birds do not furnish any proofs for men, for we are not
descended from birds.
And if strict monogamy is the height of virtue, then the palm belongs to
the tapeworm that carries a complete male and female sexual apparatus in
each of its 50 to 200 sections and passes its whole lifetime in
fertilizing itself in every one of its sections. But if we confine
ourselves to mammals, we find all forms of sexual intercourse, license,
suggestions of group marriage, polygamy and monogamy. Only polyandry is
missing;[8] that could be accomplished by men only. Even our next
relations, the quadrumana, exhibit all possible differences in the
grouping of males and females. And if we draw the line still closer and
consider only the four anthropoid apes, Letourneau can only tell us,
that they are now monogamous, now polygamous; while Saussure contends
according to Giraud-Teulon that they are monogamous. The recent
contentions of Westermarck[9] in regard to monogamy among anthropoid
apes are far from proving anything. In short, the information is such
that honest Letourneau admits: "There exists no strict relation at all
between the degree of intellectual development and the form of sexual
intercourse among mammals." And Espinas says frankly:[10] "The herd is
the highest social group found among animals. It seems to be composed of
families, but from the outset the family and the herd are antagonistic;
they develop in directly opposite ratio."
It is evident from the above that we know next to nothing of the family
and other social groups of anthropoid apes; the reports are directly
contradictory. How full of contradiction, how much in need of critical
scrutiny and research are the reports even on savage human tribes! But
monkey tribes are far more difficult to observe than human tribes. For
the present, therefore, we must decline all final conclusions from such
absolutely unreliable reports.
The quotation from Espinas, however, offers a better clue. Among higher
animals, the herd and family are not supplements of one another, but
antitheses. Espinas demonstrates very nicely, how the jealousy of the
males loosens or temporarily dissolves every herd during mating time.
"Where the family is closely organized, herds are formed only in
exceptional cases. But wherever free sexual intercourse or polygamy are
existing, the herd appears almost spontaneously.... In order that a herd
may form, family ties must be loosened and the individual be free. For
this reason we so rarely find organized herds among birds.... Among
mammals, however, we find groups organized after a fashion, just because
here the individual is not merged in the family.... The rising sense of
cohesion in a herd cannot, therefore, have a greater enemy than the
consciousness of family ties. Let us not shrink from pronouncing it: the
development of a higher form of society than the family can be due only
to the fact that it admitted families which had undergone a thorough
change. This does not exclude the possibility that these same families
were thus enabled to reorganize later on under infinitely more favorable
circumstances."[11]
It becomes apparent from this, that animal societies may indeed have a
certain value in drawing conclusions in regard to human life—but only
negatively. The higher vertebrate knows, so far as we may ascertain,
only two forms of the family: polygamy or pairs. In both of them there
is only one grown male, only one husband. The jealousy of the male, at
the same time tie and limit of the family, creates an opposition between
the animal family and the herd. The latter, a higher social form, is
here rendered impossible, there loosened or dissolved during mating
time, and at best hindered in its development by the jealousy of the
male. This in itself is sufficient proof that the animal family and
primeval human society are irreconcilable; that ancient man, struggling
upward from the animal stage, either had no family at all or at the most
one that does not exist among animals. A being so defenceless as
evolving man might well survive in small numbers though living in an
isolated state, the highest social form of which is that of pairs such
as Westermarck, relying on hunter's reports, attributes to the gorilla
and the chimpanzee. Another element is necessary for the elevation out
of the animal stage, for the realization of the highest progress found
in nature: the replacing of the defencelessness of the single individual
by the united strength and co-operation of the whole herd. The
transition from beast to man out of conditions of the sort under which
the anthropoid apes are living to-day would be absolutely unexplainable.
These apes rather give the impression of stray sidelines gradually
approaching extinction, and at all events in process of decline. This
alone is sufficient to reject all parallels between their family forms
and those of primeval man. But mutual tolerance of the grown males,
freedom from jealousy, was the first condition for the formation of such
large and permanent groups, within which alone the transformation from
beast to man could be accomplished. And indeed, what do we find to be
the most ancient and original form of the family, undeniably traceable
by history and even found to-day here and there? The group marriage,
that form in which whole groups of men and whole groups of women
mutually belong to one another, leaving only small scope for jealousy.
And furthermore we find at a later stage the exceptional form of
polyandry which still more supersedes all sentiments of jealousy and
hence is unknown to animals.
But all the forms of the group marriage known to us are accompanied by
such peculiarly complicated circumstances that they of necessity point
to a preceding simpler form of sexual intercourse and, hence, in the
last instance to a period of unrestricted sexual intercourse
corresponding to a transition from the animal to man. Therefore the
references to animal marriages lead us back to precisely that point,
from which they were intended to remove us forever.
What does the term "unrestricted sexual intercourse" mean? Simply, that
the restrictions in force now were not observed formerly. We have
already seen the barrier of jealousy falling. If anything is certain, it
is that jealousy is developed at a comparatively late stage. The same is
true of incest. Not only brother and sister were originally man and
wife, but also the sexual intercourse between parents and children is
permitted to this day among many nations. Bancroft testifies to the
truth of this among the Kaviats of the Behring Strait, the Kadiaks of
Alaska, the Tinnehs in the interior of British North America; Letourneau
compiled reports of the same fact in regard to the Chippeway Indians,
the Coocoos in Chile, the Caribeans, the Carens in Indo-China, not to
mention the tales of ancient Greeks and Romans about the Parthians,
Persians, Scythians, Huns and so forth. Before incest was invented (and
it is an invention, a really valuable one indeed), sexual intercourse
between parents and children could not be any more repulsive than
between other persons belonging to different generations, which takes
place even in our day among the most narrow-minded nations without
causing any horror. Even old "maids" of more than sixty years sometimes,
if they are rich enough, marry young men of about thirty. Eliminating
from the primeval forms of the family known to us those conceptions of
incest—conceptions totally different from ours and often enough in
direct contradiction with them—we arrive at a form of sexual
intercourse that can only be designated as unrestricted. Unrestricted in
the sense that the barriers drawn later on by custom did not yet exist.
This in no way necessarily implies for practical purposes an injudicious
pell-mell intercourse. The separate existence of pairs for a limited
time is not out of the question, and even comprises the majority of
cases in the group marriage of our days. And if the latest repudiator of
such a primeval state, Westermarck, designates as marriage every case,
where both sexes remain mated until the birth of the offspring, then
this is equivalent to saying that this kind of marriage may well exist
during a stage of unrestricted intercourse without contradicting
license, i. e., absence of barriers drawn by custom for sexual
intercourse. Westermarck bases himself on the opinion that "license
includes the suppression of individual affections" so that "prostitution
is its most genuine form." To me it rather seems that any understanding
of primeval conditions is impossible as long as we look at them through
brothel spectacles. We shall return to this point in the group marriage.
According to Morgan, the following forms developed from this primeval
state at an apparently early stage:
The Consanguine Family is the first step toward the family. Here the
marriage groups are arranged by generations: all the grand-fathers and
grand-mothers within a certain family are mutually husbands and wives;
and equally their children, the fathers and mothers, whose children form
a third cycle of mutual mates. The children of these again, the
great-grandchildren of the first cycle, will form a fourth. In this form
of the family, then, only ancestors and descendants are excluded from
what we would call the rights and duties of marriage. Brothers and
sisters, male and female cousins of the first, second and more remote
grades, are all mutually brothers and sisters and for this reason mutual
husbands and wives. The relation of brother and sister quite naturally
includes at this stage the practice of sexual intercourse.[12]
The typical form of such a family would consist of the offspring of one
pair, representing again the descendants of each grade as mutual
brothers and sisters and, therefore, mutual husbands and wives. The
consanguine family is extinct. Even the crudest nations of history do
not furnish any proofs of it. But the Hawaiian system of kinship, in
force to this day in all Polynesia, compels us to acknowledge its
former existence, for it exhibits grades of kinship that could only
originate in this form of the family. And the whole subsequent
development of the family compels us to admit this form as a necessary step.
While the first step of organization consisted in excluding parents and
children from mutual sexual intercourse, the second was the erection of
a barrier between brother and sister. This progress was much more
important on account of the greater equality in the ages of the parties
concerned, but also far more difficult. It was accomplished gradually,
probably beginning with the exclusion of the natural sister (i. e., on
the mother's side) from sexual intercourse, first in single cases, then
becoming more and more the rule (in Hawaii exceptions were still noted
during the nineteenth century), and finally ending with the prohibition
of marriage even among collateral brothers and sisters, i. e., what we
now term brother's and sister's children, grandchildren, and
great-grandchildren. This progress offers, according to Morgan, an
excellent illustration how the principle of natural selection works.
Without question, the tribes limiting inbreeding by this progress
developed faster and more completely than those retaining the marriage
between brothers and sisters as a rule and law. And how powerfully the
influence of this progress was felt, is shown by the institution of the
gens, directly attributable to it and passing far beyond the goal. The
gens is the foundation of the social order of most, if not all,
barbarian nations, and in Greece and Rome we step immediately from it to civilization.
Every primeval family necessarily had to divide after a few generations.
The originally communistic and collective household existing far into
the middle stage of barbarism, involved a certain maximum size of the
family, variable according to conditions, but still limited in a degree.
As soon as the conception of the impropriety of sexual intercourse
between children of the same mother arose, it naturally became effective
on such occasions as the division of old and the foundation of new
household communities (which, however, did not necessarily coincide with
the family group). One or more series of sisters became the center of
one group, their natural brothers that of another. In this or a similar
manner that form which Morgan styles the Punaluan family developed from
the consanguine family. According to Hawaiian custom, a number of
sisters, natural or more remote (i. e., cousins of the first, second and
more remote degrees) were the mutual wives of their mutual husbands,
their natural brothers excepted. These men now no longer addressed one
another as "brother"—which they no longer had to be—but as "Punalua,"
i. e., intimate companion, associate as it were. Likewise a series of
natural or more remote brothers lived in mutual marriage with a number
of women, not their natural sisters, and these women referred to each
other as "Punalua." This is the classical form of a family, which later
admitted of certain variations. Its fundamental characteristic was
mutual community of husbands and wives within a given family with the
exclusion of the natural brothers (or sisters) first, and of the more
remote grades later.
