Ancient Society[edit]

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State begins with an extensive discussion of
Morgan's Ancient Society, which aims to describe the major stages of human development, and
agrees with the work that the first domestic institution in human history was the matrilineal clan.
Morgan was a pioneering American anthropologist and business lawyer who championed the land
rights of Native Americans. Traditionally, the Iroquois had lived in communal longhouses based on
matrilineal descent and matrilocal residence, giving women a great deal of power. Engels stressed
the theoretical significance of Morgan's highlighting of the matrilineal clan:
The rediscovery of the original mother-right gens as the stage preliminary to the father-right gens of
the civilized peoples has the same significance for the history of primitive society as Darwin’s theory
of evolution has for biology, and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy.
— Engels, Friedrich (1884). "Preface to the Fourth Edition". The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State. New York: Pathfinder Press. pp. 27–38, the quotation is on p.36.
Primitive communism, according to both Morgan and Engels, was based in the matrilineal clan
where women lived with their classificatory sisters – applying the principle that "my sister’s child is
my child". Because they lived and worked together, women in these communal households felt
strong bonds of solidarity with one another, enabling them when necessary to take action against
uncooperative males. Engels cites this passage from a letter to Morgan written by a missionary who
had lived for many years among the Seneca Iroquois,
As to their family system, when occupying the old long-houses, it is probable that some one clan
predominated, the women taking in husbands, however, from the other clans; and sometimes, for a
novelty, some of their sons bringing in their young wives until they felt brave enough to leave their
mothers. Usually, the female portion ruled the house, and were doubtless clannish enough about it.
The stores were held in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to
do his share of the providing. No matter how many children, or whatever goods he might have in the
house, he might at any time be ordered to pack up his blanket and budge; and after such orders it
would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey. The house would be too hot for him; and, unless
saved by the intercession of some aunt or grandmother, he must retreat to his own clan; or, as was
often done, go and start a new matrimonial alliance in some other. The women were the great power
among the clans, as everywhere else. They did not hesitate, when occasion required, to "knock off
the horns", as it was technically called, from the head of a chief, and send him back to the ranks of
the warriors. The original nomination of the chiefs also always rested with them.
— Morgan, Lewis H. (1877). Ancient Society. London: Macmillan. p. 455.
According to Morgan, the rise of alienable property disempowered women by triggering a switch
to patrilocal residence and patrilineal descent:
It thus reversed the position of the wife and mother in the household; she was of a different gens
from her children, as well as her husband; and under monogamy was now isolated from her gentile
kindred, living in the separate and exclusive house of her husband. Her new condition tended to
subvert and destroy that power and influence which descent in the female line and the joint-
tenement houses had created.
— Morgan, Lewis H. (1881). Houses and house-life of the American Aborigines. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press. p. 128.

Development of human society and the family[edit]

Engels added political impact to Morgan's studies of women in prehistory, describing the "overthrow
of mother right" as "the world-historic defeat of the female sex"; he attributed this defeat to the onset
of farming and pastoralism. In reaction, most twentieth-century social anthropologists considered the
theory of matrilineal priority untenable,[1][2] though feminist scholars of the 1970s-1980s
(particularly socialist and radical feminists) attempted to revive it with limited success.[3] In recent
years, evolutionary biologists, geneticists and palaeoanthropologists have been reassessing the
issues, many citing genetic and other evidence that early human kinship may have been matrilineal
after all.[4]
Engels emphasizes the importance of social relations of power and control over material resources
rather than supposed psychological deficiencies of "primitive" people. In the eyes of both Morgan
and Engels, terms such as "savagery" and "barbarism" were respectful and honorific, not negative.
Engels summarises Morgan's three main stages as follows:
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), whose pioneering anthropological study of Native American
peoples was adapted by Frederick Engels in The Origin of the Family.

