The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

has mothers. With the American kinship system Verwandtschaftssystem, which the Hawaiian family corresponds to, brother and sister cannot be father and mother of the same child; the Hawaiian kinship system Verwandtschaftssystem, however, presupposes a family in which this is, on the contrary, the rule. We are placed here into a series of family forms that directly contradict those hitherto commonly assumed to be the only ones valid. The traditional conception knows only monogamy Einzelehe, alongside polygyny Vielweiberei (of one man), and at most polyandry Vielmännerei (of one woman), and thereby conceals, as befits the moralizing philistine, that practice quietly but uninhibitedly overrides these boundaries imposed by official society. The study of prehistory Urgeschichte, on the other hand, leads us to conditions where men live in polygyny Vielweiberei, and their women simultaneously in polyandry Vielmännerei, and the common children therefore count as common to them all; conditions which themselves pass through a whole series of changes until their eventual dissolution into monogamy Einzelehe. These changes are such that the circle encompassed by the common marriage bond, which was originally very wide, narrows more and more until it finally leaves only the individual pair Einzelpaar that prevails today.

By constructing the history of the family backwards in this way, Morgan comes into agreement with the majority of his colleagues on a primeval state Urzustand where unrestricted sexual intercourse Geschlechtsverkehr prevailed within a tribe, so that every woman belonged to every man and every man to every woman equally. The discovery of this primeval state is the first great merit of Bachofen.*) From this primeval state developed, probably very early:

*) How little Bachofen understood what he had discovered, or rather guessed, he proves by the designation of this primeval state Urzustand as hetaerism Hetärismus. Hetaerism denoted to the Greeks, when they introduced the word, intercourse of men, unmarried or living in monogamy Einzelehe, with unmarried women, presupposes