This form of the family, now, furnishes with complete accuracy the
degrees of kinship expressed by the American system. The children of the
sisters of my mother still are her children; likewise the children of
the brothers of my father still his children; and all of them are my
brothers and sisters. But the children of the brothers of my mother are
now her nephews and nieces, the children of the sisters of my father
his nephew and nieces, and they are all my cousins. For while the
husbands of the sisters of my mother are still her husbands, and
likewise the wives of the brothers of my father still his
wives—legally, if not always in fact—the social proscription of sexual
intercourse between brothers and sisters has now divided those relatives
who were formerly regarded without distinction as brothers and sisters,
into two classes. In one category are those who remain (more remote)
brothers and sisters as before; in the other the children of the brother
on one hand or the sister on the opposite, who can be brothers and
sisters no longer. The latter have mutual parents no more, neither
father nor mother nor both together. And for this reason the class of
nephews and nieces, male and female cousins, here becomes necessary for
the first time. Under the former family order this would have been
absurd. The American system of kinship, which appears absolutely
paradoxical in any family form founded on monogamy, is rationally
explained and naturally confirmed in its most minute details by the
Punaluan family. Wherever this system of kinship was in force, there the
Punaluan family or at least a form akin to it must also have existed.
This family form, the existence of which in Hawaii was actually
demonstrated, would have been transmitted probably by all Polynesia, if
the pious missionaries, similar to the Spanish monks in America, could
have looked upon such anti-Christian relations as being something more
than simply a "horror."[13]
Cesar's report to the effect that the
Britons, who then were in the middle stage of barbarism, "have ten or
twelve women in common, mostly brothers with brothers and parents with
children," is best explained by group marriage. Barbarian mothers have
not ten or twelve sons old enough to keep women in common, but the
American system of kinship corresponding to the Punaluan family
furnishes many brothers, because all near and remote cousins of a
certain man are his brothers. The term "parents with children" may arise
from a wrong conception of Cesar, but this system does not absolutely
exclude the existence of father and son, mother or daughter in the same
group. It does exclude, however, father and daughter or mother and son.
This or a similar form of group marriage also furnishes the easiest
explanation of the reports of Herodotus and other ancient writers
concerning community of women among savage and barbarian nations. This
is true, furthermore, of Watson's and Kaye's[14] tale about the Tikurs
of Audh (north of the Ganges): "They live together (i. e., sexually)
almost indiscriminately in large communities, and though two persons may
be considered as being married, still the tie is only nominal."
The institution of the gens seems to have its origin in the majority of
cases in the Punaluan family. True, the Australian class system also
offers a starting point for it; the Australians have gentes, but not yet
a Punaluan family, only a cruder form of group marriage.[15]
In all forms of the group family it is uncertain who is the father of a
child, but certain, who is its mother. Although she calls all the
children of the aggregate family her children and has the duties of a
mother toward them, still she knows her natural children from others.
It is also obvious that, as far as group marriage exists, descent can
only be traced on the mother's side and, hence, only female lineage be
acknowledged. This is actually the case among all savage tribes and
those in the lower stage of barbarism. To have discovered this first is
the second great merit of Bachofen. He designates this exclusive
recognition of descent from the female line and the hereditary relations
resulting therefrom in course of time as "maternal law." I retain this
term for the sake of brevity, although it is distorted; for at this
social stage there is no sign yet of any law in the juridic sense.
If we now take one of the two standard groups of a Punaluan family,
namely that of a series of natural and remote sisters (i. e., first,
second and more remote descendants of natural sisters), their children
and their natural or remote brothers on the mother's side (who according
to our supposition are not their husbands), we have exactly that circle
of persons who later appear as members of a gens, in the original form
of this institution. They all have a common ancestress, by virtue of the
descent that makes the different female generations sisters. But the
husbands of these sisters cannot be chosen among their brothers any
more, can no longer come from the same ancestress, and do not,
therefore, belong to the consanguineous group of relatives, the gens of
a later time. The children of these same sisters, however, do belong to
this group, because descent from the female line alone is conclusive,
alone is positive. As soon as the proscription of sexual intercourse
between all relatives on the mother's side, even the most remote of
them, is an accomplished fact, the above named group has become a gens,
i. e., constitutes a definite circle of consanguineous relatives of
female lineage who are not permitted to marry one another. Henceforth
this circle is more and more fortified by other mutual institutions of
a social or religious character and thus distinguished from other gentes
of the same tribe. Of this more anon.
Finding, as we do, that the gens not only necessarily, but also as a
matter of course, develops from the Punaluan family, it becomes obvious
to us to assume as almost practically demonstrated the prior existence
of this family form among all those nations where such gentes are
traceable, i. e., nearly all barbarian and civilized nations.
When Morgan wrote his book, our knowledge of group marriage was very
limited. We knew very little about the group marriages of the
Australians organized in classes, and furthermore Morgan had published
as early as 1871 the information he had received about the Punaluan
family of Hawaii. This family on one hand furnished a complete
explanation of the system of kinship in force among the American
Indians, which had been the point of departure for all the studies of
Morgan. On the other hand it formed a ready means for the deduction of
the maternal law gens. And finally it represented a far higher stage of
development than the Australian classes.
It is, therefore, easy to understand how Morgan could regard this form
as the stage necessarily preceding the pairing family and attribute
general extension in former times to it. Since then we have learned of
several other forms of the group marriage, and we know that Morgan went
too far in this respect. But it was nevertheless his good fortune to
encounter in his Punaluan family the highest, the classical, form of
group marriage, that form which gave the simplest clue for the
transition to a higher stage.
The most essential contribution to our knowledge of the group marriage
we owe to the English missionary, Lorimer Fison, who studied this form
of the family for years on its classical ground, Australia. He found
the lowest stage of development among the Papuans near Mount Gambier in
South Australia. Here the whole tribe is divided into two great classes,
Kroki and Kumite.[16] Sexual intercourse within each of these classes is
strictly prohibited. But every man of one class is by birth the husband
of every woman of the other class, and vice versa. Not the individuals
are married to one another, but the whole groups, class to class. And
mark well, no caution is made anywhere on account of difference of age
or special consanguinity, unless it is resulting from the division into
two exogamous classes. A Kroki has for his wife every Kumite woman. And
as his own daughter, being the daughter of a Kumite woman, is also
Kumite according to maternal law, she is therefore the born wife of
every Kroki, including her father. At least, the class organization, as
we know it, does not exclude this possibility. Hence this organization
either arose at a time when, in spite of all dim endeavor to limit
inbreeding, sexual intercourse between parents and children was not yet
regarded with any particular horror; in this case the class system would
be directly evolved from a condition of unrestricted sexual relations.
Or the intercourse between parents and children was already proscribed
by custom, when the classes were formed; and in this case the present
condition points back to the consanguine family and is the first step
out of it. The latter case is the more probable. So far as I know, no
mention is made of any sexual intercourse between parents and children
in Australia. Even the later form of exogamy, the maternal law gens, as
a rule silently presupposes that the prohibition of this intercourse
was an accomplished fact at the time of its institution.
The system of two classes is not only found near Mount Gambier in South
Australia, but also farther east along Darling River, and in the
northeast of Queensland. It is, consequently, widespread. It excludes
only marriage between brothers and sisters, between brothers' children
and between sisters' children of the mother's side, because these belong
to the same class; but the children of a sister can marry those of a
brother and vice versa. A further step for preventing inbreeding is
found among the Kamilaroi on the Darling River in New South Wales, where
the two original classes are split into four, and every one of these is
married as a whole to a certain other class. The first two classes are
husbands and wives by birth. According to the place of the mother in the
first or second class, the children belong to the third and fourth. The
children of these two classes, who are also married to one another,
again belong to the first and second class. So that a certain generation
belongs to the first and second class, the next to the third and fourth
and the following again to the first and second. Hence the children of
natural brothers and sisters (on the mother's side) cannot marry one
another, but their grandchildren can do so. This peculiarly complicated
order of things is still more entangled by the inoculation—evidently at
a later stage—with maternal law gentes. But we cannot discuss this
further. Enough, the desire to prevent inbreeding again and again
demands recognition, but feeling its way quite spontaneously, without a
clear conception of the goal.
The group marriage is represented in Australia by class marriage, i. e.,
mass marriage of a whole class of men frequently scattered over the
whole breadth of the continent to an equally widespread class of women.
A close view of this group marriage does not offer quite such a horrible
spectacle as the philistine imagination accustomed to brothel conditions
generally pictures to itself. On the contrary, long years passed, before
its existence was even suspected, and quite recently it is once more
denied. To the casual observer it makes the impression of a loose
monogamy and in certain places of polygamy, with occasional breach of
faith. Years are required before one can discover, like Fison and
Howitt, the law regulating these marital conditions that rather appeal
in their practicability to the average European; the law enabling the
strange Papuan, thousands of miles from his home and among people whose
language he does not understand, to find frequently, from camp to camp
and from tribe to tribe, women who will without resistance and
guilelessly surrender to him; the law according to which a man with
several women offers one to his guest for the night. Where the European
sees immorality and lawlessness, there in reality a strict law is
observed. The women belong to the marriage class of the stranger and,
therefore, they are his wives by birth. The same moral law assigning
both to one another forbids under penalty of proscription all sexual
intercourse outside of the two marriage classes. Even when women are
abducted, as is frequently the case in certain regions, the class law is carefully respected.
In the abduction of women, by the way, a trace of transition to monogamy
is found even here, at least in the form of the pairing family. If a
young man has abducted a girl with the help of his friends, they hold
sexual intercourse with her one after another. But after that the girl
is regarded as the wife of the young man who planned the abduction. And
again, if an abducted woman deserts her husband and is caught by another
man, she becomes the wife of the latter and the first has lost his
privilege. Alongside of and within the generally existing group marriage
such exclusive relations are formed, pairing for a shorter or longer
term by the side of polygamy, so that here also group marriage is
declining. The question is only which will first disappear under the
pressure of European influence: group marriage or the Papuans addicted to it.
The marriage in whole classes, such as is in force in Australia, is no
doubt a very low and primitive form of group marriage, while the
Punaluan family, so far as we know, is its highest stage of development.
