Читать книгу Woman under socialism - Bebel August, August Bebel - Страница 4

Woman and the workingman have, since old, had this in common —oppression. The forms of oppression have suffered changes in the course of time, and in various countries. But the oppression always remained. Many a time and oft, in the course of the ages, did the oppressed become conscious of their oppression; and such conscious knowledge of their condition did bring on changes and reliefs. Nevertheless, a knowledge, that grasped the actual feature of the oppression by grasping its causes, is, with woman as with the workingman, the fruit of our own days. The actual feature of society, and of the laws that lie at the bottom of its development, had first to be known, before a general movement could take place for the removal of conditions, recognized as oppressive and unjust. The breadth and intensity of such a movement depends, however, upon the measure of the understanding prevalent among the suffering social layers and circles, and upon the measure of freedom of motion that they enjoy. In both respects, woman stands, through custom and education, as well as the freedom allowed her by law, behind the workingman. To this, another circumstance is added. Conditions, lasting through a long series of generations, finally grow into custom; heredity and education then cause such conditions to appear on both sides as "natural." Hence it comes that, even to-day, woman in particular, accepts her subordinate position as a matter of course. It is no easy matter to make her understand that that position is unworthy, and that it is her duty to endeavor to become a member of society, equal-righted with, and in every sense a peer of man.

However much in common woman may be shown to have with the workingman, she leads him in one thing: —Woman was the first human being to come into bondage: she was a slave before the male slave existed.

All social dependence and oppression has its roots in the economic dependence of the oppressed upon the oppressor. In this condition woman finds herself, from an early day down to our own. The history of the development of human society proves the fact everywhere.

The knowledge of the history of this development is, however, comparatively new. As little as the myth of the Creation of the World – as taught us by the Bible – can be upheld in sight of the investigations of geographers and, scientists, grounded as these investigations are upon unquestionable and innumerable facts, just so untenable has its myth proved concerning the creation and evolution of man. True enough, as yet the veil is far from being lifted from all the sub-departments of this historical development of mankind; over many, on which already light has been shed, differences of opinion still exist among the investigators on the meaning and connection of this or that fact; nevertheless, on the whole, there is agreement and clearness. It is established that man did not, like the first human couple of the Bible, make his first appearance on earth in an advanced stage of civilization. He reached that plane only in the course of endlessly long lapses of time, after he had gradually freed himself from purely animal conditions, and had experienced long terms of development, in the course of which his social as well as his sexual relations – the relations between man and woman – had undergone a great variety of changes.

The favorite phrase – a phrase that the ignorant or impostors daily smite our ears with on the subject of the relations between man and woman, and between the poor and the rich – "it always has been so," and the conclusion drawn therefrom – "it will always be so," is in every sense of the word false, superficial and trumped-up.

For the purposes of this work a cursory presentation of the relations between the sexes, since primitive society, is of special importance. It is so because it can thereby be proved that, seeing that these relations have materially changed in the previous course of human development, and that the changes have taken place in even step with the existing systems of production, on the one hand, and of the distribution of the product of labor, on the other, it is natural and goes without saying that, along with further changes and revolutions in the system of production and distribution, the relations between the sexes are bound to change again. Nothing is "eternal," either in nature or in human life; eternal only is change and interchange.

As far back as one may go in the development of human society, the horde is found as the first human community. True enough, Honeger mentions in his "General History of Civilization" that even to-day in the little explored interior of the island of Borneo, there are wild people, living separately; and Huegel likewise maintains that, in the wild mountain regions of India, human couples have been discovered living alone, and who, ape-like, fled to the trees as soon as they were met; but there is no further knowledge on the subject. If verified, these claims would only confirm the previous superstition and hypothesis concerning the development of the human race. The probability is that, wherever human beings sprang up, there were, at first, single couples. Certain it is, however, that so soon as a larger number of beings existed, descended from a common parent stock, they held together in hordes in order that, by their joint efforts, they might, first of all, gain their still very primitive conditions of life and support, as well as to protect themselves against their common enemies, wild animals. Growing numbers and increased difficulties in securing subsistence, which originally consisted in roots, berries and fruit, first led to the splitting up or segmentation of the hordes, and to the search for new habitats.

This almost animal-like state, of which we have no further credible antiquarian proofs, undoubtedly once existed, judging from all that we have learned concerning the several grades of civilization of wild peoples still living, or known to have lived within historic times. Man did not, upon the call of a Creator, step ready-made into existence as a higher product of civilization. It was otherwise. He has had to pass through the most varied stages in an endlessly long and slow process of development. Only via ebbing and flowing periods of civilization, and in constant differentiation with his fellows in all parts of the world, and in all zones, did he gradually climb up to his present height.

Indeed, while in one section of the earth's surface great peoples and nations belong to the most advanced stages of civilization, other peoples are found in different sections standing on the greatest variety of gradations in development. They thus present to us a picture of our own past history; and they point to the road which mankind traversed in the course of its development. If but certain common and generally accepted data are established, that may serve everywhere as sign-posts to guide investigation, a mass of facts will follow, throwing a wholly new light upon the relations of man in the past and the present. A number of social phenomena – unintelligible to us to-day, and attacked by superficial judges as nonsensical, not infrequently even as "immoral" – will become clear and natural. A material lifting of the veil, formerly spread over the history of the development of our race, has been effected through the investigations made, since Bachofen, by a considerable number of scientists, like Tylor, MacLennan, Lubbock and others. Prominently among the men who joined these was Morgan, with his fundamental work, that Frederick Engels further substantiated and supplemented with a series of historical facts, economic and political in their nature, and that, more recently, has been partly confirmed and partly rectified by Cunow.1

By means of these expositions – especially as clearly and lucidly presented by Frederick Engels, in his support of Morgan's excellent and fundamental work, – a mass of light is shed upon hitherto unintelligible, partly seemingly contradictory phenomena in the life of the races and tribes of both high and low degree of culture. Only now do we gain an insight into the structure that human society raised in the course of time. According thereto, our former views of marriage, the family, the community, the State, rested upon notions that were wholly false; so false that they turn out to be no better than a fancy-picture, wholly devoid of foundation in fact.

All that is said and proved about marriage, the family, the community and the State holds good especially with regard to woman, who, in the various periods of development did likewise fill a place, that differs materially from the "eternal," imputed to her.

Morgan, whom Engels agrees with in this, divides the history of mankind into three main epochs: – savagery, barbarism and civilization. Each of the two first ones he again divides into an under, a middle and an upper period, each distinguishing itself from the other by certain innovations and improvements, predicated in each instance upon the control over subsistence. Morgan, accordingly, exactly in the sense of the materialist conception of history, as established by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, – perceives the leading characteristics in the development of society to be the changes that, in given epochs, the conditions of life are molded into; and he perceives the changes to be due to the progress made in the process of production, that is to say, in the procurement of subsistence. Summed up in a few words, the lower period of savagery constitutes the infancy of the human race, during which the race, partly living in trees, is mainly nourished by fruits and roots, and during which articulate language takes its inception. The middle period of savagery commences with the acquisition of a fish subsistence, and the use of fire. The construction of weapons begins; at first the club and spear, fashioned out of wood and stone. Thereby also begins the chase, and probably also war with contiguous hordes for the sources of food, for domiciles and hunting grounds. At this stage appears also cannibalism, still practiced to-day by some tribes and peoples of Africa, Australia and Polynesia. The upper period of savagery is characterized by the perfection of weapons to the point of the bow and arrow; finger weaving, the making of baskets out of filaments of bark, the fashioning of sharpened stone tools have here their start, and thereby begins also the preparation of wood for the building of boats and huts. The form of life has accordingly, become many-sided. The existing tools and implements, needed for the control of a plentiful food supply, make possible the subsistance of larger communities.

The lower period of barbarism Morgan starts with the invention of the art of pottery. The taming and domestication of animals, and, along with that, the production of meat and milk, and the preparation of hides, horns and hair for various purposes of use, have here their start. Hand in hand therewith begins the cultivation of plants, – in the West of maize, in the East of almost all known cereals, maize excepted. The middle period of barbarism shows us, in the East, the ever more extensive domestication of animals; in the West, the cultivation of maize and plants by irrigation. Here also begins the use of adobe-bricks and of stone for house-building. The domestication of animals promotes the rearing of herds, and leads to the pastoral life. The necessity of larger quantities of food for men and beasts leads to field agriculture. Along therewith, the people begin to be localized; food increases in quantity and diversity, and gradually cannibalism disappears.

The upper period of barbarism begins finally with the smelting of iron ore, and the discovery of the phonetic alphabet. The iron plow-share is invented, making possible agriculture on a larger scale; the iron axe and spade are brought into requisition, making easy the clearing of the forests. With the preparation of iron, a number of fields are opened to activity, imparting to life a new form. Iron utensils help the building of houses, vessels and weapons; with the preparation of metals arises skilled handwork, a more perfect knowledge of weapons, and the building of walled cities. Architecture, as an art, then rises; mythology, poetry and history find support and expansion in the discovery of the phonetic alphabet.

The Orient and the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, particularly Egypt, Greece and Italy, are those in which the last sketched stage of life principally unfolded; and it laid the foundation for the social transformation that in the course of time exercised a determining influence on the social development of Europe and of the whole earth.

