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 Kovalesky'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.
4. THE MONOGAMOUS FAMILY.
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."
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Author's note.
How little Bachofen understood what he had discovered, or rather
guessed, is proved by the term "hetaerism," which he applies to this
primeval stage. Hetaerism designated among the Greeks an intercourse of
men, single or living in monogamy, with unmarried women. It always
presupposes the existence of a well defined form of marriage, outside of
which this intercourse takes place, and includes the possibility of
prostitution. In another sense this word was never used, and I use it in
this sense with Morgan. Bachofen's very important discoveries are
everywhere mystified in the extreme by his idea that the historical
relations of man and wife have their source in the religious conceptions
of a certain period, not in the economic conditions of life.
[8] Translator's note.
The female of the European cuckoo (cuculus canorus) keeps intercourse
with several males in different districts during the same season. Still,
this is far from the human polyandry, in which the men and one women all
live together in the same place, the men mutually tolerating one
another, which male cuckoos do not.
[9] Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage, London, 1891.
[10] Espinas, Des Societes Animales, 1877.
[11] Espinas, l. c., quoted by Giraud-Teulon, Origines du mariage et de
la famille, 1884, p. 518-20.
[12] Author's note.
In the spring of 1882, Marx expressed himself in the
strongest terms on the total misrepresentation of primeval times by
Wagner's Nibelungen text: "Who ever heard of a brother embracing his
sister as a bride?" To these lascivious Wagnerian gods who in truly
modern style are rendering their love quarrels more spicy by a little
incest, Marx replies: "In primeval times the sister was the wife and
that was moral." (To the fourth edition.) A French friend and admirer of
Wagner does not consent to this foot note, and remarks that even in the
Oegisdrecka, the more ancient Edda on which Wagner built, Loki denounces
Freya: "Before the gods you embraced your own brother." This, he says,
proves that marriage between brother and sister was interdicted even
then. But the Oegisdrecka is the expression of a time when the belief in
the old myths was totally shaken; it is a truly Lucian satire on the
gods. If Loki as Mephisto denounces Freya in this manner, then it is
rather a point against Wagner. Loki also says, a few verses further on,
to Niordhr: "With your sister you generated (such) a son" ("vidh systur
thinni gatzu slikan mog"). Niordhr is not an Asa, but a Vana, and says
in the Ynglinga Saga that marriages between brothers and sisters are
sanctioned in Vanaland, which is not the case among the Asas. This would
indicate that the Vanas are older gods than the Asas. At any rate
Niordhr lived on equal terms with the Asas, and the Oegisdrecka is thus
rather a proof that at the time of the origin of the Norwegian mythology
the marriage of brother and sister was not yet repulsive, at least not
to the gods. In trying to excuse Wagner it might be better to quote
Goethe instead of the Edda. This poet commits a similar error in his
ballad of the god and the bajadere in regard to the religious surrender
of women and approaches modern prostitution far too closely.
[13] There is no longer any doubt that the traces of unrestricted sexual
intercourse, which Bachofen alleges to have found--called "incestuous
generation" by him--are traceable to group marriage. If Bachofen
considers those Punaluan marriages "lawless," a man of that period would
look upon most of our present marriages between near and remote cousins
on the father's or mother's side as incestuous, being marriages between
consanguineous relatives.--Marx.
[14] The People of India.
[15] See translator's note, p. 55.
[16] Translator's note.
According to Cunow, Kroki and Kumite are phratries. See "Die
Verwandschaftsorganizationen der Australneger," by Heinrich Cunow.
Stuttgart, Dietz Verlag, 1894.
[17] Translator's note.
Heinrich Cunow has given us the results of his most recent
investigations in his "Verwandschaftsorganisationen der Australneger."
He sums up his studies in these words: "While Morgan and Fison regard
the system of marriage classes as an original organization preceding the
so-called Punaluan family, I have found that the class is indeed older
than the gens, having its origin in the different strata of generations
characteristic of the "consanguine family" of Morgan; but the present
mode of classification in force among Kamilaroi, Kabi, Yuipera, etc.,
cannot have arisen until a much later time, when the gentile institution
had already grown out of the horde. This system of classification does
not represent the first timid steps of evolution; it is not the most
primitive of any known forms of social organization, but an intermediate
form that takes shape together with the gentile society, a stage of
transition to a pure gentile organization. In this stage, the generic
classification in strata of different ages belonging to the so-called
consanguine family runs parallel for a while with the gentile order....