The former seems to be corresponding to the social stage of roving
savages, the latter requires relatively settled communistic bodies and
leads directly to the next higher stage of development. Between these
two, we shall no doubt find many an intermediate stage. Here lies a
barely opened, hardly entered field of investigation.[17]
A certain pairing for a longer or shorter term took place even during
the group marriage or still earlier. A man had his principal wife (one
can hardly call it favorite wife as yet) among many women, and he was to
her the principal husband among others. This fact in no small degree
contributed to the confusion among missionaries, who regarded group
marriage now as a disorderly community of women, now as an arbitrary
adultery. Such a habitual pairing would gain ground the more the gens
developed and the more numerous the classes of "brothers" and "sisters"
became who were not permitted to marry one another. The impulse to
prevent marriage of consanguineous relatives started by the gens went
still further. Thus we find that among the Iroquois and most of the
Indians in the lower stage of barbarism marriage is prohibited between
all the relatives of their system of kinship, and this comprises several
hundred kinds. By this increasing complication of marriage restrictions,
group marriage became more and more impossible; it was displaced by the
pairing family. At this stage one man lives with one woman, but in such
a manner that polygamy, and occasional adultery, remain privileges of
men, although the former occurs rarely for economic reasons. Women,
however, are generally expected to be strictly faithful during the time
of living together, and adultery on their part is cruelly punished. But
the marriage-tie may be easily broken by either party, and the children
belong to the mother alone, as formerly.
In this ever more extending restriction of marriage between
consanguineous relations, natural selection also remains effective. As
Morgan expresses it: "Marriages between gentes that were not
consanguineous produced a more vigorous race, physically and mentally;
two progressive tribes intermarried, and the new skulls and brains
naturally expanded until they comprised the faculties of both." Thus
tribes composed of gentes necessarily either gained the supremacy over
the backward ones or, by their example, carried them along in their wake.
The development of the family, then, is founded on the continual
contraction of the circle, originally comprising the whole tribe, within
which marital intercourse between both sexes was general. By the
continual, exclusion, first of near, then of ever remoter relatives,
including finally even those who were simply related legally, all group
marriage becomes practically impossible. At last only one couple,
temporarily and loosely united, remains; that molecule, the dissolution
of which absolutely puts an end to marriage. Even from this we may infer
how little the sexual love of the individual in the modern sense of the
word had to do with the origin of monogamy. The practice of all nations
of that stage still more proves this. While in the previous form of the
family the men were never embarrassed for women, but rather had more
than enough of them, women now became scarce and were sought after. With
the pairing family, therefore, the abduction and barter of women
began—widespread symptoms, and nothing but that, of a new and much more
profound change. The pedantic Scot, McLennan, however, transmuted these
symptoms, mere methods of obtaining women, into separate classes of the
family under the head of "marriage by capture" and "marriage by barter."
Moreover among American Indians and other nations in the same stage, the
marriage agreement is not the business of the parties most concerned,
who often are not even asked, but of their mothers. Frequently two
persons entirely unknown to one another are thus engaged to be married
and receive no information of the closing of the bargain, until the time
for the marriage ceremony approaches. Before the wedding, the bridegroom
brings gifts to the maternal relatives of the bride (not to her father
or his relatives) as an equivalent for ceding the girl to him. Either of
the married parties may dissolve the marriage at will. But among many
tribes, as, e. g., the Iroquois, public opinion has gradually become
averse to such separations. In case of domestic differences the gentile
relatives of both parties endeavor to bring about a reconciliation, and
not until they are unsuccessful a separation takes place. In this case
the woman keeps the children, and both parties are free to marry again.
The pairing family, being too weak and too unstable to make an
independent household necessary or even desirable, in no way dissolves
the traditional communistic way of housekeeping. But household communism
implies supremacy of women in the house as surely as exclusive
recognition of a natural mother and the consequent impossibility of
identifying the natural father signify high esteem for women, i. e.,
mothers. It is one of the most absurd notions derived from eighteenth
century enlightenment, that in the beginning of society woman was the
slave of man. Among all savages and barbarians of the lower and middle
stages, sometimes even of the higher stage, women not only have freedom,
but are held in high esteem. What they were even in the pairing family,
let Arthur Wright, for many years a missionary among the Seneca
Iroquois, testify: "As to their families, at a time when they still
lived in their old long houses (communistic households of several
families) ... a certain clan (gens) always reigned, so that the women
choose their husbands from other clans (gentes).... The female part
generally ruled the house; the provisions were held in common; but woe
to the luckless husband or lover who was too indolent or too clumsy to
contribute his share to the common stock. No matter how many children or
how much private property he had in the house, he was liable at any
moment to receive a hint to gather up his belongings and get out. And he
could not dare to venture any resistance; the house was made too hot for
him and he had no other choice, but to return to his own clan (gens) or,
as was mostly the case, to look for another wife in some other clan. The
women were the dominating power in the clans (gentes) and everywhere
else. Occasionally they did not hesitate to dethrone a chief and degrade
him to a common warrior."
The communistic household, in which most or all the women belong to one
and the same gens, while the husbands come from different gentes, is the
cause and foundation of the general and widespread supremacy of women in
primeval times. The discovery of this fact is the third merit of Bachofen.
By way of supplement I wish to state that the reports of travelers and
missionaries concerning the overburdening of women among savages and
barbarians do not in the least contradict the above statements. The
division of labor between both sexes is caused by other reasons than the
social condition of women. Nations, where women have to work much harder
than is proper for them in our opinion, often respect women more highly
than Europeans do. The lady of civilized countries, surrounded with sham
homage and a stranger to all real work stands on a far lower social
level than a hard-working barbarian woman, regarded as a real lady
(frowa-lady-mistress) and having the character of such.
Whether or not the pairing family has in our time entirely supplanted
group marriage in America, can be decided only by closer investigations
among those nations of northwestern and especially of southern America
that are still in the higher stage of savagery. About the latter so many
reports of sexual license are current that the assumption of a complete
cessation of the ancient group marriage is hardly warranted. Evidently
all traces of it have not yet disappeared. In at least forty North
American tribes the man marrying an elder sister has the right to make
all her sisters his wives as soon as they are of age, a survival of the
community of men for the whole series of sisters. And Bancroft relates
that the Indians of the Californian peninsula celebrate certain
festivities uniting several "tribes" for the purpose of unrestricted
sexual intercourse. These are evidently gentes that have preserved in
these festivities a vague recollection of the time when the women of one
gens had for their common husbands all the men of another gens, and vice
versa. The same custom is still observed in Australia. Among certain
nations it sometimes happens that the older men, the chief and
sorcerer-priests, exploit the community of women for their own benefits
and monopolize all the women. But in their turn they must restore the
old community during certain festivities and great assemblies,
permitting their wives to enjoy themselves with the young men. A whole
series of examples of such periodical saturnalia restoring for a short
time the ancient sexual freedom is quoted by Westermarck:[18] among the
Hos, the Santals, the Punjas and Kotars in India, among some African
nations, etc. Curiously enough Westermarck concludes that this is a
survival, not of group marriage, the existence of which he denies,
but—of a rutting season which primitive man had in common with other animals.
Here we touch Bachofen's fourth great discovery: the widespread form of
transition from group marriage to pairing family. What Bachofen
represents as a penance for violating the old divine laws—the penalty
with which a woman redeems her right to chastity, is in fact only a
mystical expression for the penalty paid by a woman for becoming exempt
from the ancient community of men and acquiring the right of
surrendering to one man only. This penalty consists in a limited
surrender: Babylonian women had to surrender once a year in the temple
of Mylitta; other nations of Western Asia sent their young women for
years to the temple of Anaitis, where they had to practice free love
with favorites of their own choice before they were allowed to marry.
Similar customs in a religious disguise are common to nearly all Asiatic
nations between the Mediterranean and the Ganges. The penalty for
exemption becomes gradually lighter in course of time, as Bachofen
remarks: "The annually repeated surrender gives place to a single
sacrifice; the hetaerism of the matrons is followed by that of the
maidens, the promiscuous intercourse during marriage to that before
wedding, the indiscriminate intercourse with all to that with certain
individuals."[19] Among some nations the religious disguise is missing.
Among others—Thracians, Celts, etc., in classic times, many primitive
inhabitants of India, Malay nations, South Sea Islanders and many
American Indians to this day—the girls enjoy absolute sexual freedom
before marriage. This is especially true almost everywhere in South
America, as everybody can confirm who penetrates a little into the
interior. Agassiz, e. g., relates[20] an anecdote of a wealthy family of
Indian descent. On being introduced to the daughter he asked something
about her father, presuming him to be her mother's husband, who was in
the war against Paraguay. But the mother replied, smiling: "Nao tem pai,
he filha da fortuna"—she hasn't any father; she is the daughter of
chance. "It is the way the Indian or half-breed women here always speak
of their illegitimate children; and though they say it without an
intonation of sadness or of blame, apparently as unconscious of any
wrong or shame as if they said the father was absent or dead, it has the
most melancholy significance; it seems to speak of such absolute
desertion. So far is this from being an unusual case, that among the
common people the opposite seems the exception. Children are frequently
quite ignorant of their parentage. They know about their mother, for all
the care and responsibility falls upon her, but they have no knowledge
of their father; nor does it seem to occur to the woman that she or her
children have any claim upon him." What seems so strange to the
civilized man, is simply the rule of maternal law and group marriage.
Again, among other nations the friends and relatives of the bridegroom
or the wedding guests claim their traditional right to the bride, and
the bridegroom comes last. This custom prevailed in ancient times on the
Baleares and among the African Augilers; it is observed to this day by
the Bareas in Abyssinia. In still other cases, an official person—the
chief of a tribe or a gens, the cazique, shamane, priest, prince or
whatever may be his title—represents the community and exercises the
right of the first night. All modern romantic whitewashing
notwithstanding, this jus primae noctis, is still in force among most of
the natives of Alaska,[21] among the Tahus of northern Mexico[22] and
some other nations. And during the whole of the middle ages it was
practiced at least in originally Celtic countries, where it was directly
transmitted by group marriage, e. g. in Aragonia. While in Castilia the
peasant was never a serf, the most disgraceful serfdom existed in
Aragonia, until abolished by the decision of Ferdinand the Catholic in
1486. In this document we read: "We decide and declare that the
aforesaid 'senyors' (barons) ... shall neither sleep the first night
with the wife of a peasant, nor shall they in the first night after the
wedding, when the woman has gone to bed, step over said woman or bed as
a sign of their authority. Neither shall the aforesaid senyors use the
daughter or the son of any peasant, with or without pay, against their
will." (Quoted in the Catalonian original by Sugenheim, "Serfdom,"
Petersburg, 1861, page 35.)