As a matter of course, the social development of the human race through the periods of savagery and barbarism had also its peculiar sexual and social relations, differing materially from those of later days.

Bachofen and Morgan have traced these relations by means of thorough investigations. Bachofen, by studying closely all ancient and modern writings, so as to arrive at the nature of phenomena that appear singular to us in mythology, folk-lore and historic tradition, and that, nevertheless, seem to be re-echoed in incidents and events of later days, occasionally even of our own. Morgan, by spending decades of his life among the Iroquois Indians, located in the State of New York, and thereby making observations, through which he gained new and unexpected insight into the system of life, the family and the relationships of the said Indian tribe, and, based upon which, observations made elsewhere, first received their correct interpretation and explanation.

Both of them, Bachofen and Morgan, discovered, each along his own line of research, the latter, however, far more clearly than the former, that the relations of the sexes during primitive times of human development were substantially different from the relations existing in historic days, and among the modern civilized peoples. Especially did Morgan discover – thanks to his many years' sojourn among the Iroquois of North America, and grounded upon comparative studies, which he was moved to by that which he there observed, – that all the existing races, that are still materially backward, possess systems of family and consanguinity that are totally different from ours, but must be similar to those once prevalent among all races during the previous stages of civilization.

Morgan found, at the time that he lived among the Iroquois, that among them there existed a system of monogamy, easily dissolvable by both parties, and which he designated as the "pairing family." He also found that the terms for the degrees of consanguinity – father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister – although, according to our conception, there can be no doubt as to their application, were there, nevertheless, applied in quite different sense. The Iroquois calls not only his own children "sons" and "daughters," but also the children of all his brothers; and their children call him "father." Conversely, the female Iroquois calls not only her own children "sons" and "daughters," but all those of her sisters, and likewise do their children call her "mother." On the other hand, she calls the children of her brothers "nephews" and "nieces," and these call her "aunt." The children of brothers call one another "brothers" and "sisters;" likewise the children of sisters. Finally, the children of a woman and those of her brother call one another "cousins." Accordingly, the singular spectacle is seen of the terms of relationship going, not as in our sense, by the degree of consanguinity, but by the sex of the relative.

This system of relationship is in full force, not only among all the American Indians, as well as among the aborigines of India, the tribes of Dekan and the Gaura tribes of Hindostan, but, according to the investigations that have taken place since Bachofen, similar conditions must have existed everywhere in primitive times, as they still exist to-day among many peoples of Upper and Further Asia, Africa and Australia. When, in connection with these investigations and established facts, the investigation will be everywhere taken up on the sex and family relations of wild and barbarous nations still living, then will the fact transpire that, what Bachofen still confusedly found among numerous peoples of antiquity, and rather surmised than otherwise; what Morgan found among the Iroquois; what Cunow found among the Austral-Negros, are but social and sexual formations, that constitute the groundwork of human development for all the peoples of the earth.

The investigations of Morgan bring, moreover, other interesting facts to light. Although the "pairing family" of the Iroquois starts in insolvable contradiction with the terms of consanguinity in use among them, it turns out that, as late as the first half of the 19th Century, there existed on the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) a family-form that actually tallied with that which, among the Iroquois, existed in name only. But the system of consanguinity, in force in Hawaii, failed, in turn, to tally with the family-form actually in existence there. It referred to an older family-form, one still more primitive, but no longer extant. There, all the children of brothers and sisters, without exception, were "brothers" and "sisters." Accordingly, they were not considered the common children of their mothers and of the sisters of these, or of their fathers and of the brothers of these, but of all the brothers and sisters of their parents, without distinction. The Hawaiian system of consanguinity corresponded, accordingly, with a stage of development that was lower than the family-form still actually in existence. Hence transpires the curious fact that, in Hawaii, as with the Indians of North America, two distinct systems of consanguinity are, or rather, at a time, were in vogue, which no longer tallied with actual conditions, but were both overtaken by a higher state. On this head Morgan says: "The family represents an active principle. It is never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society advances from a lower to a higher condition, and finally passes out of one form into another of higher grade. Systems of consanguinity, on the contrary, are passive; recording the progress made by the family at long intervals apart, and only changing radically when the family has radically changed."

The theory, – even to-day generally considered conclusive, and which is stubbornly upheld as irrefutable by the representatives of the status quo– to the effect that the existing family-form has existed since time immemorial, and, lest the whole social fabric be put in jeopardy, must continue to exist forever, turned out, accordingly, after these discoveries of the investigators, to be wholly false and untenable. The form, under which the relations of the sexes appear and the situation of the family is raised, depends rather upon the social conditions, upon the manner in which man controls his subsistence. The form changes with the changed degree of culture at each given period.

The study of primitive history leaves now no room for doubt that, at the lowest grades of human development, the relation of the sexes is totally different from that of latter times, and that a state of things resulted therefrom, which, looked at with modern eyes, appears as monstrous, and as a sink of immorality. Nevertheless, as each social stage of human development has its own conditions of production, so likewise has each its own code of morals, which is but the reflection of the social condition. That is moral which is usage; and that, in turn, is usage which corresponds with the innermost being, i. e., the needs of a given period.

Morgan reaches the conclusion that, at the lower period of savagery, there was sexual intercourse between the several grades or generations, every woman belonging to every man, and every man to every woman, – in other words, promiscuity. All men live in polygamy and all women in polyandry. There is a general community of women and of men, but also a community of children, Strábo reports (sixty-six years before our reckoning) that, among the Arabians, brothers cohabited with sisters and with their own mother. On any route other than that of incest, the increase of population is nowhere possible, if, as alleged in the Bible also, descent from one couple is granted. The Bible itself contradicts itself on this delicate point. It is stated there that Cain, after he had murdered his brother Abel, took a wife of another people. Whence came that other people? The theory of promiscuity in primitive times, that is to say, that the horde was endogamous, that sexual intercourse was indiscriminate, is furthermore supported by the Hindoo myth, according to which Brahma married his own daughter Saravasti. The same myth turns up again among the Egyptians and the northern Edda. The Egyptian god Ammon was the spouse of his own mother, and boasted of it. Odin, according to the Edda, was the mate of his own daughter Frigga.2 Morgan proceeds from the principle that, from the state of promiscuity, soon a higher form of sexual intercourse took shape. He designates this the consanguine family. Here the groups, that stand in sexual relation, are separated by grades or generations, so that grandfathers and grandmothers, within an age group, are husbands and wives. Their children, likewise, constitute a group of common couples; likewise the children of these, so soon as they have reached the requisite age. Accordingly, in contrast with the sex relations of the rawest period, in which promiscuity of sexes exists without distinction of age, now one generation is excluded from sexual intercourse with another. Sexual intercourse, however, exists between brothers and sisters, male and female cousins of the first, second and third remove. All of these together are brothers and sisters, but towards one another, they are all husbands and wives. This family-form corresponds with the system of consanguinity that still existed in Hawaii during the first part of the 19th Century, in name only, but no longer in fact. On the other hand, according to the American Indian system of consanguinity, a brother and sister can never be the father and mother of the same child – a thing, however, permissible in the Hawaiian family system. Probably the consanguine family was the state that, at the time of Herodotus, existed among the Massagetae, on the subject of which he reports: "Each man received a wife, but all were allowed to use her." And he continues: "At any time a man desires a woman, he hangs his quiver in front of his wagon, and cohabits, unconcerned, with her… He at the same time sticks his staff into the ground, a symbol of his own act… Cohabitation is exercised in public."3 Similar conditions Bachofen shows have existed among the Lycians, Etruscans, Cretans, Athenians, Lesbians and Egyptians.

According to Morgan, the consanguine family is supervened by a third and higher form of family relationship, which he designates as the Punaluan family. Punalua, "dear friend," "intimate companion."

Cunow, in his above named book, takes exception to Morgan's views that the consanguine family, which rests on the organization of marriage classes by generations, preceded the punaluan family as an original organization. Cunow does not see in the consanguine family the most primitive of all social forms, until now discovered. He sees in it merely a middle form, that takes its origin in the generation groups; a transition stage toward the pure gentile organization, on which, as a graft, the division in age classes, belonging to the consanguine family system, still continues for a time in altered form, along with the division in totem-groups.4 Cunow explains further: The division in classes – every individual, man or woman, carries the name of his or her class and generation group totem – does not serve to exclude sexual intercourse between collateral, but to prevent cohabitation between relatives in the ascending and descending line, between parents and children, aunts and nephews, uncles and nieces. Terms such as "aunt," "uncle," etc., he designates as grade-names.

Cunow furnishes the proofs for the correctness of the views in which he differs from Morgan on some points. But, however he may differ from Morgan in single instances, he emphatically defends him against the attacks of Westermann and others. He says:

"Although here and there a hypothesis of Morgan may have proved itself false, and some others may be allowed only a qualified approval, that merit none can gainsay him that he has been the first to establish the identity of the North American totem-group with the gentile organization of the Romans; and, secondly, to demonstrate that our modern systems of consanguinity and family-forms are the result of a long process of development. In a measure he has thereby first made recent investigations possible; he has first built the foundation on which we may build further." In the introduction also to his book he says expressly that his own work is partly a supplement to Morgan's book on primitive man.