It would have been easy for me to quote the testimony of travelers and
ethnologists in support of the conclusions drawn by me from the forms of
relationship among Australian negroes. But I purposely refrain from
doing this, with a few exceptions, first because I do not wish to write
a general history of the primitive family, and, secondly, because I
consider all references of this kind as very doubtful testimony, unless
they are accompanied by an analysis of the entire organization. We
frequently find analogies to the institutions of a lower stage in a high
stage, and yet they are founded on radically different premises and
causes. The evolution of the Australian aborigines shows that. Among the
Australians of the lower stage, e. g., the hordes are endogamous, among
those of the middle stage they are exogamous, and in the higher stage
they are again endogamous. But while in the one instance the marriage in
the horde is conditioned on the fact that the more remote relatives are
not yet excluded from sexual intercourse, it is founded in the other
case on the difference between local and sexual organization.
Furthermore, the marriage between daughter and father is permitted in
the lower stage, and again in that higher stage, where the class
organization of the Kamilaroi is on the verge of dissolution. But in
both cases the circle of those who are regarded as fathers is entirely
different. The character of an institution can only be perfectly
understood, if we examine its connection with the entire organization,
and, if possible, trace its metamorphoses in the preceding stages....
The characteristic feature of the class system is that by the side of
the gentile order, such as is found among the North American Indians,
there is always another system of four marriage classes for the purpose
of limiting sexual intercourse between certain groups of relatives.
Neither the phratry nor the gens of the Kamilaroi forms a distinct
territorial community. Their members are scattered among different
roving hordes, and they only meet occasionally, e. g., to celebrate a
feast or dance....
The origin of gentile systems out of Punaluan groups has never been
proven, while we see among the Australian negroes that the classes are
clearly and irrefutably in existence among the first traces of
gentilism....
The class system in its original form is a conclusive proof of Morgan's
theory, that the first step in the formation of systems of relationship
consisted in prohibiting sexual intercourse between parents and children
(in a wider sense)....
It has been often disputed that the Punaluan family ever existed outside
of the Sandwich Islands. But the marriage institutions of certain
Australian tribes named by me prove the contrary. The Pirrauru of the
Dieyerie is absolutely identical with the Punalua of the Hawaiians; and
these institutions were not described by travelers who rushed through
the territories of those tribes without knowing their language, but by
men who lived among them for decades and fully mastered their
dialects....
I have shown how far the class system corresponds to the Hawaiian
system. It is and remains a fact, that it contains a long series of
terms that cannot be explained by the relations in the so-called
consanguine family, and the use of which creates confusion, if applied
to this family. But that simply shows that Morgan was mistaken about the
age and present structure of the Hawaiian system. It does not prove that
it could not have grown on the basis assumed by him....
If the opponents of Morgan dispute that the so-called consanguine family
is based on blood kinship, they are right, unless we wish to assign an
exceptional position to the Australian strata of generations. But if
they go further and declare that the subsequent restrictions of
inbreeding and the gentile order have arisen independently of
relationships, they commit a far greater mistake than Morgan. They block
their way to an understanding of subsequent organizations and force
themselves to all sorts of queer assumptions that at once appear as the
fruits of imagination, when compared with the actual institutions of
primitive peoples.
This explanation of the phases of development of family institutions
contradicts present day views on the matter. Since the scientific
investigations of the last decade have demonstrated beyond doubt that
the so-called patriarchal family was preceded by the matriarchal family,
it has become the custom to regard descent by females as a natural
institution belonging to the very first stages of development which is
explained by the modes of existence and thought among savages. Paternity
being a matter of speculation, maternity of actual observation, it is
supposed to follow that descent by females was always recognized. But
the development of the Australian systems of relationship shows that
this is not true, at least not in regard to Australians. The fact cannot
be disputed away, that we find female lineage among all those higher
developed tribes that have progressed to the formation of gentile
organizations, but male lineage among all those that have no gentile
organizations or where these are only in process of formation. Not a
single tribe has been discovered so far, where female lineage was not
combined with gentile organization, and I doubt that any will ever be
found."
[18] The History of Human Marriage, p. 28-29.
[19] Mutterrecht, p. xix.
[20] A Journey in Brazil. Boston and New York, 1886. Page 266.
[21] Bancroft, Native Races, I., 81.
[22] Ibidem, p. 584.
[23] Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 504.