Bachofen, furthermore, is perfectly right in contending that the
transition from what he calls "hetaerism" or "incestuous generation" to
monogamy was brought about mainly by women. The more in the course of
economic development, undermining the old communism and increasing the
density of population, the traditional sexual relations lost their
innocent character suited to the primitive forest, the more debasing and
oppressive they naturally appeared to women; and the more they
consequently longed for relief by the right of chastity, of temporary or
permanent marriage with one man. This progress could not be due to men
for the simple reason that they never, even to this day, had the least
intention of renouncing the pleasures of actual group marriage. Not
until the women had accomplished the transition to the pairing family
could the men introduce strict monogamy—true, only for women.
The pairing family arose on the boundary line between savagery and
barbarism, generally in the higher stage of savagery, here and there in
the lower stage of barbarism. It is the form of the family
characteristic for barbarism, as group marriage is for savagery and
monogamy for civilization. In order to develop it into established
monogamy, other causes than those active hitherto were required. In the
pairing family the group was already reduced to its last unit, its
biatomic molecule: one man and one woman. Natural selection, had
accomplished its purpose by a continually increasing restriction of
sexual intercourse. Nothing remained to be done in this direction.
Unless new social forces became active, there was no reason why a new
form of the family should develop out of the pairing family. But these
forces did become active.
We now leave America, the classic soil of the pairing family. No sign
permits the conclusion that a higher form of the family was developed
here, that any established form of monogamy ever existed anywhere in the
New World before the discovery and conquest. Not so in the Old World.
In the latter, the domestication of animals and the breeding of flocks
had developed a hitherto unknown source of wealth and created entirely
new social conditions. Up to the lower stage of barbarism, fixed wealth
was almost exclusively represented by houses, clothing, rough ornaments
and the tools for obtaining and preparing food: boats, weapons and
household articles of the simplest kind. Nourishment had to be secured
afresh day by day. But now, with their herds of horses, camels, donkeys,
cattle, sheep, goats and hogs, the advancing nomadic nations—the Aryans
in the Indian Punjab, in the region of the Ganges and the steppes of the
Oxus and Jaxartes, then still more rich in water-veins than now; the
Semites on the Euphrates and Tigris—had acquired possessions demanding
only the most crude attention and care in order to propagate themselves
in ever increasing numbers and yield the most abundant store of milk and
meat. All former means of obtaining food were now forced to the
background. Hunting, once a necessity, now became a sport.
But who was the owner of this new wealth? Doubtless it was originally
the gens. However, private ownership of flocks must have had an early
beginning. It is difficult to say whether to the author of the so-called
first book of Moses Father Abraham appeared as the owner of his flocks
by virtue of his privilege as head of a communistic family or of his
capacity as gentile chief by actual descent. So much is certain: we
must not regard him as a proprietor in the modern sense of the word. It
is furthermore certain that everywhere on the threshold of documentary
history we find the flocks in the separate possession of chiefs of
families, exactly like the productions of barbarian art, such as metal
ware, articles of luxury and, finally, the human cattle—the slaves.
For now slavery was also invented. To the barbarian of the lower stage a
slave was of no use. The American Indians, therefore, treated their
vanquished enemies in quite a different way from nations of a higher
stage. The men were tortured or adopted as brothers into the tribe of
the victors. The women were married or likewise adopted with their
surviving children. The human labor power at this stage does not yet
produce a considerable amount over and above its cost of subsistence.
But the introduction of cattle raising, metal industry, weaving and
finally agriculture wrought a change. Just as the once easily obtainable
wives now had an exchange value and were bought, so labor power was now
procured, especially since the flocks had definitely become private
property. The family did not increase as rapidly as the cattle. More
people were needed for superintending; for this purpose the captured
enemy was available and, besides, he could be increased by breeding like the cattle.
Such riches, once they had become the private property of certain
families and augmented rapidly, gave a powerful impulse to society
founded on the pairing family and the maternal gens. The pairing family
had introduced a new element. By the side of the natural mother it had
placed the authentic natural father who probably was better
authenticated than many a "father" of our day. According to the division
of labor in those times, the task of obtaining food and the tools
necessary for this purpose fell to the share of the man; hence he owned
the latter and kept them in case of a separation, as the women did the
household goods. According to the social custom of that time, the man
was also the owner of the new source of existence, the cattle, and later
on of the new labor power, the slaves. But according to the same custom,
his children could not inherit his property, for the following reasons:
By maternal law, i. e., while descent was traced only along the female
line, and by the original custom of inheriting in the gens, the gentile
relatives inherited the property of their deceased gentile relative. The
wealth had to remain in the gens. In view of the insignificance of the
objects, the property may have gone in practice to the closest gentile
relatives, i. e., the consanguine relatives on the mother's side. The
children of the dead man, however, did not belong to his gens, but to
that of their mother. They inherited first together with the other
consanguine relatives of the mother, later on perhaps in preference to
the others. But they could not inherit from their father, because they
did not belong to his gens, where his property had to remain. Hence,
after the death of a cattle owner, the cattle would fall to his
brothers, sisters and the children of his sisters, or to the offspring
of the sisters of his mother. His own children were disinherited.
In the measure of the increasing wealth man's position in the family
became superior to that of woman, and the desire arose to use this
fortified position for the purpose of overthrowing the traditional law
of inheritance in favor of his children. But this was not feasible as
long as maternal law was valid. This law had to be abolished, and it
was. This was by no means as difficult as it appears to us to-day. For
this revolution—one of the most radical ever experienced by
humanity—did not have to touch a single living member of the gens. All
its members could remain what they had always been. The simple
resolution was sufficient, that henceforth the offspring of the male
members should belong to the gens, while the children of the female
members should be excluded by transferring them to the gens of their
father. This abolished the tracing of descent by female lineage and the
maternal right of inheritance, and instituted descent by male lineage
and the paternal right of inheritance. How and when this revolution was
accomplished by the nations of the earth, we do not know. It belongs
entirely to prehistoric times. That it was accomplished is proven more
than satisfactorily by the copious traces of maternal law collected
especially by Bachofen. How easily it is accomplished we may observe in
a whole series of Indian tribes, that recently passed through or are
still engaged in it, partly under the influence of increasing wealth and
changed modes of living (transfer from forests to the prairie), partly
through the moral pressure of civilization and missionaries. Six out of
eight Missouri tribes have male descent and inheritance, while only two
retain female descent and inheritance. The Shawnees, Miamis and
Delawares follow the custom of placing their children into the male gens
by giving them a gentile name belonging to the father's gens, so that
they may be entitled to inherit. "Innate casuistry of man, to change the
objects by changing their names, and to find loopholes for breaking
tradition inside of tradition where a direct interest was a sufficient
motive." (Marx.) This made confusion worse confounded, which could be
and partially was remedied alone by paternal law. "This seems to be the
most natural transition." (Marx.) As to the opinion of the comparative
jurists, how this transition took place among the civilized nations of
the old world—although only in hypotheses—compare M. Kovalevsky,
Tableau des origines et de l'évolution de la famille et de la
propriété, Stockholm, 1890.
The downfall of maternal law was the historic defeat of the female sex.
The men seized the reins also in the house, the women were stripped of
their dignity, enslaved, tools of men's lust and mere machines for the
generation of children. This degrading position of women, especially
conspicuous among the Greeks of heroic and still more of classic times,
was gradually glossed over and disguised or even clad in a milder form.
But it is by no means obliterated.
The first effect of the established supremacy of men became now visible
in the reappearance of the intermediate form of the patriarchal family.
Its most significant feature is not polygamy, of which more anon, but
"the organization of a certain number of free and unfree persons into
one family under the paternal authority of the head of the family. In
the Semitic form this head of the family lives in polygamy, the unfree
members have wife and children, and the purpose of the whole
organization is the tending of herds in a limited territory." The
essential points are the assimilation of the unfree element and the
paternal authority. Hence the ideal type of this form of the family is
the Roman family. The word familia did not originally signify the
composite ideal of sentimentality and domestic strife in the present day
philistine mind. Among the Romans it did not even apply in the beginning
to the leading couple and its children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus
means domestic slave, and familia is the aggregate number of slaves
belonging to one man. At the time of Gajus, the familia, id est
patrimonium (i. e., paternal legacy), was still bequeathed by testament.
The expression was invented by the Romans in order to designate a new
social organism, the head of which had a wife, children and a number of
slaves under his paternal authority and according to Roman law the
right of life and death over all of them. "The word is, therefore, not
older than the ironclad family system of the Latin tribes, which arose
after the introduction of agriculture and of lawful slavery, and after
the separation of the Aryan Itali from the Greeks." Marx adds: "The
modern family contains the germ not only of slavery (servitus), but also
of serfdom, because it has from the start a relation to agricultural
service. It comprises in miniature all those contrasts that later on
develop more broadly in society and the state."
Such a form of the family shows the transition from the pairing family
to monogamy. In order to secure the faithfulness of the wife, and hence
the reliability of paternal lineage, the women are delivered absolutely
into the power of the men; in killing his wife, the husband simply
exercises his right.
With the patriarchal family we enter the domain of written history, a
field in which comparative law can render considerable assistance. And
here it has brought about considerable progress indeed. We owe to Maxim
Kovalevsky (Tableau etc. de la famille et de la propriété, Stockholm,
1890, p. 60-100) the proof, that the patriarchal household community,
found to this day among Serbians and Bulgarians under the names of
Zádruga (friendly bond) and Bratstvo (fraternity), and in a modified
form among oriental nations, formed the stage of transition between the
maternal family derived from group marriage and the monogamous family of
the modern world. This seems at least established for the historic
nations of the old world, for Aryans and Semites.