The Westermanns, the Starckes, the Zieglers – the latter of whom, in his book, criticized in the introduction to the twenty-fifth edition of this work, refers mainly to the first named, in order to attack our statements with theirs – will have to submit, with good grace or bad, to the fact that the rise and development of the family has not taken the course that fits in with their bourgeois prejudices. The refutation that, in the last part of his work, Cunow bestows upon Westermann and Starcke, Ziegler's authorities, are calculated to enlighten their most fanatic followers upon the value of their caviling criticisms of, and arguments against, Morgan.

According to Morgan, the punaluan family has its start with the exclusion of consanguineous brothers and sisters, on the mother's side. Where a woman has several husbands, the evidence of paternity is impossible. Paternity becomes a fiction. Even to-day, under the rule of strict monogamous marriage, paternity, as Goethe, in his "Apprenticeship," lets Frederick say, "rests only upon faith." If with monogamy, paternity is often doubtful, it is impossible of proof in polygamy: only descent from the mother is certain and unquestionable. Accordingly, descent from the mother afforded the only criterion. As all deep-reaching transformations in the social relations of primitive man are accomplished only slowly, the change of the so-called consanguine into the punaluan family must unquestionably have engaged vast periods of time, and been broken through by many relapses, still noticeable in much later days. The proximate external inducement for the development of the punaluan family was, possibly, the necessity of splitting up the strongly swollen membership of the family, to the end that new grounds could be occupied for cattle ranges and agriculture. Probably, also, with the reaching of a higher grade of civilization, a sense gradually asserted itself of the harmfulness and indecorousness of sexual intercourse between brothers and sisters, and close relatives. In favor of this theory stands a pretty tradition, that, as related by Cunow, Gaston found among the Dieyeries, one of the South Australian tribes, on the rise of the "Mordu" consanguine group. He says:

"After creation, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and other near relatives married promiscuously among one another, until the evil effects of such connections showed themselves clearly. A conference of leaders was held, and it was considered in what way this could be avoided. The outcome of the conference was a request to the Muramura (Great Spirit); and he ordered in his answer that the tribe be divided into several branches, and that, in order to distinguish them, they be called by different names, after animate or inanimate objects. For instance: after the dingo, the mouse, the emu, the rain, the iguana-lizard, etc. The members of one and the same group could not marry another. The son of a Dingo could not, for instance, marry the daughter of a Dingo; each of the two could, however, enter into connections with the Mouse, the Emu, the Rat, or any other family."

This tradition is more sensible and natural, by a good deal, than the Christian tradition, taught by the Bible. It shows plainly the rise of the consanguine groups. Moreover, Paul Lafargue, makes in the "Neue Zeit" the sagacious, and, we think, felicitous point, that names, such as Adam and Eve, are not names of individual persons, but the names of gentes, in which, at the time, the Jews were joined. Lafargue solves by his argument a series of otherwise obscure and contradictory passages in the first Book of Moses. Again, M. Beer calls attention, likewise in the "Neue Zeit," that, to this day, it is a conjugal custom among Jews that the bride and the bridegroom's mother may not carry the same name, otherwise – thus runs this belief – a misfortune will befall the family: sickness and death will pursue them. In our opinion, this is a further proof for the correctness of Lafargue's theory. The gentile organization forbids marriage between persons that descend from the same gens stock. Such a common descent must be considered to exist, according to gentile principles, between the bride, that carries the name of "Eve," and the bridegroom's mother of the same name. Modern Jews, of course, have no longer the remotest suspicion of the real connection between their prejudice and their old gentile constitution, which forbade such marriages of relatives. The old gentile order had for its object to avoid the degenerating consequences of in-breeding. Although this gentile constitution has for thousands of years been destroyed among the Jews, tradition, as we see, has continued to live in superstition.

Quite possible, the experience, made at an early day with the breeding of animals, revealed the harmfulness of in-breeding. How far this experience went transpires from the manner in which, according to the first Book of Moses, chap. 30, verse 32 and sequel, Jacob understood how to outwit his father-in-law Laban, by knowing how to encompass the birth of eanlings that were streaked and pied, and which, according to Laban's promises, were to be Jacob's. The old Israelites had, accordingly, long before Darwin, studied Darwinism.

Once upon the subject of the conditions existing among the old Jews, a few other facts are in order, clearly proving that, among them, descent in the female line was actually in force of old. True enough, on the subject of woman, I Moses, 3, 16, runs this wise: "And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee;" and the verse also undergoes the variation: "the woman shall leave father and mother, and cleave to her husband." In point of fact, however, I Moses, 2, 24, has it this way: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." The same language recurs in Matthew 19, 15; Mark 10, 7, and in the Epistle to the Ephesians 5, 31. The command sprang, accordingly, from the system of descent in the female line, and the exegetists, at a loss what to do with it, allowed it to appear in a light that is utterly false.

Descent in female line appears clearly also in IV Moses, 32, 41. It is there said that Jair had a father, who was of the tribe of Judah, but his mother was of the tribe of Manasseh, and Jair is expressly called the son of Manasseh, and he inherited in that tribe. Another instance of descent in the female line among the Jews is met in Nehemiah 7, 63. There the children of a priest, who took to wife one of the daughters of Barzillai – a Jewish clan – are called children of Barzillai; they are, accordingly, not called after the father, who, moreover, as a priest occupied a privileged position, but after the mother. For the rest, already in the days of the Old Testament, accordingly, in historic times, the father-right prevailed among the Jews, and the clan and tribe organization rested on descent in the male line. Accordingly, the daughters were shut off as heirs, as may be seen in I Moses 31, 14-15, where even Leah and Rachel, the daughters of Laban, complain: "Is there yet any portion or inheritance for us in our father's house? Are we not counted of him strangers? for he has sold us, and hath quite devoured also our money."

As happened with all peoples where descent in male replaced descent in female line, woman among the Jews stood wholly bereft of rights. Wedlock was marriage by purchase. On woman the obligation was laid of the strictest chastity; on the other hand, man was not bound by the same ordinance; he, moreover, was privileged to possess several wives. Did the husband, after the bridal night, believe to have found that his wife had, before marriage, lost her maidenhood, not only had he the right to cast her off, she was stoned to death. The same punishment fell upon the adultress; upon the husband, however, only in case he committed adultery with a married Jewish woman. According to V Moses 24, 1-4, the husband had also the right to cast off his newly-married wife, if she found no favor in his eyes, even if only out of dislike. He was then to write her a bill of divorcement, give it in her hand, and let her out of the house. An expression of the low position that woman took later among the Jews is furthermore found in the circumstances that, even to this day, woman attends divine service in the synagogue, in a space strictly separated from the men, and they are not included in the prayers.5

The relations of the sexes in the punaluan family consisted, according to Morgan, in one or more sisters, belonging to one family group, marrying jointly one or more brothers of another group. The consanguine sisters, or the first, second and more remote cousins were wives in common with their husbands in common, who could not be their brothers. These consanguine brothers, or cousins of several degrees, were the husbands in common of their wives in common, who could not be their sisters. With the stopping of in-breeding, the new family-form undoubtedly contributed towards the rapid and vigorous development of the tribes, and imparted to the tribes, that had turned to this form of family connection, an advantage over those that still retained the old form of connections.

In general, the physical and intellectual differences between man and woman were vastly less in primitive days than in our society. Among all the peoples, living in the state of savagery or barbarism, the differences in the weight and size of the brain are slighter than among the peoples in civilization. Likewise, in strength of body and agility, the women among these peoples are but little behind the men. This is attested not only by the testimony of the ancient writers on the peoples who clung to the mother-right. Further testimony is furnished by the armies of women among the Ashantees and of the King of Dahomey in West Africa, who distinguished themselves by special bravery and ferocity. Likewise does the opinion of Tacitus on the women of the old Germans, and Caesar's accounts of the women of the Iberians and Scots confirm the fact. Columbus had to sustain a fight before Santa Cruz with an Indian skiff in which the women fought as bravely as the men; and we find this theory further confirmed in the passages from Havelock Ellis's work, "Man and Woman," which Dr. Hope B. Adams-Walther deals upon in Nos. 39 and 40 of the "Neue Zeit." He says:

"About the Andombis of the Congo, Johnson relates that the women work hard as carriers and in other occupations. All the same, they lead a perfectly happy life. They are often stronger and more handsomely built than the men; not a few of them have positively magnificent figures. Parke styles the Manynema of the same neighborhood 'fine animals,' and he finds the women very stately. They carry burdens as heavy as the men and with equal ease. A North American Indian chief said to Hearne: 'Women are created for labor; a woman can carry or drag as much as two men.' Schellong, who published a painstaking study on the Papuans of New Guinea in the Ethnologic Journal, issued in 1891, is of the opinion that the women are more strongly built than the men. In the interior of Australia, women are sometimes beaten by men out of jealousy; but it happens not infrequently that it is the man, who, on such occasions, receives the stronger dose. In Cuba the women fought shoulder to shoulder with the men. Among some tribes in India, as well as the Pueblos of North and the Patagonians of South America, the women are as tall as the men. Even among the Arabians and Druses the difference in size is slight; and yet nearer home, among the Russians, the sexes are more alike than is the case among the western Europeans. Accordingly, in all parts of the earth there are instances of equal or approximately equal physical development."

