classifying kin relationships. Social scientists used these ties in order to validate contemporary western family structures ideologically as universal, to confirm their ‘naturalness’. Anthropologists documented a bewildering variety of marriage types across the world, including monogamy (having only one spouse), polygamy (having more than one wife or husband at a time) and polyandry (having more than one husband at a time); matriarchal (woman as ruler of the family) and patriarchal (man as ruler of the family) unions; households with matrilocal residence (move to the wife’s home) and patrilocal residence (move to the husband’s home). The aim of early sociological studies of the family was to navigate a path through these variations to create hypothetical constructions about ‘original’ or ‘prior’ forms of marriage. The aim was to prove that the acceptable western version of monogamous marriage is the final, correct and highest stage of social evolution.
Early biological and anthropological studies employed analogies with the animal kingdom by referring to the mating behaviour of higher primates. These analogies justified dominant western conceptions of the family in the nineteenth century (Saini 2017). Despite the lack of any representative examples, evolutionary schemes were devised from selected aspects of existing ‘simple societies’ to pinpoint and prove a natural earlier stage of marriage organization. For instance, the nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologist Lewis Morgan constructed an evolutionary scheme in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family (1870) in which he interpreted matriliny (descent through the female line) as preceding patriliny (descent through the male line) and monogamy as the final evolutionary stage. Morgan’s position was refuted by Edward Westermarck in his History of Human Marriage (1921), first published in 1891. He contested the hypothesis that primitive societies were promiscuous, believing that humans were originally monogamous.
For proof, Westermarck used a biological discourse influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin. He relied on selected examples of monogamy both among anthropoid apes and among hunter-gatherer peoples, who were considered by social evolutionists as the most primitive societies. In this way, Westermarck argued that the nuclear family was prefigured among the anthropoids and was therefore the primary and universal unit from which contemporary society evolved. The child’s need for parental protection generates the need for a family as a unit for the continued existence of the species. The male remains with the female and child to protect them, and this is governed by instincts achieved through natural selection. These kinds of anthropological attempts at explaining kinship and marriage were no more than elaborate hypotheses. Yet they were accepted among academic and wider communities because biological determinism supported a particular ideology to identify and reaffirm a ‘proper’ kind of family.
By the early twentieth century, however, it became increasingly clear that bonds of family require social recognition, rather than simply relying on the factor of biological procreation. Anthropologists were finding that, especially in societies beyond the so-called ‘West’, kinship is defined by social as well as blood ties. Societies were being discovered in which the physiological role of the male in reproduction was not recognized. In some non-western societies, little or no significance was attached to the relationship between sexual union and the arrival of a baby nine months later. The husband regarded a child born to his wife as his own simply because she was his wife. In parts of Melanesia, for instance, it was found that the family to which a child belonged was not determined by the physiological act of birth but by the performance of some social act (Malinowski 1932). The social-cultural construction of kinship and meanings of feminine and masculine was further examined by anthropologist Margaret Mead in works such as Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). Drawing on this pioneering work, contemporary anthropologists have referred to the radically different role of fathers in nurturing and family involvement across two neighbouring tribes in East Tanzania: the Hadza people (hunter-gatherers, where men are highly involved in caring for children) and the Datoga people (skilled farmers, where men are socially expected to be warriors and to be kept outside the domestic sphere) (see Saini 2017).
American sociologists Ernest W. Burgess and Harvey J. Locke defined the modern family as nuclear in The Family: From Institution to Companionship (1945), describing it as a group of people united by marriage, blood or adoption. This family group was defined as a single household whose members interacted with one another in their respective social roles of husband and wife, mother and father, brother and sister, to create a common culture. Importantly, then, Burgess and Locke included not only blood ties but also the social family tie of adoption in their definition of the modern family. This social family tie was normatively underlined by the practical requirement that a man should publicly acknowledge himself to be a child’s ‘father’.
Engels: family, private property and the state
Many of the prominent political ideologies preceding the twentieth century failed to advance the cause of women. The idea that the position of women in society is an indicator of social progress emerged through the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. But this did not yet translate into equal rights for the sexes (Therborn 2004). Although science overtook religion as the established authority for advancing knowledge in the nineteenth century, gender inequality and women’s inferiority persisted in scientific discourse. The rationale for gender difference was now established by Nature, rather than God. With his colleague Karl Marx, Frederick Engels challenged this account by arguing that women’s oppression was merely treated as fixed and unchangeable. Engels explained religious or ‘natural’ accounts as flawed ideological rationalizations employed to support a system of exploitation. He argued that the family was an unnatural institution designed to ‘privatize’ wealth and human relationships.
Engels’ book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1972 [1884]) is a seminal work that traced the evolution of family organization from prehistory to the present. It comprised a historical approach to the family in relation to the issues of social class, female suppression and ownership of private property. His aim was to offer a social explanation for women’s oppression with regard to the rise of the patriarchal family and private property during a particular historic period. This explanation was quite daring for the time: it challenged the dominant view that women’s inferior status was God-ordained or founded on biological, physical, intellectual and moral inferiority. According to Engels, the traditional monogamous family household was a recent concept that supported capitalist, property-owning societies. He argued that the division of labour and commodity exchange between individuals emerged as social class distinctions at this last phase of social evolution, and that the repression of women then became clearly visible.
For Engels, the patriarchal nature of the current family system was one in which women were not only servants to men but, to all intents and purposes, prostitutes. He claimed that liberation from class and gender oppression was possible for all. Engels explained that, originally, unrestricted sexual intercourse prevented a sure way of determining parentage. Descent could only be traced by the female line, in compliance with matriarchal law. As mothers, women received respect and deference which led to complete rule by women (gynaecocracy). The shift to monogamy, in which a certain woman was reserved exclusively for one man, undermined the primeval religious law of sexual freedom. Engels claimed that property and inheritance through family ties prevent people from engaging in free, passionate relationships. In his view, it was only through socialism that ‘individual sex love’ could occur and a communist society could lead to communal living, equality, sexual freedom and the collapse of the state.
Feminist writers have criticized Engels for not giving sufficient weight to women’s issues. Although Engels distinguished between social production and reproduction, he subsumed reproduction under production by claiming that women’s liberation is dependent on economic liberation (Evans 2011). Engels’ work has also been criticized for using inaccurate anthropological sources. Nevertheless, his book represented a significant critique of the Victorian nuclear family and continues to reverberate as a daring critique of sexual inequality. By studying the connection between patriarchy and capitalism, he was able to address the question of sexual
