In this state of a somewhat limited promiscuity the only natural tie was that between mother and child. The child belonged exclusively to the mother, and therefore, in the wider sense, belonged to his mother’s totem. As Bachofen proved in his celebrated work,[161] in primeval times, and among many primitive tribes even at the present day, the “mother-right” (matriarchy), founded upon purely sensual, non-individual relations, was predominant; and only with the appearance of freer, more spiritual, more individual relations between the sexes (though this did not necessarily involve the development of monogamy) was “mother-right” first superseded by “father-right” (patriarchy).
These recent ethnological researches have proved the untenability of Westermarck’s criticism of the doctrine of promiscuity; it is no longer possible to doubt the fact of a primitive sex-companionship, taking the form of a more or less limited promiscuity of sexual intercourse. Ludwig Stein also lays stress on this view.[162] The sexual relationships of the primeval hordes were either quite unregulated, or regulated only to a very small extent.
In this view of the matter there is nothing in any sense degrading to the human race; on the contrary, in the development of individual, enduring relationships between man and woman out of a condition of primitive promiscuity, we see manifested a continuous progression from lower to higher social forms of the sexual relationships, a gradual improvement and ennoblement of these relationships, until the development of monogamic marriage (which even to-day is merely an ideal state, since the reality does not correspond to it, or the original pure idea has been falsified and obscured).
The transition from matriarchy, resting on a purely natural basis, in which women assumed a leading social position, and often also a leading political position, to patriarchy, in which the spiritual and the individual relationships were brought into the foreground, signified a great step forward in the developmental history of marriage. Bachofen was the first to recognize the profound importance in the history of civilization and for the spiritual and social life of humanity of this transition of the mother-right to the father-right, from matriarchy to patriarchy. Schurtz found the following formula to express the change:
“Woman is the central point of the natural groups arising from sexual intercourse and reproduction; man, on the other hand, is the creator of free forms of society based upon the sympathy of like kinds.”
The development of the individual personal marriage is most intimately dependent upon patriarchy. In this sense, but only in this sense, Eduard von Mayer is right when he points to man as the true creator of the family. For under the matriarchal system the “family” was incomplete: it consisted only of mother and child. Only with the development of patriarchy could the family become a complete whole. This patriarchal family, which is also our modern family, is thus “the masculine form of the human tendency to social aggregation.”[163]
The father-right consisted in the right of the father over the wife and her children; it was a right of domination acquired by a severe struggle. The rape of women and marriage by capture belong to the beginnings of patriarchy; later, when woman, completely enslaved, had fallen to the position of a mere chattel, marriage by purchase was introduced. The debased position of women under the domination of the primitive father-right can be best studied among the Greeks, where free sexual relationships were possible only in connexion with hetairæ and the love of boys. To the Greeks of classical antiquity the love of boys was precisely that which to the modern civilized man hetero-sexual love is, resting upon the most personal, most individual, most spiritual contact and understanding.
Kohler has beautifully described the bright side of the complete and unrestricted father-right:
“Now for the first time the man founds his home; he is the master of the domestic herd, he is the priest of sacrifice at the domestic altar; his ancestors are present in the spirit; he honours them; the house is permeated by them. In his house nothing unclean shall exist; he teaches the children propriety and dependence on the family; and the wife, at the moment when, as a bride, she crosses the threshold of her husband’s house, or is carried across it, gives up her household gods; his home is now her home. Now, at the domestic hearth, the virtues flourish—those virtues which become the preliminaries of national greatness. In the bosom of his family the man gains power, which fits him for the most important functions, whether in the life of the State or in the life of science; and a township or an agricultural community based upon such conditions constitutes the necessary foundation upon which to erect the structure of ethical, scientific, and political life. The wife passes into the background, but in the house she develops new virtues; self-sacrifice to the family, a domestic sense, joy in the home, amiability in narrower circles, are the bright sides of her influence, for the wife knows how to develop everywhere beautiful traits of character, so long as her lot is not cast amidst rude or degenerating conditions.”
The most ancient form of marriage under the father-right was polygamy, as, for example, we find it described in the Old Testament. Here we have a typical picture of the patriarchal order of family. The head of the house and of the family has a principal wife for the procreation of legitimate issue, but, in addition, numerous concubines. Among the Jews, the great stress laid upon father-right gave rise to the so-called “Leviratsehe”—that is to say, a widowed wife was compelled to marry the brother of her deceased husband, in order that the race of the dead man should be continued. Out of this patriarchal polygamy there gradually arose monogamic marriage, which down to the present time—let us insist on the matter once for all—has remained an ideal, never in reality attained, either by the Greeks or Romans or in the modern civilized world. For the modern civilized marriage is mainly a production of the father-right, and stands under the dominion of “man-made” morality, which, beside monogamy, legally established and assumed to be binding, tolerates “facultative polygamy”; hence there is here concealed an element of lying and hypocrisy which has rightly brought into discredit the modern patriarchal marriage as a conventional form among those who regard as the true ideal of marriage in the future the enduring life in common of two free personalities endowed with equal rights.