1. Savagery – the period in which man's appropriation of products in their natural state
predominates; the products of human art are chiefly instruments which assist this
appropriation.
2. Barbarism – the period during which man learns to breed domestic animals and to practice
agriculture, and acquires methods of increasing the supply of natural products by human
activity.
3. Civilization – the period in which man learns a more advanced application of work to the
products of nature, the period of industry proper and of art.
In the following chapter on family, Engels seeks to connect the transition into these stages with a
change in the way that family is defined and the rules by which it is governed. Much of this is still
taken from Morgan, although Engels begins to intersperse his own ideas on the role of family into
the text. Morgan acknowledges four stages in the family.
The consanguine family is the first stage of the family and as such a primary indicator of our superior
nature in comparison with animals. In this state marriage groups are separated according to
generations. The husband and wife relationship is immediately and communally assumed between
the male and female members of one generation. The only taboo is a sexual relationship between
two generations (i.e. father and daughter, grandmother and grandson).
The punaluan family, the second stage, extends the incest taboo to include sexual intercourse
between siblings, including all cousins of the same generation. This prevents most incestuous
relationships. The separation of the patriarchal and matriarchal lines divided a family into gentes.
Interbreeding was forbidden within gens (anthropology), although first cousins from separate gentes
could still breed.
In the pairing family, the first indications of pairing are found in families where the husband has one
primary wife. Inbreeding is practically eradicated by the prevention of a marriage between two family
members who were even just remotely related, while relationships also start to approach
monogamy. Property and economics begin to play a larger part in the family, as a pairing family had
responsibility for the ownership of specific goods and property. Polygamy is still common amongst
men, but no longer amongst women since their fidelity would ensure the child's legitimacy. Women
have a superior role in the family as keepers of the household and guardians of legitimacy. The
pairing family is the form characteristic of the lower stages of barbarism. However, at this point,
when the man died his inheritance was still given to his gens, rather than to his offspring. Engels
refers to this economic advantage for men coupled with the woman's lack of rights to lay claim to
possessions for herself or her children (who became hers after a separation) as the overthrow of
mother-right which was "the world historical defeat of the female sex". For Engels, ownership of
property created the first significant division between men and women in which the woman was
inferior.
On the monogamous family, Engels writes:
It develops from the pairing family, as we have already shown, during the time of transition from the
middle to the higher stage of barbarism. Its final victory is one of the signs of beginning civilization. It
is founded on male supremacy for the pronounced purpose of breeding children of indisputable
paternal lineage. The latter is required, because these children shall later on inherit the fortune of
their father. The monogamous family is distinguished from the pairing family by the far greater
durability of wedlock, which can no longer be dissolved at the pleasure of either party. As a rule, it is
only the man who can still dissolve it and cast off his wife.
— Engels, Friedrich (1884). "Preface to the Fourth Edition". The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State. New York: Pathfinder Press. p. 75.

Family and property[edit]

Engels' ideas on the role of property in the creation of the modern family and as such modern
civilization begin to become more transparent in the latter part of Chapter 2 as he begins to
elaborate on the question of the monogamous relationship and the freedom to enter into (or refuse)
such a relationship. Bourgeois law dictates the rules for relationships and inheritances. As such, two
partners, even when their marriage is not arranged, will always have the preservation of inheritance
in mind and as such will never be entirely free to choose their partner. Engels argues that a
relationship based on property rights and forced monogamy will only lead to the proliferation
of sexual immorality and prostitution.
The only class, according to Engels, which is free from these restraints of property, and as a result
from the danger of moral decay, is the proletariat, as they lack the monetary means that are the
basis of (as well as threat to) the bourgeois marriage. Monogamy is therefore guaranteed by the fact
that theirs is a voluntary sex-love relationship.
The social revolution which Engels believed was about to happen would eliminate class differences,
and therefore also the need for prostitution and the enslavement of women. If men needed only to
be concerned with sex-love and no longer with property and inheritance, then monogamy would
come naturally.