The Zádruga of southern Slavonia offers the best still existing
illustration of such a family communism. It comprises several
generations of the father's descendants, together with their wives, all
living together on the same farm, tilling their fields in common,
living and clothing themselves from the same stock, and possessing
collectively the surplus of their earnings. The community is managed by
the master of the house (domácin), who acts as its representative, may
sell inferior objects, has charge of the treasury and is responsible for
it as well as for a proper business administration. He is chosen by vote
and is not necessarily the oldest man. The women and their work are
directed by the mistress of the house (domácica), who is generally the
wife of the domácin. She also has an important, and often final, voice
in choosing a husband for the girls. But the highest authority is vested
in the family council, the assembly of all grown companions, male and
female. The domácin is responsible to this council. It takes all
important resolutions, sits in judgment on the members of the household,
decides the question of important purchases and sales, especially of land, etc.
It is only about ten years since the existence of such family communism
in the Russia of to-day was proven. At present it is generally
acknowledged to be rooted in popular Russian custom quite as much as the
obscina or village community.
It is found in the oldest Russian code, the Pravda of Jaroslav, under
the same name (vervj) as in the Dalmatian code, and may also be traced
in Polish and Czech historical records.
Likewise among Germans, the economic unit according to Heussler
(Institutions of German law) is not originally the single family, but
the "collective household," comprising several generations or single
families and, besides, often enough unfree individuals. The Roman family
is also traced to this type, and hence the absolute authority of the
master of the house and the defenselessness of the other members in
regard to him is strongly questioned of late. Similar communities are
furthermore said to have existed among the Celts of Ireland. In France
they were preserved up to the time of the Revolution in Nivernais under
the name of "parçonneries," and in the Franche Comté they are not quite
extinct yet. In the region of Louhans (Saône et Loire) we find large
farmhouses with a high central hall for common use reaching up to the
roof and surrounded by sleeping rooms accessible by the help of stairs
with six to eight steps. Several generations of the same family live
together in such a house.
In India, the household community with collective agriculture is already
mentioned by Nearchus at the time of Alexander the Great, and it exists
to this day in the same region, in the Punjab and the whole Northwest of
the country. In the Caucasus it was located by Kovalevski himself.
In Algeria it is still found among the Kabyles. Even in America it is
said to have existed. It is supposed to be identical with the
"Calpullis" described by Zurita in ancient Mexico. In Peru, however,
Cunow (Ausland, 1890, No. 42-44) has demonstrated rather clearly that at
the time of the conquest a sort of a constitution in marks (called
curiously enough marca), with a periodical allotment of arable soil, and
consequently individual tillage, was in existence.
At any rate, the patriarchal household community with collective tillage
and ownership of land now assumes an entirely different meaning than
heretofore. We can no longer doubt that it played an important role
among the civilized and some other nations of the old world in the
transition from the maternal to the single family. Later on we shall
return to Kovaleski's further conclusion that it was also the stage of
transition from which developed the village or mark community with
individual tillage and first periodical, then permanent allotment of
arable and pasture lands.
In regard to the family life within these household communities it must
be remarked that at least in Russia the master of the house has the
reputation of strongly abusing his position against the younger women of
the community, especially his daughters-in-law, and of transforming them
into a harem for himself. Russian popular songs are very eloquent on this point.
Before taking up monogamy, which rapidly developed after the downfall of
maternal law, let me say a few words about polygamy and polyandry. Both
forms of the family can only be exceptions, historical products of
luxury so to speak, unless they could be found side by side in the same
country, which is apparently not the case. As the men excluded from
polygamy cannot find consolation in the women left over by polyandry,
the number of men and women being hitherto approximately equal without
regard to social institutions, it becomes of itself impossible to confer
on any one of these two forms the distinction of general preference.
Indeed, the polygamy of one man was evidently the product of slavery,
confined to certain exceptional positions. In the Semitic patriarchal
family, only the patriarch himself, or at best a few of his sons,
practice polygamy, the others must be satisfied with one wife. This is
the case to-day in the whole Orient. Polygamy is a privilege of the
wealthy and distinguished, and is mainly realized by purchase of female
slaves. The mass of the people live in monogamy. Polyandry in India and
Thibet is likewise an exception. Its surely not uninteresting origin
from group marriage requires still closer investigation. In its practice
it seems, by the way, much more tolerant than the jealous Harem
establishment of the Mohammedans. At least among the Nairs of India,
three, four or more men have indeed one woman in common; but every one
of them may have a second woman in common with three or more other men;
and in the same way a third, fourth, etc. It is strange that McLennan
did not discover the new class of "club marriage" in these marital
clubs, in several of which one may be a member and which he himself
describes. This marriage club business is, however, by no means actual
polyandry. It is on the contrary, as Giraud-Teulon already remarks, a
specialized form of group marriage. The men live in polygamy, the women
in polyandry.
It develops from the pairing family, as we have already shown, during
the time of transition from the middle to the higher stage of barbarism.
Its final victory is one of the signs of beginning civilization. It is
founded on male supremacy for the pronounced purpose of breeding
children of indisputable paternal lineage. The latter is required,
because these children shall later on inherit the fortune of their
father. The monogamous family is distinguished from the pairing family
by the far greater durability of wedlock, which can no longer be
dissolved at the pleasure of either party. As a rule, it is only the man
who can still dissolve it and cast off his wife. The privilege of
conjugal faithlessness remains sanctioned for men at least by custom
(the Code Napoleon concedes it directly to them, as long as they do not
bring their concubines into the houses of their wives). This privilege
is more and more enjoyed with the increasing development of society. If
the woman remembers the ancient sexual practices and attempts to revive
them, she is punished more severely than ever.
The whole severity of this new form of the family confronts us among the
Greeks. While, as Marx observes, the position of the female gods in
mythology shows an earlier period, when women still occupied a freer
and more respected plane, we find woman already degraded by the
supremacy of man and the competition of slaves during the time of the
heroes. Read in the Odysseia how Telemachos reproves and silences his
mother. The captured young women, according to Homer, are delivered to
the sensual lust of the victors. The leaders in the order of their rank
select the most beautiful captives. The whole Iliad notoriously revolves
around the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon about such a captured
woman. In mentioning any hero of importance, the captured girl sharing
his tent and bed is never omitted. These girls are also taken into the
hero's home country and his house, as Kassandra by Agamemnon in
Aeschylos. Boys born by these female slaves receive a small share of the
paternal heirloom and are regarded as free men. Teukros is such an
illegitimate son and may use his father's name. The wife is expected to
put up with everything, while herself remaining chaste and faithful.
Although the Greek woman of heroic times is more highly respected than
she of the civilized period, still she is for her husband only the
mother of his legal heirs, his first housekeeper and the superintendent
of the female slaves, whom he can and does make his concubines at will.
It is this practice of slavery by the side of monogamy, the existence of
young and beautiful female slaves belonging without any restriction to
their master, which from the very beginning gives to monogamy the
specific character of being monogamy for women only, but not for men.
And this character remains to this day.
For the Greeks of later times we must make a distinction between Dorians
and Ionians. The former, with Sparta as their classic example, have in
many respects still more antiquated marriage customs than even Homer
illustrates. In Sparta existed a form of the pairing family modified by
the contemporaneous ideas of the state and still recalling group
marriage in many ways. Sterile marriages were dissolved. King
Anaxandridas (about 650 before Christ) took another wife besides his
childless one and kept two households. About the same time King Ariston
added another wife to two childless ones, one of which he dismissed.
Furthermore, several brothers could have one wife in common; a friend
who liked his friend's wife better than his own could share her with
him, and it was not considered indecent to place a wife at the disposal
of a sturdy "stallion," as Bismarck would have said, even though he
might not be a citizen. A certain passage in Plutarch, where a Spartan
matron refers a lover, who persists in making offers to her, to her
husband, seems to indicate—according to Schoemann—even a still greater
sexual freedom. Also adultery, faithlessness of a wife behind her
husband's back, was unheard of. On the other hand, domestic slavery in
Sparta, at least during the best time, was unknown, and the serf Helots
lived on separate country seats. Hence there was less temptation for a
Spartan to hold intercourse with other women. As was to be expected
under such circumstances, the women of Sparta occupied a more highly
respected place than those of other Greeks. Spartan women and the
Athenian hetaerae were the only Greek women of whom the ancients speak
respectfully and whose remarks they considered worthy of notice.
Quite a different condition among Ionians, whose representative is
Athens. The girls learned only to spin, weave and sew, at the most a
little reading and writing. They were practically shut in and had only
the company of other women.
The women's room formed a separate part of the house, on the upper floor
or in a rear building, where men, especially strangers, did not easily
enter and whither the women retreated when male visitors came. The
women did not leave the house without being accompanied by a female
slave. At home they were strictly guarded. Aristophanes speaks of
Molossian dogs that were kept to frighten off adulterers. And at least
in the Asiatic towns, eunuchs were kept for guarding women. Even at
Herodotus' time these eunuchs were manufactured for the trade, and
according to Wachsmuth not for barbarians alone. By Euripides woman is
designated as "oikurema," a neuter signifying an object for
housekeeping, and beside the business of breeding children she served to
the Athenian for nothing but his chief house maid. The man had his
gymnastic exercises, his public meetings, from which the women were
excluded. Besides, the man very often had female slaves at his disposal,
and during the most flourishing time of Athens an extensive prostitution
which was at least patronized by the state. It was precisely on the
basis of this prostitution that the unique type of Ionic women
developed; the hetaerae. They rose by esprit and artistic taste as far
above the general level of antique womanhood as the Spartan women by
their character. But that it was necessary to become a hetaera before
one could be a woman, constitutes the severest denunciation of the Athenian family.
The Athenian family became in the course of time the model after which
not only the rest of the Ionians, but gradually all the Greeks at home
and abroad molded their domestic relations. Nevertheless, in spite of
all seclusion and watching, the Grecian ladies found sufficient
opportunity for deceiving their husbands. The latter who would have been
ashamed of betraying any love for their wives, found recreation in all
kinds of love affairs with hetaerae. But the degradation of the women
was avenged in the men and degraded them also, until they sank into the
abomination of boy-love. They degraded their gods and themselves by the myth of Ganymedes.
