Socialism; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women and socialism
Morgan assumes that from the state of general promiscuity, a higher
form of sexual relation gradually developed, the consanguine family.
Here the marriage groups are arranged by generations; all the
grandfathers and grandmothers within a certain family are mutually
husbands and wives; their children constitute another cycle of
husbands and wives, and again the children of these when they have
attained the proper age. In differentiation then from the promiscuity
prevailing at the lowest stage, we here find one generation excluded
from sexual intercourse with another generation. But brothers and
sisters and cousins of the first, second and more remote grades are
all brothers and sisters and also husbands and wives. This family
form corresponds to the system of kinship that during the first half
of the last century still existed in Hawaii in name but no longer in
fact. According to the American and Indian system of kinship, brother
and sister can never be father and mother to the same child, but
according to the Hawaiian system they may. The consanguine family
also prevailed at the time of Herodotus among the Massagetes. Of
these he wrote: “Every man marries a woman but all are permitted to
have intercourse with her.”[5] Similar conditions Backofen proves
to have existed among the Lycians, Etruscans, Cretans, Athenians,
Lesbians and Egyptians.
According to Morgan, the consanguine family is succeeded by a third,
higher form of family relations, which he calls the “Punaluan
family”--“punaluan” meaning “dear companion.”
Morgan’s conception that the consanguine family, founded upon the
formation of marriage classes according to generations, which preceded
the Punaluan family, was the original form of family life, is opposed
by Cunow in his book referred to above. Cunow does not consider the
consanguine family the most primitive form of sexual intercourse
discovered, but deems it an intermediary stage leading to the true
gentile organization, in which 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.[6] Cunow
says, furthermore: The class division--every man and every woman
bearing the name of their class and their totem--does not prevent
sexual intercourse among relations on collateral lines, but it does
prevent it among relations of preceding and succeeding lines, parents
and children, aunts and nephews, uncles and nieces. Terms as uncle,
aunt, etc., denote entire groups.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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