|
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
|
|
have no reference to the circumstance of physiological kinship. With the development of the paternal family, maternal sentiment undergoes a notable transformation. In the polygamous families of pastoral societies, the communal tending of children, which are regarded as belonging to the family as a whole rather than to any particular mother, proceeds to an even more marked extent than in the clan-group. In more advanced social and economic stages, however, where one of the wives brings economic advantages to the husband, generally in the form of a dowry of land or other wealth associated with aristocratic birth, the children born of the various wives are accounted as children of the noble, or chief, wife. Social economic relations thus once more overrule biological relations in the reckoning of kinship. The economic advantages arising from the acquisition of a wife who brings a dowry and is the heiress to land have led to the decay of the polygamy of purely pastoral societies, and to a gradual tendency towards monogamy in those societies where land cultivation is combined with pastoral holdings. Under those conditions the individualised maternal sentiments become centred upon the mother's own offspring. The children of other women, which in primitive societies equally stimulate the operation of maternal dispositions, come to arouse jealousy, more especially where they imperil in any way the economic prospects of the mother's own offspring, and still more if they are the offspring of the same father by another woman. The maternal sentiments assume a new possessive and individual character. They are conceived, by the assumption of a physiological law unknown to biology, to rest upon the fact of kinship. The sentiments of the mother towards her offspring are due, she supposes, to the fact that these are "her own flesh and blood". Those maternal sentiments are particularly centred upon male offspring, daughters being often regarded as poor substitutes as objects of maternal affection. That preference has doubtless a sexual basis, but that is greatly reinforced by the importance of male offspring in the transmission of family property under patriarchal usage.
The whole maternal disposition becomes moulded by social culture and sentiment as the chief function of the mother becomes the rearing of heirs. That which was a biological instinctive response is so overlayed with cultivated concepts and sentiments that it becomes hard to distinguish what is natural from what is cultural. The whole being of the women of a patriarchal society where their function is the production of heirs to property becomes shaped with a view to that function. A special code of morals arises for the purpose of protecting proprietary marital rights.
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 373. 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/55&oldid=- (Version vom 9.6.2022)
