What is marriage, how and why did it arise?
The terms "marriage" and "family" are common in both everyday speech and scientific publications, which is indeed legitimate, since the realities denoted by these terms are closely interrelated. However, marriage and family are not the same, they are not identical, but rather overlapping concepts, because a family can exist without marriage, and marriage without a family.
Marriage is a public institution, institution or, as lawyers and sociologists say, a special social institution, a special form of social order, along with, for example, the state as a special institution for regulating relations between its citizens, along with the institution of property, etc. Marriage is a historically conditioned, sanctioned and regulated by society form of relations between the priests, between a man and a woman, establishing their rights and duties in relation to each other and to children, to their offspring. In other words, marriage is a traditional means of forming a family and public control over it, one of the tools, ways, ways of self-preservation and development of society. The marriage form of regulating relations between representatives of different sexual groups did not appear immediately. In the deepest antiquity in the formation of man, at the first stages of the process of the transformation of the monkey stock into human society, the relations between people, including between the sexes, were regulated only by biological impulses, needs. At this time, all members of society could enter into sexual intercourse with each other,of this kind, that is, blood relatives: brothers and sisters, parents with their children, etc. This form of relationship between the sexes, the disorderly connection between them is called promiscuity( from the Latin promiscuis - mixed, universal).
Every woman in a given herd could belong to every man of the same herd, and vice versa, every man to every woman. This phenomenon is usually called endogamy, that is, marriage within a given community, an "internal" marriage. But, strictly speaking, this is not entirely accurate, because marriage in the modern sense of how public regulation of relations between the sexes at that time actually did not yet exist. It was just a biogenic premarital form of cohabitation between men and women.
Subsequently, due to the fact that the complications that often arose, the conflicts between people on a sexual basis threatened the very existence of this kind, the society was forced to introduce artificial regulation of sexual relations. Sexual taboos were introduced, a complete and unconditional prohibition of sexual intercourse between people within a given genus in certain periods. Violators of these prohibitions were punished in the most cruel manner, and for the first time in human society a cruel contradiction between social and biological that between the "wants" and "can not" is passing through the human psyche. Gradually, this gave birth to new, exogamous connections between people: deprived of the opportunity to enter into a relationship with women of a kind, men began to enter into truly casual connections with women of a different kind, another community. As we see, exogamy, this "primitive adultery", was essentially the first riot of human nature, the human body against attempts to establish a dictate of sociality over it.
Exogamous relations, apparently, immediately discovered their biological advantages: from bonds of this kind, more viable, viable children were born. Therefore, gradually endogamous connections were completely forbidden( remaining, however, for a long time, as an exception to the rules, only in the days of festive orgies, when all that was forbidden in ordinary, everyday days was allowed).The exogamous connections were stabilized and established by customs, and the first form of genuinely human, social regulation of relations between the sexes arose - what we now call marriage. Thus, the first form of marriage was in fact a group dual-generational marriage. Under him, all men of one kind "had the right" to marry with all women of a different kind. In other words, any woman of the same gender was the wife of any other kind of man. Group marriage existed at the end of the Stone Age.
But already within the framework of this group marriage, naturally, preferential, selective relations between this or that woman of the given kind and the man from other sort could have been formed( in other words, one of the "husbands" was especially sweet).Subsequently, preferential links with the most preferred partners became more and more widespread, were fixed by customs, and thus the society gradually passed to a new form of marriage - pair marriage. Only one married couple united in it. However, any of these "partners" could at the same time make up such pairs simultaneously, and even more so - consistently, "according to the schedule" or as the attachment to this partner disappears, with other people, partners or partners. At that time, the entire economy, the production of things, food, essential necessities, still remained within the framework of the primary genus. Just childbirth, the production of offspring went beyond its borders. And the "spouses" worked and lived separately from each other, within the limits of their births.(In modern terms, they were "coming" spouses).
Because biological paternity was difficult to establish under such conditions, it is almost impossible, the kinship was considered on the maternal line. Children born to a woman belonged to the kind that the woman herself belonged to."Husbands" and "wives" had separate farms, and if a man brought to his children his wife and herself as a gift a part of the food he had hunted, then this part was actually torn off, taken from the property of the kind to which the man belonged. In other words, creating more favorable conditions for a woman and children of another kind, he to some extent deprived these favorable conditions of his kind, including the children of his sisters. As we can see, already from its very inception the emerging family was in conflict with a broader community, with the clan.