Such was the origin of monogamy, as far as we may trace it in the most
civilized and most highly developed nation of antiquity. It was by no
means a fruit of individual sex-love and had nothing to do with the
latter, for the marriages remained as conventional as ever. Monogamy was
the first form of the family not founded on natural, but on economic
conditions, viz.: the victory of private property over primitive and
natural collectivism. Supremacy of the man in the family and generation
of children that could be his offspring alone and were destined to be
the heirs of his wealth—these were openly avowed by the Greeks to be
the sole objects of monogamy. For the rest it was a burden to them, a
duty to the gods, the state and their own ancestors, a duty to be
fulfilled and no more. In Athens the law enforced not only the marriage,
but also the fulfillment of a minimum of the so-called matrimonial
duties on the man's part.
Monogamy, then, does by no means enter history as a reconciliation of
man and wife and still less as the highest form of marriage. On the
contrary, it enters as the subjugation of one sex by the other, as the
proclamation of an antagonism between the sexes unknown in all preceding
history. In an old unpublished manuscript written by Marx and myself in
1846, I find the following passage: "The first division of labor is that
of man and wife in breeding children." And to-day I may add: The first
class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of
the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy, and the first class
oppression with that of the female by the male sex. Monogamy was a great
historical progress. But by the side of slavery and private property it
marks at the same time that epoch which, reaching down to our days,
takes with all progress also a step backwards, relatively speaking, and
develops the welfare and advancement of one by the woe and submission of
the other. It is the cellular form of civilized society which enables us
to study the nature of its now fully developed contrasts and contradictions.
The old relative freedom of sexual intercourse by no means disappeared
with the victory of the pairing or even of the monogamous family. "The
old conjugal system, now reduced to narrower limits by the gradual
disappearance of the punaluan groups, still environed the advancing
family, which it was to follow to the verge of civilization.... It
finally disappeared in the new form of hetaerism, which still follows
mankind in civilization as a dark shadow upon the family."[23]
By hetaerism Morgan designates sexual intercourse of men with unmarried
women outside of the monogamous family, flourishing, as is well known,
during the whole period of civilization in many different forms and
tending more and more to open prostitution. This hetaerism is directly
derived from group marriage, from the sacrificial surrender of women for
the purpose of obtaining the right to chastity. The surrender for money
was at first a religious act; it took place in the temple of the goddess
of love and the money flowed originally into the treasury of the temple.
The hierodulae of Anaitis in Armenia, of Aphrodite in Corinth and the
religious dancing girls of India attached to the temples, the so-called
bajaderes (derived from the Portuguese "bailadera," dancing girl), were
the first prostitutes. The surrender, originally the duty of every
woman, was later on practiced by these priestesses alone in
representation of all others. Among other nations, hetaerism is derived
from the sexual freedom permitted to girls before marriage—also a
survival of the group marriage, only transmitted by another route. With
the rise of different property relations, in the higher stage of
barbarism, wage labor appears sporadically by the side of slavery, and
at the same time its unavoidable companion, professional prostitution of
free women by the side of the forced surrender of female slaves. It is
the heirloom bequeathed by group marriage to civilization, a gift as
ambiguous as everything else produced by ambiguous, double-faced,
schismatic and contradictory civilization. Here monogamy, there
hetaerism and its most extreme form, prostitution. Hetaerism is as much
a social institution as all others. It continues the old sexual
freedom—for the benefit of the men. In reality not only permitted, but
also assiduously practised by the ruling class, it is denounced only
nominally. Still in practice this denunciation strikes by no means the
men who indulge in it, but only the women. These are ostracised and cast
out by society, in order to proclaim once more the fundamental law of
unconditional male supremacy over the female sex.
However, a second contradiction is thereby developed within monogamy
itself. By the side of the husband, who is making his life pleasant by
hetaerism, stands the neglected wife. And you cannot have one side of
the contradiction without the other, just as you cannot have the whole
apple after eating half of it. Nevertheless this seems to have been the
idea of the men, until their wives taught them a lesson. Monogamy
introduces two permanent social characters that were formerly unknown:
the standing lover of the wife and the cuckold. The men had gained the
victory over the women, but the vanquished magnanimously provided the
coronation. In addition to monogamy and hetaerism, adultery became an
unavoidable social institution—denounced, severely punished, but
irrepressible. The certainty of paternal parentage rested as of old on
moral conviction at best, and in order to solve the unreconcilable
contradiction, the code Napoléon decreed in its article 312: "L'enfant
conçu pendant le mariage a pour père le mari;" the child conceived
during marriage has for its father—the husband. This is the last result
of three thousand years of monogamy.
Thus we have in the monogamous family, at least in those cases that
remain true to historical development and clearly express the conflict
between man and wife created by the exclusive supremacy of men, a
miniature picture of the contrasts and contradictions of society at
large. Split by class-differences since the beginning of civilization,
society has been unable to reconcile and overcome these antitheses. Of
course, I am referring here only to those cases of monogamy, where
matrimonial life actually remains in accord with the original character
of the whole institution, but where the wife revolts against the rule of
the man. Nobody knows better than your German philistine that not all
marriages follow such a course. He does not understand how to maintain
the control of his own home any better than that of the State, and his
wife is, therefore, fully entitled to wearing the trousers, which he
does not deserve. But he thinks himself far superior to his French
companion in misery, who more frequently fares far worse.
The monogamous family, by the way, did not everywhere and always appear
in the classic severe form it had among the Greeks. Among the Romans,
who as future conquerors of the world had a sharper although less
refined eye than the Greeks, the women were freer and more respected. A
Roman believed that the conjugal faith of his wife was sufficiently
safeguarded by his power over her life and death. Moreover, the women
could voluntarily dissolve the marriage as well as the men. But the
highest progress in the development of monogamy was doubtless due to the
entrance of the Germans into history, probably because on account of
their poverty their monogamy had not yet fully outgrown the pairing
family. Three facts mentioned by Tacitus favor this conclusion: In the
first place, although marriage was held very sacred—"they are satisfied
with one wife, the women are protected by chastity"—still polygamy was
in use among the distinguished and the leaders of the tribes, as was the
case in the pairing families of the American Indians. Secondly, the
transition from maternal to paternal law could have taken place only a
short while before, because the mother's brother—the next male relative
in the gens by maternal law—was still considered almost a closer
relative than the natural father, also in accordance with the standpoint
of the American Indians. The latter furnished to Marx, according to his
own testimony, the key to the comprehension of German primeval history.
And thirdly, the German women were highly respected and also influenced
public affairs, a fact directly opposed to monogamic male supremacy. In
all these things the Germans almost harmonize with the Spartans, who, as
we saw, also had not fully overcome the pairing family. Hence in this
respect an entirely new element succeeded to the world's supremacy with
the Germans. The new monogamy now developing the ruins of the Roman
world from the mixture of nations endowed male rule with a milder form
and accorded to women a position that was at least outwardly far more
respected and free than classical antiquity ever knew. Not until now
was there a possibility of developing from monogamy—in it, by the side
of it or against it, as the case might be—the highest ethical progress
we owe to it: the modern individual sexlove, unknown to all previous ages.
This progress doubtless arose from the fact that the Germans still lived
in the pairing family and inoculated monogamy as far as possible with
the position of women corresponding to the former. It was in no way due
to the legendary and wonderfully pure natural qualities of the Germans.
These qualities were limited to the simple fact that the pairing family
indeed does not create the marked moral contrasts of monogamy. On the
contrary, the Germans, especially those who wandered southeast among the
nomadic nations of the Black Sea, had greatly degenerated morally.
Beside the equestrian tricks of the inhabitants of the steppe they had
also acquired some very unnatural vices. This is expressly confirmed of
the Thaifali by Ammianus and of the Heruli by Prokop.
Although monogamy was the only one of all known forms of the family in
which modern sexlove could develop, this does not imply that it
developed exclusively or even principally as mutual love of man and
wife. The very nature of strict monogamy under man's rule excluded this.
Among all historically active, i. e., ruling, classes matrimony remained
what it had been since the days of the pairing family—a conventional
matter arranged by the parents. And the first historical form of sexlove
as a passion, as an attribute of every human being (at least of the
ruling classes), the specific character of the highest form of the
sexual impulse, this first form, the love of the knights in the middle
ages, was by no means matrimonial love, but quite the contrary. In its
classic form, among the Provençals, it heads with full sails for
adultery and their poets extol the latter. The flower of Provençal love
poetry, the Albas, describe in glowing colors how the knight sleeps with
his adored—the wife of another—while the watchman outside calls him at
the first faint glow of the morning (alba) and enables him to escape
unnoticed. The poems culminate in the parting scene. Likewise the
Frenchmen of the north and also the honest Germans adopted this style of
poetry and the manner of knightly love corresponding to it. Old Wolfram
von Eschenbach has left us three wonderful "day songs" treating this
same questionable subject, and I like them better than his three heroic epics.
Civil matrimony in our day is of two kinds. In Catholic countries, the
parents provide a fitting spouse for their son as of old, and the
natural consequence is the full development of the contradictions
inherent to monogamy: voluptuous hetaerism on the man's part, voluptuous
adultery of the woman. Probably the Catholic church has abolished
divorce for the simple reason that it had come to the conclusion, there
was as little help for adultery as for death. In Protestant countries,
again, it is the custom to give the bourgeois son more or less liberty
in choosing his mate. Hence a certain degree of love may be at the
bottom of such a marriage and for the sake of propriety this is always
assumed, quite in keeping with Protestant hypocrisy. In this case
hetaerism is carried on less strenuously and adultery on the part of the
woman is not so frequent. But as human beings remain under any form of
marriage what they were before marrying, and as the citizens of
Protestant countries are mostly philistines, this Protestant monogamy on
the average of the best cases confines itself to the community of a
leaden ennui, labeled wedded bliss. The best mirror of these two species
of marriage is the novel, the French novel for the Catholic, the German
novel for the Protestant brand. In both of these novels they "get one
another:" in the German novel the man gets the girl, in the French novel
the husband gets the horns. It does not always go without saying which
of the two deserves the most pity. For this reason the tediousness of
the German novels is abhorred as much by the French bourgeois as the
"immorality" of the French novels by the German philistine. Of late,
since Berlin became cosmopolitan, the German novel begins to treat
somewhat timidly of the hetaerism and adultery that a long time ago
became familiar features of that city.
