What is a monogamous marriage, its origins and history. What are the monogamous families, the nature of the modern monogamous marriage.
A monogamous family is a form of marriage and living of two, when He throughout his life has only one partner - a wife, and She lives only with a single man who is her husband.
Origin of the monogamous family
Before talking about a monogamous family, you need to understand what a pair marriage is and how it differs from monogamy - monogamy. Friedrich Engels in his study "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" believed that in the era of matriarchy there was an unstable union of man and woman. It was a form of pair marriage, which replaced the group consanguineous and incestuous union of the male and female sex.
The family in this case was fragile, the spouses lived separately in their clans. This did not involve running a common household. The children traced their ancestry to the mother, inherited her property.
In the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, pair marriage was replaced by the type of family - monogamous patriarchal. One man entered into a marriage union with several women. Over the centuries, this family union was replaced by monogamy. When one man began to live with a single woman.
This is how the monogamous family emerged, which became the support - the cell of society. The husband and wife ran a common household, and the children already considered their ancestry not on the maternal line, but on the paternal line.
If we talk about the reasons for the emergence of a monogamous family, one should bear in mind the revolution in the development of the productive forces of society. This implies the totality of the means of production and people. Man learned to make more perfect tools of labor, which led to better living conditions.
From collecting the gifts of nature, man moved on to arable farming. Subsistence farming replaced commodity production when there was a surplus of products. The relationship between a man and a woman took on a completely different essence. The role of the male sex in the family has increased significantly.
The emergence of a monogamous family is the consolidation of the dominant role of men in the state. This happened with the emergence of private property and the stratification of society into rich and poor. A class society emerged when the position of various categories of people became unequal. This affected family relationships.
Now the head of the family dictated his rights to the woman and children, and those who did not obey his instructions could be kicked out of their home or deprived of their inheritance. The concept of what a monogamous family means took on an imperious connotation, the father began to be considered the breadwinner of his wife and his children. And they switched to the role of dependents.
It's important to know! The modern monogamous family is a family consisting of a husband and wife, and one or two children. Nowadays, three or more kids are very rare.