At the very end of the Stone Age, and especially in the bronze and iron centuries, with the emergence of agriculture, with the growth of labor productivity of people, conditions are gradually being created when an individual, and even more so a married couple, was able to independently support and feed their children. Gradually, this twin family "budged" from the clan in the economic, production sense. Husband and wife joined their efforts not only in childbearing, but also in the production of things, began to have a common household. Relations between the sexes stabilized, the establishment of paternity became more reliable, and responsibility for the family, for the fate of the offspring, more and more passed to the man, to the father. Together with it, naturally, the power passed also. Thus, matriarchy relations gradually became patriarchal, when the relationship was already considered on the paternal, male line. And the new family, the highest form of the family, came to replace the married couple: a monogamous( that is, a unmarried) family. Monogamy was fully entrenched as a new form of marriage with the emergence of private ownership of the means of production, with the division of society into classes. His wife moved to live with her husband, her husband's family and, together with her children, fell under his authority. The former equality of spouses in marriage ended for many centuries.
With the transition to feudalism, the society established a single compulsory church marriage( although serfs could enter into it only with the permission of their master, landowner, feudal lord and practically at his choice).
It must be said that the patriarchal family existed and exists in the form of not only monogamous, but polygamous marriage, when one husband has the right to own several wives, sometimes a whole harem. In this case, the inequality of a woman in marriage is especially clearly visible - not only in economic and legal relations, but also in sexual relations, in relations between the sexes. A woman here has the right to marry only one man, while a man is simultaneously married to several women. Now polygamy exists in some Muslim countries, but it is already declining in the civilized strata of the population.
For the sake of justice, it should be noted that history knows and a different form of inequality in marriage: polyandry, that is, polyandry. And till now polyandry is found in some tribes of India, Tibet, South America. In India, most often the wife of the elder brother became the common wife of all the brothers - and the so-called fraternal or fraternal family was obtained. And a woman in such families usually occupies a high position, quarrels are extremely rare here, relations between family members are soft, benevolent.
It is known that private property is essentially a kind of relationship between two layers of society, one of which is a complete, supreme owner of the means of production, and the other is either completely deprived of them or acts only as a subordinate owner. Therefore, some representatives of society have the opportunity to appropriate some of the labor of others to themselves. With the emergence of private property and distribution, the distribution began to take place not as belonging to the given kind, as it was at the beginning of the history of mankind, at the first stages of the primitive communal system, and not in the amount of invested labor, as it was at the end of the generic order,that is, depending on what the members of society owned.
At the same time, those who owned more property, and received more regardless of how much labor he invested in the common cause.
Turning into the owner of the family, its property, including property previously belonged to his wife, the husband began to act as the breadwinner of children and wife, and they - as his dependents, regardless of who actually kept the family, at the expense ofwhose work - the head or the members of the family themselves - lived a family. He was considered a breadwinner only because he was the owner of the means of production. The situation of the woman has sharply worsened, she has actually become a powerless domestic slave.
The establishment of the relations of inheritance of wealth sharply posed the problem of biological paternity. The man was now extremely interested in the children of his wife being his children. Hence the laws that require a woman to keep her virginity before marriage and remain faithful to her husband in marriage. The betrayal of the wife was regarded as a grave sin, and for such misconduct even the Catholic church allowed to dissolve marriages. In some countries, and the state has become to protect the rights of men: in particular, in the middle of the XIX century in France, adultery on the part of the wife could be punished by imprisonment for up to two years.
But in principle, with a monogamous form of patriarchal marriage, there was equality in the relations between the sexes: a woman could have only one husband, and a man could have only one wife. In reality, however, this equality has always been formal. First of all, based on the principle of "enduring - falling in love", the women did not listen to the voice when they married her. In addition, immediately after the birth of monogamous marriage, a man in a slave society had the right to enter into a relationship with his slaves. The children born from such a connection did not have a father by law, but they were considered his property, that is, the property of the owner of the slave."It is the existence of slavery alongside monogamy," wrote F. Engels, "the presence of young beautiful slaves in the full possession of men, gave monogamy from the very beginning its specific character, making it a monogamy only for women, but not for men."In addition, there was also a heter, hetterism( the extreme form of which is prostitution).This further contributed to the violation of the monogamy of a man.
However, in fairness, it must be said that women also did not remain in debt. F. Engels caustically remarked that although "men defeated women, but the conquered generously took the crown of winners. Along with monogamy and hetaerism, an unrecoverable social phenomenon has become adultery, forbidden, strictly punishable, but ineradicable. "
As for the working people, and especially the working class, where the woman was involved in the process of material production from the very moment of marriage, she was no longer a dependent husband. This made her economically more equal with her husband, and the marriage in this case was not so much patriarchal-monogamous, as egalitarian, equal for both spouses. Recently, such a marriage, regardless of the social order, is becoming increasingly widespread among all mankind, in all segments of the population.
In our country adopted in 1918, the decree "On the introduction of equal pay for equal work for women and men" ended economic discrimination against women. The decrees "On civil marriage, on children and on the books of state certificates", "On the dissolution of marriage"( 1917) and other documents on the family were based on such principles as monogamy( prohibition of marriages with persons who are already married),equality of spouses in relation to property and in family relationships, compulsory financial support for disabled family members, etc. The current state of the state regulation of family and marriage relations in our country is described in more detail in the second section of the publication.