The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (classic novels .txt) 📕

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