The family relations that flow from the Punaluan family were these: The children of my mother's sisters are her children, and the children of my father's brothers are his children, and all together are my brothers and sisters. Conversely, the children of my mother's brothers are her nephews and nieces, and the children of my father's sisters are his nephews and nieces, and they, all together, are my cousins. Again, the husbands of my mother's sisters are her husbands also, and the wives of my father's brothers are also his wives; but my father's sisters and my mother's brothers are excluded from family relationship, and their children are my cousins.6

Along with arising civilization, sexual intercourse is proscribed between brothers and sisters, and the proscription gradually extends to the remotest collateral relatives on the mother's side. A new group of consanguinity arises, the gens, which, in its first form, is made up of a series of consanguine and more remote sisters, together with their children and their consanguine and more remote brothers on their mother's side. The gens has a common female ancestor, from whom the female successors descend in generations. The husbands of these women are not of the consanguine group, the gens, of their wives; they are of the gens of their sisters. Conversely, the children of these men belong to the family group of their, the children's mother, descent being in the female line. The mother is the head of the family; and thus arises the "mother-right," which for a long time constitutes the basis of the family and of inheritance. In keeping therewith – so long as descent was recognized in the female line – woman had a seat and voice in the councils of the gens; they voted in the election of the sachems and of the military chiefs, and deposed them.

About the Lycians, who abided by the mother-right, Herodotus says; "Their customs are partly Cretan, partly Carian. They have, however, a custom that distinguishes them from all other nations in the world. Ask a Lycian who he is, and he answers by giving you his own name, the name of his mother, and so on in the female line. Aye, if a free-born woman marries a slave, her children are citizens, but if a free man marries a stranger, or takes a concubine, even if he be the highest person in the State, his children forfeit all citizen rights."

In those days, "matrimonium" and not "patrimonium," "mater familias" and not "pater familias" were the terms used; and the native land is called the "dear motherland." As with the previous family-forms, so did the gens rest upon the community of property, and had a communistic system of household. The woman is the real guide and leader of this family community; hence she enjoys a high degree of respect, in the house as well as in the affairs of the family community concerning the tribe. She is judge and adjuster of disputes, and frequently performs the ceremonies of religion as priestess. The frequent appearance of Queens and Princesses in antiquity, their controlling influence, even there where their sons reigned, for instance, in the history of old Egypt, are results of the mother-right. Mythology, at that epoch, assumes predominantly female characters: Astarte, Ceres, Demeter, Latona, Isis, Frigga, Freia, Gerdha, etc. Woman is considered inviolable; matricide is the blackest of all crimes: it summons all men to retribution. The blood-feud is the common concern of all the men of the tribe; each is obliged to avenge the wrong done to a member of the family community by the members of another tribe. In defence of the women the men are spurred to highest valor. Thus did the effects of the mother-right, gyneocracy, manifest themselves in all the relations of life among the peoples of antiquity – among the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, before the time of the Heroes; among the peoples of Italy, before the founding of Rome; among the Scythians, the Gauls, the Iberians and Cantabrians, the Germans of Tacitus, etc. Woman, at that time, takes in the family and in public life a position such as she has never since taken. Along these lines, says Tacitus in his "Germania": "They (the Germans) even suppose somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and, therefore, neither despise their counsels, nor disregard their responses;" and Diodorus, who lived at the time of Caesar, feels highly indignant over the position of women in Egypt, having learned that there, not the sons, but the daughters, supported their aging parents. He contemptuously shrugs his shoulders at the poltroons of the Nile, who relinquish household and public rights to the members of the weaker sex, and allow them privileges that must sound unheard-of to a Greek or a Roman.

Under the gyneocracy, a state of comparative peace prevailed in general. The horizon was narrow and small, life primitive. The different tribes separated themselves from one another, as best they could, and respected their mutual boundaries. Was, however, one tribe attacked by another, then the men were obliged to rush to its defence, and in this they were supported by the women in the most vigorous fashion. According to Herodotus, the women joined in battle among the Scythians: as he claims, the maid could not marry before she had slain an enemy. What role women played in battle among the Germans, Iberians, Scots, etc., has already been stated. But in the gens also did they, under given circumstances, command a strong regiment: – woe to the man who was either too lazy or too unskilled to contribute his share to the common support. He was shown the door, and, either he returned to his own gens, where it was with difficulty he was again received with friendliness, or he joined another gens that was more tolerant toward him.7

That conjugal life still bears this character in the interior of Africa, Livingstone learned to his great surprise, as he narrates in his "Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa," London, 1857. On the Zambesi he ran across the Valonda – a handsome, vigorous negro tribe, devoted to agriculture – where he found confirmed the informations received from the Portuguese, and which at first seemed incredible to him, with regard to the privileged position enjoyed by women. They sit in council; the young man who marries must move from his own, to the village of his wife: he thereby pledges himself to furnish the mother of his wife for life with kindling wood: if he divorces, the children remain the property of the mother. On the other hand, the wife must see to the sustenance of the husband. Although, occasionally, slight disagreements break out between man and wife, Livingstone found that the men did not retaliate, but he discovered that the men, who offended their wives, were punished in the most sensitive manner – through their stomachs. The husband, he says, comes home to eat, but one woman sends him off to another, and he gets nothing. Tired and hungry he climbs a tree in the most populous part of the village, and announces in woeful tones: "Hear! Hear! I thought I had married women, but they are witches to me! I am a bachelor; I have not a single wife! Is that right towards a man like me?" If a woman gives physical expression to her anger at a man, she is sentenced to carry him on her back from the court of the chieftain to her own house. While she is carrying him home, the other men scoff at and jeer her; the women, on the contrary, encourage her with all their might, calling out to her: "Treat him as he deserves; do it again!"

Similar conditions still exist in the German colony of Cameroon in West Africa. A German ship's doctor, who studied the country and its people by personal observation, writes us thus:

"With a large number of tribes, inheritance is based on maternity. Paternity is immaterial. Brothers and sisters are only the children of one mother. A man does not bequeath his property to his children, but to the children of his sister, that is to say, to his nephews and nieces, as his nearest demonstrable blood relatives. A chief of the Way people explained to me in horrible English: "My sister and I are certainly blood relatives, consequently her son is my heir; when I die, he will be the king of my town." "And your father?" I inquired. "I don't know what that means, 'my father,'" answered he. Upon my putting to him the question whether he had no children, rolling on the ground with laughter, he answered that, with them, men have no children, only women.

"I can assure you," our informant goes on to write, "that even the heir of King Bell in Cameroon is the King's nephew, and not one of his sons. The so-called children of King Bell, several of whom are now going through training in German cities, are merely children of his wives, whose fathers are unknown; one of them I might, possibly, claim for myself."

What say the adversaries of the theory of descent in the female line to this sketch drawn from the immediate present? Our informant is a man with eyes open, who probed things to the very bottom. How many of those who live among these semi-savage races, do as much? Hence the wild accounts about the "immorality" of the natives.

Furthermore, there come to our notice the memorials of the Imperial Government, submitted to the Reichstag on the German colonies (Session of 1894-95). In the memorial on the Southwestern territory of Africa there occurs this passage, p. 239: "Without their advice – the oldest and wealthiest – he (chief of the tribe in principal village) can not render the slightest decision, and not the men only, but quite often the women also, even the servants, express their opinion."

In the report of the Marshall Islands, p. 254 of the memorial, it runs thus: "The ruling power over all the islands of the Marshall group never rested in the hands of a single chieftain… Seeing, however, that no female member of this class (the Irody) is alive, and only the mother conveys nobility and rank to the child, the Irodies dies out with their chieftain." The expression used, and the descriptions made, by reporters betray what an utter blank are to them the conditions that they refer to: they can not find their bearings among them.

With an increasing population, there arise a number of sisters, which, in turn, produce daughter gentes. Over and against these, the mother gens appears as phratry. A number of phratries constitute a tribe. This social organization is so firm that it still constituted the foundation for the military organization in the old States, after the old gentile constitution had fallen to pieces. The tribe splits up into several tribes, all of which have the same constitution, and in each of which the old gentes are reproduced. However, seeing that the gentile constitution forbids the intermarriage of brothers and sisters, and of relatives on the mother's side to the furthest degree, it undermines its own foundation. Due to the evermore complicated relations of the separate gentes with one another – a condition of things that the social and economic progress promotes – the inhibition of marriage between the several gentes, that descend from the mother's side, becomes in the long run impracticable: it breaks down of itself, or is burst asunder. So long as the production of the means of subsistence was still at the lowest stages, and satisfied only simple wants, the activity of man and woman was essentially the same. Along with an increasing division of labor, there came about, not merely a division of functions, but also a division of occupations. Fishing, the hunt, cattle-raising, – demanded separate knowledge; and, to a still higher degree, the construction of tools and utensils, which became mainly the property of the men. Field agriculture expanded materially the circle of activities, and it created a supply of subsistence that satisfied the highest demands of the time. Man, whose activity stood in the foreground in the course of this development, became the real lord and owner of these sources of wealth, which, in turn, furnished the basis for commerce; and this created new relations, and social changes.

