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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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Bridal virginity, unknown or dreaded in the lower cultures, acquires an inordinate significance. Bodily modesty comes to be accounted an "innate" feminine sentiment. The submissiveness, helplessness, physical debility and fragility, delicacy, the mental torpor and incapacity for intellectual labour of women come, as parts of the same ideal, to be accounted equally "innate" sexual characters.
The sentiment with which women are regarded by men undergo a no less profound transformation. The relations between the sexes have not, in the lower social phases, the sentimental associations which are marked in patriarchal societies, so that, love, in the romantic sense, may rightly be said to be absent.
The fact is that all sentiments of social affection undergo a profound change when the social group, instead of being constituted by a clan or similar assemblage, in which the paternal family is either entirely absent or wholly subordinate in social and economic importance to the larger group, comes to consist definitely of paternal families. The primitive social group is an undivided whole in which are no appreciable conflicts of economic interests. A society composed of paternal families, each of which is an imperium in imperio, is a battle-field for the strife of contending interests. The paternal family is, we saw, but an avatar of the individual as an economic unit, since it is represented by its head as holder of individual rights and claims of property and authority. From a relation of cooperation and solidarity between its members, the social group passes, with the advent of the paternal family, into one representing a competition of rival interests. The whole psychological basis of social sentiments becomes changed with the change in the economic basis. The social sentiment with which all members of the social group were regarded, no pronounced difference of attitude distinguishing particular individuals, whether male or female, come to be canalised, in a competitive individualistic society, and individualised. The savage usually refers to all members of his clan as "my friends". The term "friend" has not in his society an individual connotation; it is merely the opposite of stranger, or enemy. The individualisation of friendship and affection in a competitive individualistic society, has reference to the trust which, with the savage, is felt towards all members of the group.
That individualisation of affectionate sentiment and trust takes on a notable development as regards sexual companionship. The absence of romantic or passionate individual love in savage society is largely the effect of the diffused character of social sentiment.
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 374. 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/56&oldid=- (Version vom 9.6.2022)
