Page:Zelda Kahan - The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels (1920).pdf/41

of Friedrich Engels Ancient Society was treated in the same way by the spokesmen of prehistoric science in England.

"My work can offer only a meagre substitute for that which my departed friend was not destined to accomplish. …"

Needless to say, in this short booklet we cannot give any adequate résumé of this work, but in view of its interest and importance we shall attempt to give as much as space will permit.

By filling in the gaps in Morgan's investigation, by working on the rich material in Ancient Society on the development of the gens and the family, and by applying to it the materialistic conception of history, Engels traces in this book the development of the family from the early group marriage through various stages corresponding with the economic development of society, to its present monogamic form.

Like every other existing institution of society hallowed by time and the convenience of the governing class, the present form of the family is looked upon as a divinely ordained institution, or as the most natural form of relation between the sexes without any relation to our particular form of society.

As a matter of fact, however, the family, like every other social institution, has had a long history, and has developed in accordance with the development of society and the growth of private property. The earliest form of the family corresponding to the state of savagery was that of group marriages. As society progressed to the state of society known as barbarism, we have the pairing family, in which each man has a principal wife, and to the wife this man is her principal husband. The marriage of near relations was more and more prohibited, but so long as society was organised in the form of gentes, the family in the modern sense did not exist. On the contrary, we have the communistic form of the household, in which most or all the women belonged to one and the same gens, while the husbands came from various gentes. In these households, the women naturally played a leading rôle and were anything but the slave of man. Thus, says Arthur Wright, quoted by Engels: "The female part generally ruled the house; the provisions were held in common, but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too indolent or too clumsy to contribute his share to the common stock. No matter how many children, or how much private property he had in the house, he was liable at any moment to receive a hint to gather up his belongings and get out. And he could not venture to resist. The house was made too hot for him, and he had no other choice but to return to his own clan (gens), or, as was mostly the case, to look for another wife in some other clan. The women were the dominating power in the gentes (clans) and everywhere else. Occasionally they did not hesitate to dethrone a chief and degrade him to a common warrior." But the growth of wealth and of private property changed all this.

How great a rôle the question of property already played in later