Woman and the Socialist Movement/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY.
PRIMITIVE FORMS OF THE FAMILY.
Marriage and family life have not always been what they are to-day. In fact monogamy is a rather modern institution, and as far as its ideal attainment is concerned, humanity has even now a long way to travel.
When man lived in wild herds sexual intercourse was promiscuous. In the course of development, a form of group marriage and blood relationship was instituted under which all men of one group were the husbands of all the women of another group and vice versa. This system of marriage was one of humanity's great inventions, as by it interbreeding was prevented. This was a most important step in the progress of the race. It improved the health and strength of the tribe and when once established there sprung from it moral concepts, high for that status of development. In these stages of the family, it was a matter of course that descent was traced in the female line.
During primitive communism, a form of pairing family developed. One man and one woman only were husband and wife. Polygamy was of course neither abolished nor forbidden, much less did they have our moral concept about it. However, it was seldom practiced. Food was hard to procure and it was man's bounden duty to provide for the woman with whom he lived, and as man went into the family of his wife, or wives, it was the women who saw to it that he fulfilled this duty. If he utterly failed, he was bluntly ousted from the house. That was the barbaric, plain and unsophisticated method of divorce. The man was then free to pair with another woman and the woman could choose another mate. The children remained in the mother's family and the mother's brother was a nearer relative and owed greater duty to the child than the father himself.
Between the pairing family and the monogamiam intervenes the patriarchal family. This was monogamous in nature and concept, but when the patriarch was rich enough it became polygamous because slavery had arisen and he had the right over his female slaves.
MONOGAMY.
Monogamy arose with the development of private property. It is far from meaning the sole association of one man with one woman, as the word would imply. It simply means the legal recognition of the marriage of one man and one woman. This in turn, means that the children of such a marriage are the only legitimate heirs of the persons involved. Side by side with it grew the two nasty heirlooms of modern civilization—prostitution and adultery. Neither the ancient masters nor the feudal lords recognized the first iota of the moral concept of monogamy. The ancients had a house full of pretty female slaves and their intellectual female associate was not the wife but the hetaera. The knights of the middle ages had the right over their female serfs and their romantic love, so beautiful in song and poetry, steered headlong for prostitution and adultery. Nor does monogamy fare better, from a moral point of view. to-dav, with its crop of divorces and its host of scandals. Many of our leading pillars of society have several living wives and many of our prominent society ladies have ditto husbands. The "affinity" is becoming as well recognized as the Greek hetaera. For the rest, man buys his sexual pleasures from the women whom poverty forces to sell. There is small difference between that and the ancient institutions under which he took the same privilege as his divinely ordained right. The modern way only is more hypocritical, as it is considered shameful and the shame and blame fall upon the woman only.
Historic monogamy is a strictly economic institution. It means nothing more or less than the seclusion of the wife of the economic master, be he slave-owner, feudal lord or modern capitalist. This seclusion has for its purpose the bringing up of legitimate heirs through which to perpetuate the economic mastery. It brought about the first degradation of woman, as it made her a parasite, and marriage a speculation. Among the ruling classes, it has remained so throughout. Marriage has been a contract seldom made by the contracting parties themselves. Parents, guardians and marriage brokers have attended to that business. The determining factor has been property. Where choice has been allowed at all it has been only within the given class of the chooser. Often the contract has been made without the parties seeing each other, generally without the least reference to their likes or dislikes. Children have been betrothed in the cradle or while too young to be concerned at all. Land, goods and chattels have been the world's most irresistible Cupid! It is a serious mistake to think that the "age of romance" was an age of marrying for love. On the other hand the romance as a rule headed for the very opposite of matrimony. The heroes were often already married, the heroines as often so.
The grand old institution of marriage has had very little to do with love, faith and troth!
THE PROLETARIAN FAMILY.
We saw that polygamy was seldom practiced among our barbarian ancestors because food was too difficult to procure to allow the man that luxury. Even so throughout the ages have the poor been too poor to follow in the footsteps of the rich in creating the expensive corollaries of the monogamian family.
Among the poorer classes monogamy has been comparatively strict from the force of economic necessity. And as economic necessity is the world's greatest teacher, so among the propertyless monogamy has become the greatest moral virtue. It is therefore among the proletarians that the purest of all human feelings, modern sex-love with a view to marriage and life partnership, has sprung into life.
Even animals exercise choice at mating and often show strong likes and dislikes. Man has no doubt always had preferments. But sex-love, true, pure and lasting, is a very modern virtue and could spring only from generations of the strictest monogamy. While the ancients secluded their legitimate wives, and themselves remained perfectly unrestricted, the poor herdsman composed songs to his beloved one and his suit once won he was usually too poor to look for further adventure. While the feudal knight romanced for another man's wife or betrothed, the poor serf toiled and saved to get together that with which to purchase the "right of the first night" from the lord for the woman of his choice. Crude and simple and coarse and ignorant as these herdsmen and serfs might be, a life companionship purchased by a multitude of sacrifices, before and after marriage, could not fail to breed devotion, and devotion from generation to generation might well be expected to bear a child as pure as the modern sex-love.
While the modern heiresses look for titles with which to adorn their names, and titled degenerates look for fortunes with which to revive their faded glory; while middle class matrons dicker for position, money and support for their marriageable daughters; while immorality, scandal and divorce stalk rampant in the land, that part of the industrial proletariat that is separated from the scourges of both wealth and extreme poverty are remaining as nearly as possible pure from the taint that pollutes the upper and lower slums alike. With the proletariat property can play no part either as a matchmaker or an agent of oppression. The workers own nothing but their labor power, and that they all own alike. The "man with a good job" may appear as a desirable match from a proletarian point of view, but as a job is in itself a most unstable thing only the most superficial can allow it to influence their choice.
The average proletarian home is far from ideal. There are thousands of rocky reefs in the worker’s matrimonial sea. The inherited narrowness still clings to the woman, the inherited brutality still clings to the man. Then there are the troubles bred by economic conditions, by lack of work and small pay, and high cost of living and large families to be fed and clothed. "When poverty comes in through the door, love flies out through the window," is a proverb that holds good forever.
But the workers are too poor to indulge in the vices of the rich. Their troubles are of a different character. It takes at all times all a worker can make, to support home, wife and children. His wages do not allow him to support an "affinity." Such extravagance would too soon be detected, and a working woman of to-day sooner seeks the factory for employment than to sit neglected at home. No property brought her to the man, no property holds her there, and the legal and official trappings instituted for the control of property in matrimonial relations are meaningless to the working class. A new morality, a union based on mutual love and faith is growing in spite of all influences to the contrary. Out of this will spring the morals of the future, a monogamian family in the full sense of the word.