In both cases the marriage is influenced by the class environment of the
participants, and in this respect it always remains conventional. This
conventionalism often enough results in the most pronounced
prostitution—sometimes of both parties, more commonly of the woman. She
is distinguished from a courtisane only in that she does not offer her
body for money by the hour like a commodity, but sells it into slavery
for once and all. Fourier's words hold good with respect to all
conventional marriages: "As in grammar two negatives make one
affirmative, so in matrimonial ethics, two prostitutions are considered
as one virtue." Sexual love in man's relation to woman becomes and can
become the rule among the oppressed classes alone, among the
proletarians of our day—no matter whether this relation is officially sanctioned or not.
Here all the fundamental conditions of classic monogamy have been
abolished. Here all property is missing and it was precisely for the
protection and inheritance of this that monogamy and man rule were
established. Hence all incentive to make this rule felt is wanting here.
More still, the funds are missing. Civil law protecting male rule
applies only to the possessing classes and their intercourse with
proletarians. Law is expensive and therefore the poverty of the laborer
makes it meaningless for his relation to his wife. Entirely different
personal and social conditions decide in this case. And finally, since
the great industries have removed women from the home to the labor
market and to the factory, the last remnant of man rule in the
proletarian home has lost its ground—except, perhaps, a part of the
brutality against women that has become general since the advent of
monogamy. Thus the family of the proletarian is no longer strictly
monogamous, even with all the most passionate love and the most
unalterable loyalty of both parties, and in spite of any possible
clerical or secular sanction. Consequently the eternal companions of
monogamy, hetaerism and adultery, play an almost insignificant role
here. The woman has practically regained the right of separation, and if
a couple cannot agree, they rather separate. In short, the proletarian
marriage is monogamous in the etymological sense of the word, but by no
means in a historical sense.
True, our jurists hold that the progress of legislation continually
lessens all cause of complaint for women. The modern systems of civil
law recognize, first that marriage, in order to be legal, must be a
contract based on voluntary consent of both parties, and secondly that
during marriage the relations of both parties shall be founded on equal
rights and duties. These two demands logically enforced will, so they
claim, give to women everything they could possibly ask.
This genuinely juridical argumentation is exactly the same as that used
by the radical republican bourgeois to cut short and dismiss the
proletarian. The labor contract is said to be voluntarily made by both
parties. But it is considered as voluntary when the law places both
parties on equal terms on paper. The power conferred on one party by the
division of classes, the pressure thereby exerted on the other party,
the actual economic relation of the two—all this does not concern the
law. Again, during the term of the contract both parties are held to
have equal rights, unless one has expressly renounced his right. That
the economic situation forces the laborer to give up even the last
semblance of equality, that is not the fault of the law.
In regard to marriage, even the most advanced law is completely
satisfied after both parties have formally declared their willingness.
What passes behind the juridical scenes where the actual process of
living is going on, and how this willingness is brought about, that
cannot be the business of the law and the jurist. Yet the simplest legal
comparison should show to the jurist what this willingness really means.
In those countries where a legitimate portion of the parental wealth is
assured to children and where these cannot be disinherited—in Germany,
in countries with French law, etc.—the children are bound to secure the
consent of their parents for marrying. In countries with English law,
where the consent of the parents is by no means a legal qualification of
marriage, the parents have full liberty to bequeath their wealth to
anyone and may disinherit their children at will. Hence it is clear that
among classes having any property to bequeath the freedom to marry is
not a particle greater in England and America than in France and Germany.
The legal equality of man and woman in marriage is by no means better
founded. Their legal inequality inherited from earlier stages of society
is not the cause, but the effect of the economic oppression of women. In
the ancient communistic household comprising many married couples and
their children, the administration of the household entrusted to women
was just as much a public function, a socially necessary industry, as
the procuring of food by men. In the patriarchal and still more in the
monogamous family this was changed. The administration of the household
lost its public character. It was no longer a concern of society. It
became a private service. The woman became the first servant of the
house, excluded from participation in social production. Only by the
great industries of our time the access to social production was again
opened for women—for proletarian women alone, however. This is done in
such a manner that they remain excluded from public production and
cannot earn anything, if they fulfill their duties in the private
service of the family; or that they are unable to attend to their family
duties, if they wish to participate in public industries and earn a
living independently. As in the factory, so women are situated in all
business departments up to the medical and legal professions. The modern
monogamous family is founded on the open or disguised domestic slavery
of women, and modern society is a mass composed of molecules in the form
of monogamous families. In the great majority of cases the man has to
earn a living and to support his family, at least among the possessing
classes. He thereby obtains a superior position that has no need of any
legal special privilege. In the family, he is the bourgeois, the woman
represents the proletariat. In the industrial world, however, the
specific character of the economic oppression weighing on the
proletariat appears in its sharpest outlines only after all special
privileges of the capitalist class are abolished and the full legal
equality of both classes is established. A democratic republic does not
abolish the distinction between the two classes. On the contrary, it
offers the battleground on which this distinction can be fought out.
Likewise the peculiar character of man's rule over woman in the modern
family, the necessity and the manner of accomplishing the real social
equality of the two, will appear in broad daylight only then, when both
of them will enjoy complete legal equality. It will then be seen that
the emancipation of women is primarily dependent on the re-introduction
of the whole female sex into the public industries. To accomplish this,
the monogamous family must cease to be the industrial unit of society.
* * * * *
We have, then, three main forms of the family, corresponding in general
to the three main stages of human development. For savagery group
marriage, for barbarism the pairing family, for civilization monogamy
supplemented by adultery and prostitution. Between the pairing family
and monogamy, in the higher stage of barbarism, the rule of men over
female slaves and polygamy is inserted.
As we proved by our whole argument, the progress visible in this chain
of phenomena is connected with the peculiarity of more and more
curtailing the sexual freedom of the group marriage for women, but not
for men. And group marriage is actually practised by men to this day.
What is considered a crime for women and entails grave legal and social
consequences for them, is considered honorable for men or in the worst
case a slight moral blemish born with pleasure. But the more traditional
hetaerism is changed in our day by capitalistic production and conforms
to it, the more hetaerism is transformed into undisguised prostitution,
the more demoralizing are its effects. And it demoralizes men far more
than women. Prostitution does not degrade the whole female sex, but only
the luckless women that become its victims, and even those not to the
extent generally assumed. But it degrades the character of the entire
male world. Especially a long engagement is in nine cases out of ten a
perfect training school of adultery.
We are now approaching a social revolution, in which the old economic
foundations of monogamy will disappear just as surely as those of its
complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose through the concentration of
considerable wealth in one hand—a man's hand—and from the endeavor to
bequeath this wealth to the children of this man to the exclusion of all
others. This necessitated monogamy on the woman's, but not on the man's
part. Hence this monogamy of women in no way hindered open or secret
polygamy of men. Now, the impending social revolution will reduce this
whole care of inheritance to a minimum by changing at least the
overwhelming part of permanent and inheritable wealth—the means of
production—into social property. Since monogamy was caused by economic
conditions, will it disappear when these causes are abolished?
One might reply, not without reason: not only will it not disappear, but
it will rather be perfectly realized. For with the transformation of the
means of production into collective property, wage labor will also
disappear, and with it the proletariat and the necessity for a certain,
statistically ascertainable number of women to surrender for money.
Prostitution disappears and monogamy, instead of going out of existence,
at last becomes a reality—for men also.
At all events, the situation will be very much changed for men. But also
that of women, and of all women, will be considerably altered. With the
transformation of the means of production into collective property the
monogamous family ceases to be the economic unit of society. The private
household changes to a social industry. The care and education of
children becomes a public matter. Society cares equally well for all
children, legal or illegal. This removes the care about the
"consequences" which now forms the essential social factor—moral and
economic—hindering a girl to surrender unconditionally to the beloved
man. Will not this be sufficient cause for a gradual rise of a more
unconventional intercourse of the sexes and a more lenient public
opinion regarding virgin honor and female shame? And finally, did we not
see that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution, though
antitheses, are inseparable and poles of the same social condition? Can
prostitution disappear without engulfing at the same time monogamy?
Here a new element becomes active, an element which at best existed only
in the germ at the time when monogamy developed: individual sexlove.
Before the middle ages we cannot speak of individual sexlove. It goes
without saying that personal beauty, intimate intercourse, harmony of
inclinations, etc., awakened a longing for sexual intercourse in persons
of different sex, and that it was not absolutely immaterial to men and
women, with whom they entered into such most intimate intercourse. But
from such a relation to our sexlove there is a long way yet. All through
antiquity marriages were arranged for the participants by the parents,
and the former quietly submitted. What little matrimonial love was known
to antiquity was not subjective inclination, but objective duty; not
cause, but corollary of marriage. Love affairs in a modern sense
occurred in classical times only outside of official society. The
shepherds whose happiness and woe in love is sung by Theocritos and
Moschus, such as Daphnis and Chloë of Longos, all these were slaves who
had no share in the state and in the daily sphere of the free citizen.
Outside of slave circles we find love affairs only as products of
disintegration of the sinking old world. Their objects are women who
also are standing outside of official society, hetaerae that are either
foreigners or liberated slaves: in Athens since the beginning of its
decline, in Rome at the time of the emperors. If love affairs really
occurred between free male and female citizens, it was only in the form
of adultery. And to the classical love poet of antiquity, the old
Anakreon, sexlove in our sense was so immaterial, that he did not even
care a fig for the sex of the beloved being.
Our sexlove is essentially different from the simple sexual craving, the
Eros, of the ancients. In the first place it presupposes mutual love. In
this respect woman is the equal of man, while in the antique Eros her
permission is by no means always asked. In the second place our sexlove
has such a degree of intensity and duration that in the eyes of both
parties lack of possession and separation appear as a great, if not the
greatest, calamity. In order to possess one another they play for high
stakes, even to the point of risking their lives, a thing heard of only
in adultery during the classical age. And finally a new moral standard
is introduced for judging sexual intercourse. We not only ask: "Was it
legal or illegal?" but also: "Was it caused by mutual love or not?" Of
course, this new standard meets with no better fate in feudal or
bourgeois practice than all other moral standards—it is simply ignored.
