Social problems of the family / by Ernest R. Groves.

  • Ernest R. Groves
Date:
[1927]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Social problems of the family / by Ernest R. Groves. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    When the anthropologists began to study the question they could find no clear evidences of this promiscuous life, even among some of the higher animals. Birds are monogamous. Nowhere has promiscuity been found among savages. The theory has been largely abandoned now. One does find illustrations of something that seems to be a communistic sex life but rightly interpreted it is not that, rather it is a variation from a standard family life. As far as we can get evidence the first family life seems to have been very much like ours in that it was monogamous. Promiscuity may have occurred, but there is nothing to demonstrate its existence; its prevalence is a purely theoretical assumption. Morgan also said that among peoples with a rudimentary family life each generation married within itself promiscuously, so that all the younger men and women were mates, and the members of the elder generation, their parents; a child could not distinguish his own father and mother from the group of his potential fathers and mothers. This idea Morgan got from the fact that in the Hawaiian Islands, as elsewhere, the children call all the men father. The confusion apparently resulted from a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word, father; to Morgan the word meant what we mean by father, to the Hawaiians it meant men of the older generation. The savage was simply classifying the two generations. Likewise, when the young people used a certain term in speaking of each other it did not follow that they were mingling freely in their sex life, but that they were recognizing the fact that they belonged to the gen eration within which they would later marry. Lowie's statement of the situation is representative of the mod ern viewpoint regarding the theory of promiscuity in human history : Sexual communism as a condition taking the place of the individual family exists nowhere at the present time ; and the arguments for its former existence must be rejected as unsatisfactory. This conclusion will find confirmation in the phenomena of primitive family life. 1 Forms of Marriage. —Polygyny is one of the variations of marriage. We are apt to get the idea that it is common because it is permissible, but it cannot be common unless there are many more women than men. This does not often happen among savages. If one man has many wives, others will have none unless there is a 1 Primitive Society, p. 62.
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