Not only did ever fresh causes of friction and conflicts arise for the possession of the best lands, due to the increase of population, and the need of wider domains for cattle-raising and agriculture, but, along with such increase of population, there arose the need of labor power to cultivate the ground. The more numerous these powers, all the greater was the wealth in products and herds. These struggles led, first, to the rape of women, later to the enslaving of conquered men. The women became laborers and objects of pleasure for the conqueror; their males became slaves. Two elements were thereby simultaneously introduced into the old gentile constitution. The two and the gentile constitution could not, in the long run, get along together.

Furthermore, hand in hand with the increasing differentiation of occupations, owing to the growing need of tools, utensils, weapons, etc., handicraft rises into existence. It follows its own course of development and separates itself from agriculture. As a consequence, a distinct population, one that plies the trades, is called into life; and it splits off from the agricultural population with entirely different interests.

According to the mother-right, i. e., so long as descent followed only in female line, the custom was that the gentile relatives inherited from the deceased gentile fellow-members on the mother's side. The property remained in the gens. The children of the deceased father did not belong to his gens, but to that of the mother: accordingly, they did not inherit from the father; at his death his property fell back to his own gens. Under the new conditions, where the father was the property-holder, i. e., the owner of herds and slaves, of weapons and utensils, and where he had become a handicraftsman, or merchant, his property, so long as he was still considered of the gens of his mother, fell after his death, not to his own children, but to his brothers and sisters, and to the children of his sisters, or to the successors of his sisters. His own children went away empty-handed. The pressure to change such a state of things was, accordingly, powerful; – and it was changed. Thereupon a condition arose that was not yet monogamy, but that approximated it; there arose the "pairing family." A certain man lived with a certain woman, and the children, born of that relation, were that couple's own children. These pairing families increased in the measure in which the marriage inhibitions, that flowed from the gentile constitution, hampered marriage, and in which the above mentioned economic grounds rendered desirable this new form of family life. Personal property accorded ill with the old condition of things, which rested upon the community of goods. Both rank and occupation now decidedly favored the necessity for the choice of a domicile. The production of merchandise begot commerce with neighboring and foreign nations; and that necessitated money. It was man who led and controlled this development. His private interests had, accordingly, no longer any real points of contact with the old gentile organization, whose interests often stood in opposition to his own. Accordingly, the importance of the gentile organization sank ever more. The gens finally became little more than the center of the religious functions for the family, its economic significance was gone. The complete dissolution of gentile organization became only a question of time.

With the dissolution of the old gentile organization, the influence and position of woman sank rapidly. The mother-right vanished; the father-right stepped into its shoes. Man now became a private property-holder: he had an interest in children, whom he could look upon as legitimate, and whom he made the heirs of his property: hence he forced upon woman the command of abstinence from intercourse with other men.

At the same time man assumed the right of taking unto himself, beside his own wife, or several of them, as many concubines as his condition allowed; and the children of these concubines were likewise treated as legitimate. On this head we find two valuable illustrations in the Bible. In I Book of Moses, chapter 16, verses 1 and 2, we read: "Now Sarai, Abram's wife, bare him no children: and she had a hand-maid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the Lord has restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai." The second remarkable illustration is found in I Book of Moses 30, 1 and sequel: "And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel; and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? and she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees that I may also have children by her. And she gave him Bilhah her handmaid to wife: and Jacob went in unto her."

Jacob, accordingly, had not only the daughters of Laban, two sisters, simultaneously for wives, they also helped him to their maids, all of which, according to the usage of the times, was wholly free from taint of impropriety. The two principal wives he had bought, as is well known, by serving Laban seven years for each. The purchase of a wife was at the time common among the Jews, but, along with the purchase of wives, whom they were compelled to take from among their own people, they practiced on an extensive scale the rape of women from among the peoples that they conquered. The Benjaminites raped the daughters of Silos.8 In such wars, it was originally customary that all the men who fell into the hands of the vanquisher were killed. The captured woman became a slave, a concubine. Nevertheless, she could be raised to the dignity of a legitimate wife so soon as she had fulfilled certain conditions of the Jews: she had to cut her hair and nails; to lay off the dress she was captured in, and exchange it for another that was given her; thereupon she had to mourn a whole month for her father and mother: she was, in a manner to be dead to her own people, become estranged from them: then could she climb into the conjugal bed. The largest number of wives had King Solomon, as is known. According to Kings 1, 11, not less than 700 wives and 300 concubines are ascribed to him.

With the rule of the father-right and descent in the male line in the Jewish gentile organization, the daughters were excluded from inheritance. Later this was, however, changed, at least when a father left no sons. This appears from IV Book of Moses 27, 2-8, where it is reported that, as Zelaphehad died without sons, and his daughter complained bitterly that she was to be excluded from her father's inheritance, which was to fall back to the tribe of Joseph, Moses decided that, in that case, the daughters should inherit. But seeing that she contemplated marrying, according to custom, in another tribe, the tribe of Joseph complained that thereby the inheritance would be lost to it. Thereupon Moses decided further (4, 36) that heiresses, though free in the choice of a husband, were bound to marry in the tribe of their own father. For the sake of property, the old ordinance was overthrown. Similarly, in Athens, did Solon decree that an heiress had to marry her nearest male agnate, even though both belonged to the same gens, and, according to former law, such a marriage was forbidden. Solon ordered also that a property-holder was not compelled as thitherto, to leave his property to his own gens in case he died childless; but that he could by testament constitute any one else his heir. From all this it is obvious: – man does not rule property, property rules him, and becomes his master.

With the rule of private property, the subjection of woman to man, her bondage was sealed. Then came the time of disregard, even of contempt for woman.

The reign of the mother-right implied communism; equality for all; the rise of the father-right implied the reign of private property, and, with it, the oppression and enslavement of woman.

It is difficult to trace in detail the manner in which the change was achieved. A knowledge of the events is lacking. Neither did this first great revolution in the lap of mankind come into force simultaneously among the ancient nations; nor yet is it probable that it was accomplished everywhere in the same manner. Among the peoples of old Greece, it was Athens where the new order of things first prevailed.

Frederick Engels is of the opinion that this great revolution was accomplished peacefully, and that, after all the conditions for the new rights were at hand, it only required a simple vote in the gens in order to rear the father in the place of the mother-right. Bachofen, on the contrary, grounding his opinion upon more or less reliable information from the old writers, holds that the women offered strong resistance to this social transformation. He, for instance, sees in the legends of the Amazonian Kingdoms, which re-appear under manifold variations in the old history of Asia and the Orient, and also have turned up in South America and in China, proofs for the struggle and resistance which the women offered to the new order. We leave that as it may be.

With the rule of man, women lost their position in the community; they were excluded from the councils and from all leading influence. Man exacts conjugal fidelity from her, but claims exemption for himself. If she violates that, she is guilty of the most serious deception that can afflict the new citizen; she thereby introduces into his house stranger's children as heirs of his property. Hence, among all ancient nations, the breach of conjugal fidelity on the part of woman is punished with death or slavery.

Notwithstanding women were thus removed from their position as leaders, the customs connected with the old system of morals continued for centuries to sway the public mind, although the meaning of the surviving customs was gradually lost to the people. It is only in modern times that pains are being taken to inquire into the original meaning of these old customs. In Greece, for instance, it remained a religious practice that Greek women prayed only to goddesses for advice, help and favors. Likewise, the yearly recurring celebration of the Thesmophoria owed its origin to the days of mother-right. Even in later days, the women of Greece celebrated this festival for five days in honor of Demeter; and no man was allowed to be present. It was similarly in old Rome with a festival in honor of Ceres. Both Demeter and Ceres were considered goddesses of fertility. In Germany also such festivals, once customary in the heathen days of Frigga, were held, deep into the Middle Ages, Frigga being considered the goddess of fertility among the old Germans. According to the narratives, women gave a free reign to their frolicsomeness on the occasions of these festivals. Also here men were excluded from participation in the festival.

In Athens, where, as already stated, the mother-right made earliest room for the father-right, but, as it seems, under strong opposition from the women, the transition is portrayed touchingly and in all the fullness of its tragic import, in the "Eumenides" of Aeschylus. The story is this: Agamemnon, King of Mycene, and husband of Clytemnestra, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, upon the command of the oracle on his expedition against Troy. The mother, indignant at the sacrifice of her daughter, takes, during her husband's absence, Aegysthos for her consort. Upon Agamemnon's return to Mycene, after an absence of many years, he is murdered by Aegysthos with the connivance of Clytemnestra. Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, avenges the murder of his father, at the instigation of Apollo and Athene, by slaying his mother and Aegysthos. The Erinnyes, as representatives of the old law, pursue Orestes on account of the murder of his mother. Apollo and Athene, the latter of whom, according to mythology, is motherless – she leaped full-armed out of the head of Jupiter – represent the new law, and defend Orestes. The issue is carried to the Areopagus, before which the following dialogue ensues. The two hostile principles come here into dramatic vividness of expression:

Erinnyes – The prophet bade thee be a matricide?

