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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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That hypothesis is, in my opinion, conclusively excluded by the facts of social ethnography. In societies where economic conditions have not given rise to important private property, paternal families are not formed. The men have not the right to remove women from the latter's homes and to transfer them to theirs; they have no juridic rights over their children, who are not reckoned as members of their social groups, and they exercise no authority over either wife or children.
Those conditions are found very extensively distributed over every continent, in every race, and in every region. Wherever they do not obtain at the present day, and the practice of removing a wife at marriage to her husband's home is now observed, conclusive evidence exists that it has been preceded by matrilocal usages, and there is nowhere any indication of a change of custom in the opposite direction. The evidence that matrilocal marriage was the original custom extends to those peoples who offer most conspicuous examples of fully developed patriarchal social organisation in paternal families, such as the Chinese, the Aryan Indians, the Semites, and the Greeks, which latter observe the matrilocal usage to this day in the more secluded islands of the Aegean. Roman society itself, whence the European constitution of the paternal family is derived, followed at one time the maternal order of succession, not from father to son, but from maternal uncle to sister's children, and the Roman tribes or curiae, reckoned their ancestry in the female line [1].
But there is an even more clinching proof that the paterna family has everywhere been preceded by the matrilocal family.
Wheresoever the former is established, the right of the man to remove his wife and to count the children as his has to be acquired by means of an economic transaction. That right, upon which rests the constitution of the paternal family, exists nowhere unless it has been purchased. The authority of the head of the family over wife and children, has been everywhere established by economic acquisition.
After prolonged, detached viewing of that evidence and those arguments, I consider that it is no overstatement to say that they exclude completely the hypothesis that the paternal family has anywhere been the original form of social group, and that estimate has been confirmed by competent judges.
That conclusion has, as might be expected, been rejected, or waived aside, or ignored by those numerous social anthropologists
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 360. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Zeitschrift_f%C3%BCr_Sozialforschung_Jahrgang_2_Heft_3.pdf/42&oldid=- (Version vom 31.5.2022)
- ↑ The full evidence is given in my work, The Mothers, vol. 1, p. 268 ff
