Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/11

 Rh mate. The children remained in the mother's family and the mother's brother was a nearer relative and owed greater duty to the child than the father himself.

Between the pairing family and the monogamiam intervenes the patriarchal family. This was monogamous in nature and concept, but when the patriarch was rich enough it became polygamous because slavery had arisen and he had the right over his female slaves.

Monogamy arose with the development of private property. It is far from meaning the sole association of one man with one woman, as the word would imply. It simply means the legal recognition of the marriage of one man and one woman. This in turn, means that the children of such a marriage are the only legitimate heirs of the persons involved. Side by side with it grew the two nasty heirlooms of modern civilization—prostitution and adultery. Neither the ancient masters nor the feudal lords recognized the first iota of the moral concept of monogamy. The ancients had a house full of pretty female slaves and their intellectual female associate was not the wife but the hetaera. The knights of the middle ages had the right over their female serfs and their romantic love, so beautiful in song and poetry, steered headlong for prostitution and adultery. Nor does monogamy fare better, from a moral point of view. to-dav, with its crop of divorces and its host of scandals. Many of our leading pillars of society have several living wives and many of our prominent society ladies have ditto husbands. The "affinity" is becoming as well recognized as the Greek hetaera. For the rest, man buys his sexual pleasures from the women whom poverty forces to sell. There is small difference between that and the ancient institutions under which he took the same privilege as his divinely ordained right. The modern way only is more hypocritical, as it is considered shameful and the shame and blame fall upon the woman only.

Historic monogamy is a strictly economic institution. It