The Erinnyes, it will be noticed, recognize no rights on the part of the father and the husband; to them there exists only the right of the mother. That Clytemnestra slew her husband is indifferent to them; on the other hand, they demand punishment for the matricide, committed by Orestes: in killing his mother he had committed the worst crime imaginable under the old gentile order. Apollo, on the contrary, stands on the opposite principle. Commissioned by Zeus to avenge the murder of his father, he had led Orestes to the murder of his own mother. Apollo now defends Orestes' action before the judges, saying:

According to Apollo, the act of begetting confers the superior right; whereas, according to the views in force until then, the mother, who gives to the child her blood and its life, was esteemed the sole possessor of the child, while the man, the father of her child, was regarded a stranger. Hence the Erinnyes reply to the strange notions of Apollo:

The judges, thereupon, make ready for the sentence. One half stand by the old, one half by the new right; a tie is threatened; thereupon Athene seizes the ballot from the altar and dropping it in the urn, says:

The new right won. Marriage with the father as head, had overpowered the gyneocracy.

Another legend represents the downfall of the mother-right in Athens this way: "Under the reign of Kekrops, a double miracle happened. There broke forth simultaneously out of the earth an oil-tree, and at another place water. The frightened king sent to Delphi to interrogate the Oracle upon the meaning of these happenings. The answer was: 'The oil-tree stands for Minerva, the water for Neptune; it is now with the citizens after which of the two deities they wish to name their city.' Kekrops called together the assembly of the people in which men and women enjoyed the right of suffrage. The men voted for Neptune, the women for Minerva; and as the women had a majority of one, Minerva won. Thereupon Neptune was angered and he caused the sea to wash over the territory of the Athenians. In order to soothe the wrath of the god, the Athenians placed a threefold punishment upon their women: —they were to forfeit the suffrage, children were no longer to carry their mother's name, and they themselves were no longer to be called Athenian women."9

As in Athens, the transition from the mother to the father-right was everywhere achieved so soon as a certain height was reached in social development. Woman is crowded into the house; she is isolated; she is assigned special quarters – the gynekonitis – , in which she lives; she is even excluded from intercourse with the male visitors of the house. That, in fact, was the principal object of her isolation.

This change finds its expression as early as the Odyssey. Telemachus forbids Penelope's, his mother's, presence among the suitors. He, the son, orders his mother:

Such was the doctrine already common in Greece at that time. It went even further. Woman, even if a widow, stands so completely under the rule of the nearest male relative, that she no longer has even the choice of a husband. The suitors, tired of long waiting, due to the cunning of Penelope, address themselves to Telemachus through the mouth of Antinous, saying:

It is at an end with the freedom of woman. If she leaves the house, she must veil herself not to awaken the desires of another man. In the Orient, where, due to the warm climate, sexual passion is strongest, this method of seclusion is carried even to-day to extreme lengths. Athens becomes in this a pattern for the ancient nations. Woman shares, indeed, her husband's bed, but not his table; she does not address him by name, but "Sir;" she is his maid-servant; she was allowed to appear nowhere openly; on the street she was ever veiled and clad with greatest simplicity. If she committed adultery, she paid for the trespass, according to the laws of Solon, with her life, or with her freedom. The husband could sell her for a slave.

The position of the Greek woman at the time when Greece was rushing to the zenith of her development comes into plastic expression in the "Medea" of Euripedes. She complains:

Wholly otherwise stood matters for the men. Although with an eye to the begetting of legitimate heirs for his property, he imposed upon woman strict abstinence from other men, he was, nevertheless, not inclined to lay a corresponding abstinence upon himself.

Hetairism sprang up. Women distinguished for their beauty and intellect, and who, as a rule, were aliens, preferred a free life in intimate intercourse with men, to the slavery of marriage. Nothing objectionable was seen in that. The names and fame of these hetairae, who held intimate intercourse with the leading men of Greece, and participated in their learned discourses, as well as in their revels, has come down to our own days; whereas the names of the legitimate wives are mostly forgotten and lost. Thus the handsome Aspasia was the intimate friend of the celebrated Pericles, who later made her his legitimate wife; the name of Phryne became in later days the generic designation of those women that were to be had for money. Phryne held intimate relations with Hyperides, and she stood for Praxiteles, one of the first sculptors of Greece, as the model for his Aphrodite. Danae was the sweetheart of Epicurus, Archeanassa that of Plato. Other celebrated hetairae, whose names have reached our days, were Lais of Corinth, Gnathanea, etc. There is no celebrated Greek, who had no intercourse with hetairae. It belonged to the style of life of distinguished Greeks. Demosthenes, the great orator, described in his oration against Neara, the sexual life of the rich men of Athens in these words: "We marry a woman in order to obtain legitimate children, and to have a faithful warder in the house; we keep concubines for our service and daily care; and hetairae for the enjoyment of love." The wife was, accordingly, only an apparatus for the production of children; a faithful dog, that watched the house. The master of the house, on the contrary, lived according to his bon plaisir, as he willed.

In order to satisfy the demand for venal women, particularly with younger males, there arose that which was unknown under the rule of the mother-right, —prostitution. Prostitution distinguishes itself from the free sexual intercourse that customs and social institutions rendered a matter of course under primitive conditions, and, accordingly, freed from objectionableness, in that the woman sells her body, either to one man or to several, for material benefit. Prostitution, therefore, exists so soon as woman makes a trade of her charms. Solon, who formulated the new law for Athens, and is, consequently, esteemed the founder of the new legal status, was also the founder of the public houses for women, the "deikterion," – official houses of prostitution – , and the price to all the customers was the same. According to Philemon it amounted to one obolus, about four cents of our money. Like the temples with the Greeks and Romans, and the Christian churches in Middle Ages, the deikterion was inviolable: it stood under the protection of the Government. Until about a hundred and fifty years before our reckoning, the Temple of Jerusalem also was the usual place of gathering for the filles de joie.

For the benefit that Solon bestowed upon the Athenian male population, in founding the deikterion, he was praised in song by one of his contemporaries in these words: "Hail to you, Solon! You bought public women for the benefit of the city, for the benefit of the morality of a city that is full of vigorous young men, who, in the absence of your wise institution, would give themselves over to the disturbing annoyance of the better women." We shall see that, at the close of the nineteenth century, justification is sought for the regulation of houses of prostitution by Government, and for the necessity of prostitution itself, upon the identical grounds. Thus, actions, committed by men, were recognized by legislation as a natural right, while, committed by women, were held to be shameful, and a serious crime. As is well known, even to-day not few are the men who prefer the company of a pretty female sinner to that of their own wives, and who not infrequently belong to the "Props of the State," the "Pillars of Order," and are "guardians of the sanctity of marriage and the family."

True enough, it seems, that the Greek women often revenged themselves upon their marital-lords for the yoke placed upon them. If prostitution is the supplement of monogamy, on the one side, adultery among women and the cuckoldry of men is its supplement, on the other. Among the Greek dramatic poets, Euripides is the woman-hater: he loved to make women the object of attacks in his dramas. What all he twitted them with appears best from the speech that a Greek woman flings at him in the "Thesmophoria" of Aristophanes. She says among other things:

We can understand that this ready-tongued Greek woman should serve the assailer of her sex in such manner; nevertheless, Euripides could not very well have made these accusations, nor could he have found credence with the men, if they knew not but too well that the accusations were justified. To judge by the concluding sentences of this address, the custom – met later in Germany and many other countries – had not yet been naturalized in Greece, that the host placed his own wife or daughter at the disposal of his guest for the night. Murner writes on this custom, prevalent in Holland as late as the fifteenth century, in these words: "It is the custom in the Netherlands, when the host has a dear guest, that he lets his wife sleep with him on faith."11

The increasing struggles between the classes in the several states of Greece, and the sad state of many of the smaller communities, gave occasion for Plato to inquire into the best constitution and the best institutions for the State. In his "Republic," set up by him as ideal, he demands, at least for the first class of his citizens, the watchers, the complete equality of woman. Women are to participate in the exercises of arms, the same as the men, and are to fill the same duties as these, only they are to attend to the lighter ones, "owing to the weakness of the sex." He maintains that the natural inclinations are equally distributed among the two sexes, only that woman is in all matters weaker than man. Furthermore, the women are to be common to the men, and vice versa; likewise are the children to be common, "so that neither the father may know his child, nor the child his father."12

Aristotle, in his "Politics," is satisfied with less. Woman should have a free hand in the selection of her husband, but she is to be subordinate to him; nevertheless, she should have the right "to give good advice." Thucydides expresses an opinion that meets with the applause of all modern Philistines. He says: "That wife deserves the highest praise of whom, outside of her home, neither good nor bad is heard."