But neither does it fare worse. It is recognized just as much as the
others—in theory, on paper. And that is all we can expect at present.
Where antiquity left off with its attempts at sexual love, there the
middle ages resumed the thread: with adultery. We have already described
the love of the knights that invented the day songs. From this love
endeavoring to break through the bonds of marriage to the love destined
to found marriage, there is a long distance which was never fully
traversed by the knights. Even in passing on from the frivolous Romanic
race to the virtuous Germans, we find in the Nibelungen song Kriemhild,
who secretly is no less in love with Siegfried than he with her, meekly
replying to Gunther's announcement that he has pledged her in troth to a
certain knight whom he does not name: "You need not beg for my consent;
as you will demand, so I shall ever be; whomever you, sir, will select
for my husband, I shall willingly take in troth." It does not enter her
head at all that her love could find any consideration. Gunther asks for
Brunhild, Etzel for Kriemhild without ever having seen one another. The
same is true of the suit of Gutrun Sigebant of Ireland for the Norwegian
Ute and of Hetel of Hegelingen for Hilda of Ireland. When Siegfried of
Morland, Hartmut of Oranien and Herwig of Sealand court Gutrun, then it
happens for the first time that the lady voluntarily decides, favoring
the last named knight. As a rule the bride of the young prince is
selected by his parents. Only when the latter are no longer alive, he
chooses his own bride with the advice of the great feudal lords who in
all cases of this kind have a decisive voice. Nor could it be otherwise.
For the knight and the baron as well as for the ruler of the realm
himself, marriage is a political act, an opportunity for increasing
their power by new federations. The interest of the house must decide,
not the arbitrary inclination of the individual. How could love have a
chance to decide the question of marriage in the last instance under such conditions?
The same held good for the bourgeois of the medieval towns, the members
of the guilds. Precisely the privileges protecting them, the clauses and
restrictions of the guild charters, the artificial lines of division
separating them legally, here from the other guilds, there from their
journeymen and apprentices, drew a sufficiently narrow circle for the
selection of a fitting bourgeois spouse. Under such a complicated
system, the question of fitness was unconditionally decided, not by
individual inclination, but by family interests.
In the overwhelming majority of cases the marriage contract thus
remained to the end of the middle ages what it had been from the outset:
a matter that was not decided by the parties most interested. In the
beginning one was already married from his birth—married to a whole
group of the other sex. In the later forms of group marriage, a similar
relation was probably maintained, only under a continual narrowing of
the group. In the pairing family it is the rule for mothers to exchange
mutual pledges for the marriage of their children. Here also the main
consideration is given to new ties of relationship that will strengthen
the position of the young couple in the gens and the tribe. And when
with the preponderance of private property over collective property and
with the interest for inheritance paternal law and monogamy assumed the
supremacy, then marriage became still more dependent on economic
considerations. The form of purchase marriage disappears, but the
essence of the transaction is more and more intensified, so that not
only the woman, but also the man have a fixed price—not according to
his qualities, but to his wealth. That mutual fondness of the marrying
parties should be the one factor dominating all others had always been
unheard of in the practice of the ruling classes. Such a thing occurred
at best in romances or—among the oppressed classes that were not counted.
This was the situation encountered by capitalist production when it
began to prepare, since the epoch of geographical discoveries, for the
conquest of the world by international trade and manufacture. One would
think that this mode of making the marriage contract would have been
extremely acceptable to capitalism, and it was. And yet—the irony of
fate is inexplicable—capitalist production had to make the decisive
breach through this mode. By changing all things into commodities, it
dissolved all inherited and traditional relations and replaced time
hallowed custom and historical right by purchase and sale, by the "free
contract." And the English jurist, H. S. Maine, thought he had made a
stupendous discovery by saying that our whole progress over former
epochs consisted in arriving from status to contract, from inherited to
voluntarily contracted conditions. So far as this is correct, it had
already been mentioned in the Communist Manifesto.
But in order to make contracts, people must have full freedom over their
persons, actions and possessions. They must furthermore be on terms of
mutual equality. The creation of these "free" and "equal" people was
precisely one of the main functions of capitalistic production. What
though this was done at first in a half-conscious way and, moreover, in
a religious disguise? Since the Lutheran and Calvinist reformation the
thesis was accepted that a human being is fully responsible for his
actions only then, when these actions were due to full freedom of will.
And it was held to be a moral duty to resist any compulsion for an
immoral action. How did this agree with the prevailing practice of
match-making? Marriage according to bourgeois conception was a contract,
a legal business affair, and the most important one at that, because it
decided the weal and woe of body and spirit of two beings for life. At
that time the agreement was formally voluntary; without the consent of
the contracting parties nothing could be done. But it was only too well
known how this consent was obtained and who were really the contracting
parties. If, however, perfect freedom of decision is demanded for all
other contracts, why not for this one? Did not the two young people who
were to be coupled together have the right freely to dispose of
themselves, of their bodies and the organs of these? Had not sexual love
become the custom through the knights and was not, in opposition to
knightly adultery, the love of married couples its proper bourgeois
form? And if it was the duty of married couples to love one another, was
it not just as much the duty of lovers to marry each other and nobody
else? Stood not the right of lovers higher than the right of parents,
relatives and other customary marriage brokers and matrimonial agents?
If the right of free personal investigation made its way unchecked into
the church and religion, how could it bear with the insupportable claims
of the older generation on the body, soul, property, happiness and
misfortune of the younger generation?
These questions had to be raised at a time when all the old ties of
society were loosened and all traditional conceptions tottering. The
size of the world had increased tenfold at a bound. Instead of one
quadrant of one hemisphere, the whole globe now spread before the eyes
of West Europeans who hastened to take possession of the other seven
quadrants. And the thousand-year-old barriers of conventional medieval
thought fell like the old narrow obstacles to marriage. An infinitely
wider horizon opened out before the outer and inner eyes of humanity.
What mattered the well-meaning propriety, what the honorable privilege
of the guild overcome through generations to the young man tempted by
the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Potosi?
It was the knight errant time of the bourgeoisie. It had its own
romances and love dreams, but on a bourgeois footing and, in the last
instance, with bourgeois aims.
Thus it came about that the rising bourgeoisie more and more recognized
the freedom of contracting in marriage and carried it through in the
manner described above, especially in Protestant countries, where
existing institutions were most strongly shaken. Marriage remained class
marriage, but within the class a certain freedom of choice was accorded
to the contracting parties. And on paper, in moral theory as in poetical
description, nothing was more unalterably established than the idea that
every marriage was immoral unless founded on mutual sex-love and
perfectly free agreement of husband and wife. In short, the love match
was proclaimed as a human right, not only as droit de l'homme—man's
right—but also for once as droit de femme—woman's right.
However, this human right differed from all other so-called human rights
in one respect. While in practice other rights remained the privileges
of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, and were directly or indirectly
curtailed for proletarians, the irony of history once more asserted
itself in this case. The ruling class remains subject to well-known
economic influences and, therefore, shows marriage by free selection
only in exceptional cases. But among the oppressed class, love matches
are the rule, as we have seen.
Hence the full freedom of marriage can become general only after all
minor economic considerations, that still exert such a powerful
influence on the choice of a mate for life, have been removed by the
abolition of capitalistic production and of the property relations
created by it. Then no other motive will remain but mutual fondness.
Since sexlove is exclusive by its very nature—although this
exclusiveness is at present realized for women alone—marriage founded
on sexlove must be monogamous. We have seen that Bachofen was perfectly
right in regarding the progress from group marriage to monogamy mainly
as the work of women. Only the advance from the pairing family to
monogamy must be charged to the account of men. This advance implied,
historically, a deterioration in the position of women and a greater
opportunity for men to be faithless. Remove the economic considerations
that now force women to submit to the customary disloyalty of men, and
you will place women on a equal footing with men. All present
experiences prove that this will tend much more strongly to make men
truly monogamous, than to make women polyandrous.
However, those peculiarities that were stamped upon the face of monogamy
by its rise through property relations, will decidedly vanish, namely
the supremacy of men and the indissolubility of marriage. The supremacy
of man in marriage is simply the consequence of his economic superiority
and will fall with the abolition of the latter.
The indissolubility of marriage is partly the consequence of economic
conditions, under which monogamy arose, partly tradition from the time
where the connection between this economic situation and monogamy, not
yet clearly understood, was carried to extremes by religion. To-day, it
has been perforated a thousand times. If marriage founded on love is
alone moral, then it follows that marriage is moral only as long as love
lasts. The duration of an attack of individual sexlove varies
considerably according to individual disposition, especially in men. A
positive cessation of fondness or its replacement by a new passionate
love makes a separation a blessing for both parties and for society.
But humanity will be spared the useless wading through the mire of a divorce case.
What we may anticipate about the adjustment of sexual relations after
the impending downfall of capitalist production is mainly of a negative
nature and mostly confined to elements that will disappear. But what
will be added? That will be decided after a new generation has come to
maturity: a race of men who never in their lives have had any occasion
for buying with money or other economic means of power the surrender of
a woman; a race of women who have never had any occasion for
surrendering to any man for any other reason but love, or for refusing
to surrender to their lover from fear of economic consequences. Once
such people are in the world, they will not give a moment's thought to
what we to-day believe should be their course. They will follow their
own practice and fashion their own public opinion about the individual
practice of every person—only this and nothing more.
But let us return to Morgan from whom we moved away a considerable
distance. The historical investigation of social institutions developed
during the period of civilization exceeds the limits of his book. Hence
the vicissitudes of monogamy during this epoch occupy him very briefly.
He also sees in the further development of the monogamous family a
progress, an approach to perfect equality of the sexes, without
considering this aim fully realized. But he says: "When the fact is
accepted that the family has passed through four successive forms, and
is now in a fifth, the question at once arises whether this form can be
permanent in the future. The only answer that can be given is that it
must advance as society advances, and change as society changes, even as
it has done in the past. It is the creature of the social system, and
will reflect its culture. As the monogamian family has improved greatly
since the commencement of civilization, and very sensibly in modern
times, it is at least supposable that it is capable of still farther
improvement until the equality of the sexes is attained. Should the
monogamian family in the distant future fail to answer the requirements
of society, assuming the continuous progress of civilization, it is
impossible to predict the nature of its successor."
