Preface to the Fourth Edition¶
Core Argument¶
Seven years had elapsed since the first edition went out of print, and the publisher's demands for a new edition had been delayed by more pressing work. Those years had brought important advances in the understanding of primitive family forms, necessitating careful revision and additions before the text could be stereotyped. A short review of the history of the family from Bachofen to Morgan is given, chiefly because chauvinistic English anthropologists strive to kill Morgan's discoveries by silence while appropriating his results.
Before the 1860s, no history of the family existed. The patriarchal family from the Five Books of Moses was assumed to be the oldest form, identified with the bourgeois family, as if the family had no historical development. Only sexual promiscuity in primitive times was admitted. Polygamy in the Orient and polyandry in India and Tibet were known but could not be arranged historically. Facts about matrilineal descent and marriage prohibitions were known but treated as mere 'curious customs'.
The study of the history of the family dates from Bachofen's Mutterrecht (1861). He advanced: original sexual promiscuity (using the mistaken term 'hetaerism'); descent reckoned only in the female line (mother right); women held high honour, founding a gyneocracy; the transition to monogamy violated a primitive religious law, expiated by the woman's limited surrender. Bachofen found proofs in classical literature, interpreting the Oresteia as the conflict between declining mother right and triumphant father right. Yet he believed religion was the lever of world history, ending in mysticism. Nevertheless, he proved that traces of a state prior to monogamy survived, that descent was originally reckoned in the female line, and that mothers held a higher social status than women have since enjoyed.
McLennan (1865) was Bachofen's opposite: a dry jurist who found 'marriage by capture' among many peoples and constructed a rigid opposition between exogamous and endogamous 'tribes'. He argued exogamous tribes obtained wives only by capture, deriving exogamy from female infanticide causing a surplus of men. Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) fully develops what he had only guessed in 1871, demonstrating that no antithesis exists between endogamy and exogamy; exogamous 'tribes' have never been proven. Under group marriage, the tribe was subdivided into mother-right gentes, within which marriage was forbidden. Men of a gens took wives from outside it, making each gens exogamous but the tribe endogamous, finally demolishing McLennan's constructions. Morgan's second advance was discovering in the American Indian mother-right gens the primitive form from which the father-right gens of civilised peoples developed, solving the old riddle of the Greek and Roman gens. This rediscovery has the same importance for anthropology as Darwin's theory for biology and Marx's theory of surplus value for political economy. It enabled Morgan to outline the first history of the family with classic stages determined. Despite some minor hypotheses being shaken, none of Morgan's great leading ideas have been ousted; the order he introduced into primitive history still holds in its main lines.