With such views, respect for woman was bound to sink to a low level; fear of over-population even led to the avoidance of intimate intercourse with her. Unnatural means of satisfying sexual desires were resorted to. The Greek states were cities with small territories, unable to supply the usual sustenance to a population in excess of a given number. Hence the fear of over-population caused Aristotle to recommend to the men abstinence from their wives, and pederasty, instead. Before him, Socrates had praised pederasty as the sign of a higher culture. In the end, the most promising men of Greece became adherents of this unnatural passion. Regard for women sank all the deeper. There were now houses for male prostitutes, as there were for female. In such a social atmosphere, it was natural for Thucydides to utter the saying that woman was worse than the storm-lashed ocean's wave, than the fire's glow, than the cascade of the wild mountain torrent. "If it is a God that invented woman, wherever, he may be, let him know, that he is the unhallowed cause of the greatest evil."13

The male population of Greece having become addicted to pederasty, the female population fell into the opposite extreme: it took to the love of members of its own sex. This happened especially with the women of the island of Lesbos, whence this aberration was, and still continues to be named, "Lesbian love," for it has not yet died out: it survives among us. The poetess Sappho, "the Lesbian nightingale," who lived about six hundred years before our reckoning, is considered the leading representative of this form of love. Her passion is glowingly expressed in her hymn to Aphrodite, whom she implores:

A still more passionate sensuousness is attested in her hymn to the handsome Atthis.

While in Athens, along with the rest of Greece, the father-right ruled, Sparta, the rival for supremacy with Athens, still continued under the mother-right, a condition that had become wholly foreign to most Greeks. The story runs that one day a Greek asked a Spartan what punishment was meted out in Sparta to the adulterer. He answered: "Stranger, among us there are no adulterers." "But if there should be any?" "For punishment," the Spartan replied, sarcastically, "he must donate an ox, so large as to be able to reach over Taygetus with his head, and drink out of Eurotas." Upon the startled question, put by the stranger, "How can an ox be so large?" the Spartan answered laughing: "How is it possible that there could be an adulterer in Sparta?" At the same time the self-consciousness of the Spartan woman appears in the proud answer given a stranger by the wife of Leonidas. On his saying to her: "You female Lacedaemonians are the only women who rule over your men," she answered: "So are we the only women who bring men into the world."

The free condition of women under the mother-right promoted her beauty, raised her pride, her dignity and her self-reliance. The judgment of all ancient writers is to the effect that, during the period of the gyneocracy, these qualities were highly developed among women. The constrained condition that later supervened, necessarily had its evil effect upon them. The difference appears even in the garb of the two periods. The garb of the Doric woman hung loose from her shoulders; it left the arms free, and thighs exposed: it is the garb of Diana, who is represented as free and bold in our museums. The Ionian garb, on the contrary, concealed the body and hampered its motion. The garb of woman to-day is, far more than usually realized, a sign of her dependence and helplessness. The style of woman's dress amongst most peoples, down to our own days, renders her awkward, forces on her a sense of weakness, and makes her timid; and this, finally, finds its expression in her attitude and character. The custom among the Spartans of letting the girls go naked until marriageable age – a custom that the climate allowed – contributed considerably, in the opinion of an ancient writer, to impart to them a taste for simplicity and for attention to decency. Nor was there in the custom, according to the views of those days, aught offensive to decorum, or inciting to lust. Furthermore, the girls participated in all the bodily exercises, just as the boys, and thus there was reared a vigorous, proud, self-conscious race, a race that was conscious of its own merit, as proved by the answer of Leonidas' wife to the stranger.

In intimate connection with the mother-right, after it had ceased to be a ruling social principle, stood certain customs, which modern writers, ignorant of their meaning, designate as "prostitution." In Babylon, it was a religious duty with the maid, who had reached puberty, to appear once in the temple of Mylitta in order to offer her maidenhood as a sacrifice, by surrendering herself to some man. Similarly happened in the Serapeum of Memphis; in Armenia, in honor of the goddess Anaitis; in Cyprus; in Tyrus and Sidon, in honor of Astarte or Aphrodite. The festivals of Isis among the Egyptians served similar customs. This sacrifice of virginity was demanded in order to atone with the goddess for the exclusive surrender of woman to one man in marriage: – "Not that she may wilt in the arms of a single man is woman arrayed by nature with all the charms at its command."14 The continued favor of the goddess had to be purchased by the sacrifice of virginity to a stranger. It was likewise in line with the old idea that the Lybian maids earned their dower by prostituting their bodies. In accord with the mother-right, these women were sexually free during their unmarried status; and the men saw so little objection in these pickings, that those were taken by them for wives who had been most in demand. It was thus also among the Thracians, in the days of Herodotus: "They do not watch the maidens, but leave them full freedom to associate with whom they please. The women, however, they watch strictly. They buy them from their parents for large sums." Celebrated were the Hierodulae of the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth, where always more than one thousand maidens were gathered, and constituted a chief point of attraction for the men of Greece. Of the daughter of King Cheops of Egypt, the legend relates that she had a pyramid built out of the proceeds of prostitution of her charms.

Conditions, similar to these, prevail down to now, on the Mariana, the Philippine and the Polynesian islands; according to Waitz, also among several African tribes. Another custom, prevalent till late on the Balearic islands, and indicative of the right of all men to a woman, was that, on the wedding night, the male kin had access to the bride in order of seniority. The bridegroom came last; he then took her as wife into his own possession. This custom has been changed among other people so that the priest or the tribal chiefs (kings) exercise the privilege over the bride, as representatives of the men of the tribe. On Malabar, the Caimars hire patamars (priests) to deflower their wives… The chief priest (Namburi) is in duty bound to render this service to the king (Zamorin) at his wedding, and the king rewards him with fifty gold pieces.15 In Further India, and on several islands of the great ocean, it is sometimes the priests and sometimes the tribal chiefs who undertake the function.16 The same happens in Senegambia, where the tribal chief exercises, as a duty of his office, the deflowering of maids, and receives therefor a present. Again, with other peoples, the custom was, and continues here and yonder, that the deflowering of a maid, sometimes even of a child only a few months old, is done by means of images of deities, fashioned expressly for this purpose. It may also be accepted as certain that the "jus primae noctis" (the right of the first night), prevalent in Germany and all Europe until late in the Middle Ages, owes its origin to the same tradition, as Frederick Engels observes. The landlord, who, as master of his dependents and serfs, looked upon himself as their chief, exercised the right of the head of the tribe, a right that he considered had passed over to himself as the arbiter of their lives and existence.

Echoes of the mother-right are further detected in the singular custom among some South American tribes, that, instead of the lying-in woman, the man goes to bed, there acts like a woman in labor, and is tended by the wife. The custom implies that the father recognizes the new born child as his own. By imitating the pains of child-birth, the man fills the fiction that the birth is also his work; that he, therefore, has a right to the child, who, according to the former custom, belonged to the mother and the mother's gens, respectively. The custom is said to have also maintained itself among the Basques, who must be looked upon as a people of primitive usages and customs. Likewise is the custom said to prevail among several mountain tribes in China. It prevailed until not long since in Corsica.

In Greece likewise did woman become an article of purchase. So soon as she stepped into the house of her marital lord, she ceased to exist for her family. This was symbolically expressed by burning before the door the handsomely decked wagon which took her to the house of her husband. Among the Ostiaks of Siberia, to this day, the father sells his daughter: he chaffers with the representative of the bridegroom about the price to be paid. Likewise among several African tribes, the same as in the days of Jacob, the custom is that a man who courts a maid, enters in the service of his future mother-in-law. Even with us, marriage by purchase has not died out: it prevails in bourgeois society worse than ever. Marriage for money, almost everywhere customary among the ruling classes, is nothing other than marriage by purchase. Indeed, the marriage gift, which in all civilized countries the bridegroom makes to the bride, is but a symbol of the purchase of the wife as property.

Along with marriage by purchase, there was the custom of marriage by rape. The rape of women was a customary practice, not alone among the ancient Jews, but everywhere in antiquity. It is met with among almost all nations. The best known historic instance is the rape of the Sabine women by the Romans. The rape of women was an easy remedy where women ran short, as, according to the legend, happened to the early Romans; or where polygamy was the custom, as everywhere in the Orient. There it assumed large proportions during the supremacy of the Arabs, from the seventh to the twelfth century.

Symbolically, the rape of woman still occurs, for instance among the Araucans of South Chile. While the friends of the bridegroom are negotiating with the father of the bride, the bridegroom steals with his horse into the neighborhood of the house, and seeks to capture the bride. So soon as he catches her, he throws her upon his horse, and makes off with her to the woods. The men, women and children thereupon raise a great hue and cry, and seek to prevent the escape. But when the bridegroom has reached the thick of the woods, the marriage is considered consummated. This holds good also when the abduction takes place against the will of the parents. Similar customs prevail among the peoples of Australia.

Among ourselves, the custom of "wedding trips" still reminds us of the former rape of the wife: the bride is carried off from her domestic flock. On the other hand, the exchange of rings is a reminiscence of the subjection and enchainment of the woman to the man. The custom originated in Rome. The bride received an iron ring from her husband as a sign of her bondage to him. Later the ring was made of gold; much later the exchange of rings was introduced, as a sign of mutual union.

