Woman and Socialism

by August Bebel

[20] Similar conditions are still met with in Camerun and in other parts of Western Africa. A German naval surgeon who studied the land and people from his own observations sends us the following information: “Among a great many tribes the right of inheritance is founded on maternity. Paternity is a matter of indifference, only children of the same mother consider one another brothers and sisters. A man does not will his property to his own children, but to his sisters’ children, his nephews and nieces, who can be shown to be his nearest blood relations. A chief of the Way tribe explained to me in broken English: ‘My sister and I surely are blood relations, for we are children of the same mother. My sister again surely is the blood relation of her son. So her son is my heir, and when I die he will be king of my town.’ ‘And your father?’ I asked. ‘I do not know what that is, my father,’ he replied. When I then went on to ask him whether he had no children of his own, he was convulsed with laughter and replied that with them not men but only women had children. I can assure you,” our informant goes on to say, “that even the heir of King Bell in Camerun is not his son, but his nephew. The children of Bell, many of whom are being trained in German cities, are but the children of his wives, while their fathers are unknown. One of them I might lay claim to myself.”—How are the people who deny the existence of maternal law impressed by this description of present-day conditions?! Our informant is a keen observer who goes to the bottom of things. But few who live among these savages do so. Therefore we are given such false descriptions of the alleged “immorality” of the natives.

[21] H. v. Weislocky: “Sketches of the Life of the Transylvanian Gypsies.”

[22] Tarnowsky: “Pathological Phenomena of Sexual Desire.”

[5.—Rise of the State.—Dissolution of the Gens in Rome.]

After the dissolution of the matriarchal gens, the patriarchal gens took its place with considerably diminished functions. The chief function of the patriarchal gens was the strict observation of common religious and funeral rites and mutual aid and protection. It entailed the right, and sometimes the duty, to marry within the gens; the latter being the case especially in regard to rich heiresses and orphans. The gens also controlled all the remaining common property.

With the rise of private property and the right of inheritance connected with it, class distinctions and class antagonism came into existence. In the course of time the propertied members made common cause against the propertyless ones. The former sought to gain control of the administrative positions and to make them hereditary. Finance had become a necessity and entailed conditions of indebtedness that had previously been unknown. Struggles against external enemies, internal conflicts of interest, and the varied interests and relations created by agriculture, industry and trade, necessitated a complicated system of laws and the formation of public bodies destined to keep the social machine in orderly motion and to settle disputes. The same was true concerning the relations of masters and slaves, debtors and creditors. Thus a power was needed to control all these relations, to conduct, regulate, arbitrate, protect and punish. The state came into existence as a necessary product of the new social order based on conflicting interests. Its direction naturally was assumed by those who had the greatest interest in its founding and who, thanks to their social power, were most influential: the propertied classes. Thus aristocracy of wealth and democracy opposed one another, even where complete equality of political rights was maintained.

During the old matriarchal system no written law existed. Conditions were simple and custom was hallowed. In the new, far more complicated order, written law became one of the urgent necessities and special officials were needed for its administration. But as the legal relations became more and more complicated, a special class of persons arose, devoted exclusively to the study of law and having a special interest in still further complicating them. The jurists, the lawyers, came into existence, and owing to the importance of the law to the body social, they soon became one of the most influential estates. The new civic jurisprudence in the course of time found its most classic expression in the Roman state, that explains the influence exerted by Roman law down to the present time.

We see then that the state organization is the natural outcome of a society divided into a great variety of occupations and having varied, frequently opposing and contending, interests. An inevitable result was oppression of the weaker members. This truth was recognized by the Nabataeans, an Arabian tribe, who, according to Diodorus, issued the command neither to sow nor to plant, to drink no wine, and to build no houses, but to live in tents, for if they did all these things they might be compelled to obey by a superior power (the state). Among the Rechabites, the descendants of the father-in-law of Moses, we find similar decrees.[23] In fact, Mosaic law is framed in a manner destined to prevent the Jews from developing beyond the stage of an agricultural society, because their lawmakers feared that it might bring about the downfall of their democratic, communistic organization. For the same reasons the “holy land” was selected in a territory that was bounded on the one side by a mountain range which was difficult of access, the Libanon, and on the other, especially in the East and South, by barren lands and a desert, making isolation possible. For the same reasons, moreover, the Jews were kept at a distance from the sea, which is favorable to commerce, colonization and the acquirement of wealth. For the same reasons there were strict laws forbidding mingling and intermarriage with other nations; and the poor laws, the agrarian laws, the year of jubilee, all were institutions destined to prevent the acquirement of great fortunes by individuals. The Jews were to be prevented from becoming a state-forming nation. That is why the old gentile constitution founded on tribal organization was maintained by them until their dissolution, and has left its traces among them even to-day.

Apparently the Latin tribes who participated in the foundation of Rome had already superseded the matriarchal development. As previously stated, they robbed the women who were wanting among them from the tribe of the Sabines and called themselves Quirites after these. At a much later date the Roman citizens in the popular assembly were still addressed as Quirites. “Populus Romanus” designated the free population of Rome generally; but “populus Romanus quiritium” designated Roman citizenship by descent. The Roman gens was patriarchal; the children inherited from their natural parent. In case there were no children the property fell to relatives on the man’s side, and if these were wanting, it fell to the gens. By marriage the woman lost all rights of inheritance to her father’s property and that of her father’s brothers. She withdrew from her gens, and thus neither she nor her children could inherit from her father or his brothers. Otherwise the hereditary portion would have been lost to the paternal gens. The division into gentes and phratries for centuries remained the foundation of military organization and the enactment of civic rights. But with the decay of the patriarchal gentes and the decline of their significance, conditions became more favorable to Roman women. They not only obtained the right of inheritance, they also obtained the right to control their own fortunes; they accordingly held a far more favorable position than their Greek sisters. This freer position gradually won by them, gave the elder Cato—born 234 B. C.—cause for the following complaint: “If the head of each family, following the example of his ancestors, would seek to maintain his wife in proper submissiveness, the entire sex would not give so much trouble publicly.” When a few tribunes in the year 195 B. C., moved to repeal a law enacted previously, for the purpose of restricting the luxury of women in dress and personal adornment, he stormed: “If each of us had maintained his manly authority with his own wife, we would have less bother here with all the women. Our power that has been shattered in the home, now is being broken and trampled upon in the forum too by the unruliness of women, and because we are incapable of resisting them individually, we fear them all together. Our ancestors decided that women should not even attend to their private affairs without the control of a guardian, that they should be subject to their fathers, brothers, husbands. But we submit to it that they take possession of the republic and interfere with the popular assembly. If you give free reign to the imperious natures of these unruly creatures, do not imagine that they will recognize any limits of their tyranny. The truth is that they desire freedom, nay, dissoluteness, in all things, and when they have begun to be our equals, they will soon be our superiors.”

At the time Cato delivered this speech the father was guardian to his daughter during his lifetime, even when she was married, unless he appointed another guardian. When the father died the nearest male relative assumed the guardianship. The guardian had the right to transfer this guardianship to whomever and whenever he pleased. Originally then the Roman woman had no will of her own before the law.