The origin of the family, private property, and the stateEngels, Friedrich
Philosophy
The origin of the family, private property, and the state
Engels, Friedrich
Families -- History; Morgan, Lewis Henry, 1818-1881. Ancient society; Prehistoric peoples; Property -- History; State, The
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 Napoleon decreed in its article 312: "L'enfant
concu pendant le mariage a pour pere 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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