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

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