Criminality and economic conditions

by Willem Adriaan Bonger

We come, then, to the end of our exposition. It seems to me that it has been shown that the different forms of marriage are in the last instance determined by the respective modes of production. Hence the origin of monogamy, the most recent form of marriage, is not to be found in the innate desire of the man and the woman to be united [[307]]for the whole of their lives, a desire which the law is supposed to sanction. Quite on the contrary men are not all monogamous, and still less monogamous during the whole of their life; a circumstance because of which the present economic conditions have produced the legal marriage, obliging two persons to remain together; if it were otherwise the law would not concern itself with the relations between man and woman.

Some important modifications have taken and are taking place in this matter. The bases upon which the present marriage system rests are changing. This is due to different reasons. In the first place woman is coming little by little to occupy a higher and more independent social position. Next, the importance of housekeeping in the economic life is diminishing. The only moral basis for marriage is little by little coming to be mutual love and sympathy, for true love can only exist between persons free and equal.[57] There is a constantly increasing number of persons who, in place of stigmatizing as immoral a union that is non-legitimate, but contracted because of mutual love and sympathy, consider it, on the contrary, as superior to a legal marriage contracted for economic reasons.

Finally, it is to be noted that the present economic and social life has bound up the sexual life with the economic life, by making marriage possible only for those who have the necessary means at their disposal, and consequently has caused the compulsory celibacy of millions of men and women.

B. The Family.

In the preceding pages we have fixed the attention principally upon the relation between the man and the woman, and it now remains to treat of the position of the children born of their union.

It is a biological fact that the mother is designed by nature to have the care of the child during its first years, and consequently this care persists through all phases of the social development. It is, then, superfluous to speak of it in a sociological treatise.

The relations between parents and children have not always been the same in the different phases of social development, and it is therefore impossible to speak here of relations instituted by nature. A glance at the respective situations in the different periods shows that among the “lower hunters”, where the woman is considered as the property of the man, the children born are also in the absolute power [[308]]of their father, who has the right of life and death over his children, and whose power over them ceases only when he has sold his daughters to their husbands, or when his sons, having become adults, are recognized as members of the tribe.[58]

Among the upper hunters and the pastoral peoples it is, as with the peoples named above, to the father, in general, that the children belong, or to whom they owe obedience. The mother, herself in subjection to the father, has little or no authority over the children.[59]

Among the lower agriculturists the conditions in question differ relatively very much. As has been shown in the considerations upon marriage among these peoples, the position of woman is often quite other than during the preceding periods. She is not at all in so subordinate a situation, her position is even not without importance, thanks to the place which she occupies in the economic life. And this importance shows itself also in her relations with her children. In general it is to the mother that the education of the children falls, while the influence of the father is little or nothing. In these last cases a greater or less power belongs to the mother’s brother (under the matriarchate the grandfather and father of the children belong to another clan, and the maternal uncle and the children belong to the clan of the mother).[60]

As has already been said above conditions among the higher agriculturists were patriarchal. The father had unlimited power over his unmarried daughters, and over all his sons with their descendants.[61] It is from these so-called “great families”, that the present form of the family springs (husband, wife, and their not yet emancipated children) as a consequence of the fact that the adult sons have been able to emancipate themselves on account of the modifications that the economic life has undergone. From this time especially the affection for children in general which is found among almost all people, takes on an exclusive character, and becomes limited to one’s own children. For monogamy is before all a consequence of the desire of the man, which came in with private property, to leave his possessions to the children of his legal wife, whose father he knew himself to be.[62]