The old family ties of the gens had, accordingly, lost their foundation through the development of the conditions of production, and through the rule of private property. Upon the abolition of the gens, grounded on mother-right, the gens, grounded on the father-right first took its place, although not for long, and with materially weakened functions. Its task was mainly to attend to the common religious affairs and to the ceremonial of funerals: to safeguard the mutual obligation of protection and of help against violence: to enforce the right, and, in certain cases, the duty of marrying in the gens, in cases when rich heiresses or female orphans were concerned. The gens, furthermore, administered the still existing common property. But the segmentation of handicraft from agriculture; the ever wider expansion of commerce; the founding of cities, rendered necessary by both of these; the conquest of booty and prisoners of war, the latter of which directly affected the household, – all of these tore to shreds the conditions and bonds of eld. Handicraft had gradually subdivided itself into a larger number of separate trades – weaving, pottery, iron-forging, the preparation of arms, house and shipbuilding, etc. Accordingly, it pushed toward another organization. The ever further introduction of slavery, the admittance of strangers into the community, – these were all so many new and additional elements that rendered the old constitution of society ever more impossible.

Along with private property and the personal right of inheritance, class distinctions and class contrasts came into existence. Rich property-owners drew together against those who owned less, or nothing. The former sought to get into their own hands the public offices of the new commonwealth, and to make them hereditary. Money, now become necessary, created thitherto unknown forms of indebtedness. Wars against enemies from without, and conflicting interests within, as well as the various interests and relations which agriculture, handicraft and commerce mutually produced rendered necessary complicated rules of right, they demanded special organs to guard the orderly movement of the social machinery, and to settle disputes. The same held good for the relations of master and slave, creditor and debtor. A power, accordingly, became necessary to supervise, lead, regulate and harmonize all these relations, with authority to protect, and, when needed, to punish. Thus rose the State, the product, accordingly of the conflicting interests that sprang up in the new social order. Its administration naturally fell into the hands of those who had the liveliest interest in its establishment, and who, in virtue of their social power, possessed the greatest influence, – the rich. Aristocracy of property and democracy confronted each other, accordingly, even there where externally complete equality of political rights existed.

Under the mother-right, there was no written law. The relations were simple, and custom was held sacred. Under the new, and much more complicated order, written law was one of the most important requirements; and special organs became necessary to administer it. In the measure that the legal relations and legal conditions gained in intricacy, a special class of people gathered shape, who made the study of the law their special vocation, and who finally had a special interest in rendering the law ever more complicated. Then arose the men learned in the laws, the jurists, who, due to the importance of the statutory law to the whole of society, rose to influential social rank. The new system of rights found in the course of time its classic expression in the Roman State, whence the influence that Roman law exercises down to the present.

The institution of the State is, accordingly, the necessary result of a social order, that, standing upon the higher plane of the subdivision of labor, is broken up into a large number of occupations, animated by different, frequently conflicting, interests, and hence has the oppression of the weaker for a consequence. This fact was recognized even by an Arabian tribe, the Nabateans, who, according to Diodorus, established the regulation not to sow, not to plant, to drink no wine, and to build no houses, but to live in tents, because if those things were done, they could be easily compelled to obey by a superior power (the power of the State). Likewise among the Rachebites, the descendants of the father-in-law of Moses, there existed similar prescriptions.17 Aye, the whole Mosaic system of laws is aimed at preventing the Jews from moving out of an agricultural state, because otherwise, so the legislators feared, their democratic-communistic society would go under. Hence the selection of the "Promised Land" in a region bounded, on one side, by a not very accessible mountain range, the Lebanon; on the other side, South and East, by but slightly fertile stretches of land, partly by deserts; – a region, accordingly, that rendered isolation possible. Hence came the keeping of the Jews away from the sea, which favored commerce, colonization and the accumulation of wealth; hence the rigid laws concerning seclusion from other peoples, the severe regulations against foreign marriages, the poor laws, the agrarian laws, the jubileum, – all of them provisions calculated to prevent the accumulation of great wealth by the individual. The Jewish people were to be kept in permanent disability ever to become the builders of a real State. Hence it happens that the tribal organization, which rested upon the gentile order, remained in force with them till its complete dissolution, and continues to affect them even now.

It seems that the Latin tribes, which took a hand in the founding of Rome, had long passed beyond the stage of the mother-right. Hence Rome was built from the start as a State. The women that they needed they captured, as the legend tells us, from the tribe of the Sabines, and they called themselves after their Sabine wives, – Quirites. Even in later years, the Roman citizens were addressed in the Forum as Quirites. "Populus Romanus" stood for the free population of Rome in general; but "Populus Romanus quiritium" expressed the ancestry and quality of the Roman citizen. The Roman gens was of father-right stamp. The children inherited as consanguineous heirs; if there were no children, the relatives of the male line inherited; were none of these in existence, then the property reverted to the gens. By marriage, woman lost her right to inherit her father's property and that of his brothers. She had stepped out of her gens: neither she nor her children could inherit from her father or his brothers: otherwise the inheritance would be lost to the paternal gens. The division in gentes, phratries and tribes constituted in Rome for centuries the foundation of the military organization, and also of the exercise of the rights of citizenship. But with the decay of the paternal gentes and the decline of their significance, conditions shaped themselves more favorably for woman. She could not only inherit, but had the right to administer her own fortune. She was, accordingly, far more favorably situated than her Greek sister. The freer position that, despite all legal impediments, she gradually knew how to conquer, caused the elder Cato, born 234 before our reckoning, to complain: "If, after the example of his ancestors, every head of a family kept his wife in proper subjection, we would not have so much public bother with the whole sex."18

So long as the father lived, he held in Rome the guardianship over his daughter, even if she were married, unless he appointed another guardian himself. When the father died, the nearest male of kin, even though declared unqualified as an agnate, came in as guardian. The guardian had the right at any time to transfer the guardianship to any third person that he pleased. Accordingly, before the law, the Roman woman had no will of her own.

The nuptial forms were various, and in the course of centuries underwent manifold alterations. The most solemn nuptials were celebrated before the High Priest, in the presence of at least ten witnesses. At the occasion, the bridal pair, in token of their union, partook together from a cake made of flour, salt and water. As will be noticed, a ceremony is here celebrated, that bears great resemblance to the breaking of the sacramental wafer at the Christian communion. A second form of nuptials consisted in possession. The marriage was considered accomplished if, with the consent of her father or guardian, a woman lived with the chosen man a whole year under one roof. A third form of nuptials was a sort of mutual purchase, both sides exchanging coins, and the promise to be man and wife. Already at the time of Cicero19 free divorce for both sides was generally established; it was even debated whether the announcement of the divorce was necessary. The "lex Julia de adulteriis," however, prescribed that the divorce was to be solemnly proclaimed. This decree was made for the reason that women, who committed adultery, and were summoned to answer the charge, often claimed to have been divorced. Justinian, the Christian20 forbade free divorce, unless both sides desired to retire to a monastery. His successor, Justinian II, however, found himself obliged to allow it again.

With the growing power and rising wealth of Rome, mad-brained vices and excesses took the place of the former severity of manners. Rome became the center from which debauchery, riotous luxury and sensuous refinements radiated over the whole of the then civilized world. The excesses took – especially during the time of the Emperors, and, to a great extent, through the Emperors themselves – forms that only insanity could suggest. Men and women vied with one another in vice. The number of houses of prostitution became ever larger, and, hand in hand with these, the "Greek love" (pederasty) spread itself ever more among the male population. At times, the number of young men in Rome who prostituted themselves was larger than that of the female prostitutes.

"The hetairae appeared, surrounded by their admirers, in great pomp on the streets, promenades, the circus and theatres, often carried by negroes upon litters, where, holding a mirror in their hands, and sparkling with ornaments and precious stones, they lay outstretched, nude, fan-carrying slaves standing by them, and surrounded by a swarm of boys, eunuchs and flute-players; grotesque dwarfs closed the procession."

These excesses assumed such proportions in the Roman Empire that they became a danger to the Empire itself. The example of the men was followed by the women. There were women, Seneca reports, who counted the years, not as was the usage, after the consuls, but after the number of their husbands. Adultery was general; and, in order that the women might escape the severe punishments prescribed for the offense, they, and among them the leading dames of Rome, caused themselves to be entered in the registers of the Aediles as prostitutes.

Hand in hand with these excesses, civil wars and the latifundia system, celibacy and childlessness increased in such measure that the number of Roman citizens and of patricians ran down considerably. Hence in the year 16 B. C., Augustus issued the so-called Julian Law,21 which offered prizes for the birth of children, and imposed penalties for celibacy upon the Roman citizens and patricians. He who had children had precedence in rank over the childless and unmarried. Bachelors could accept no inheritance, except from their own nearest kin. The childless could only inherit one-half; the rest fell to the State. Women, who could be taxed with adultery, had to surrender one-half of their dower to the abused husband. Thereupon there were men who married out of speculation on the adultery of their wives. This caused Plutarch to observe: "The Romans marry, not to obtain heirs, but to inherit."

Still later the Julian Law was made severer. Tiberius decreed that no woman, whose grandfather, father or husband had been or still was a Roman Knight, could prostitute herself for money. Married women, who caused themselves to be entered in the registers of prostitutes, were condemned to banishment from Italy as adulteresses. Of course, there were no such punishments for the men. Moreover, as Juvenal reports, even the murder of husbands by poison was a frequent occurrence in the Rome of his day – the first half of the first century before Christ.