The history of the family as such begins when the development of productive forces reaches a level that ensures the separation of a monogamous family from one man and one woman living in a long-term marriage, as well as their offspring.
The etymology of the Russian word "marriage" indicates a kinship with the ancient n "marry", ie "take away". The Ukrainian word "marriage" originates from the ancient Slavic word "marriage", which meant a solemn promise. "Marry" in a number of Slavic languages means to agree.
Marriage is a socially sanctioned form of relations between the sexes and the attitude towards offspring, ie a means of regulating sexual relations and reproduction of the population. It is a free and equal union of women and men, concluded in accordance with the procedure and conditions established by law, which forms a family and gives rise to mutual personal and property rights and responsibilities between spouses.
Modern marriage is monogamous (monogamy - strong, stable monogamy) and is historically the fourth form of marriage known to mankind. instinct.
Yes, prohibitions (taboos) were imposed on sexual intercourse between men and women of this genus in certain periods (preparation for hunting, hunting itself). Taboos led to customs that later gave rise to exogamous marriages (inter-tribal, inter-tribal). The emergence of exogamous marriage coincides with the process of formation of homo sapiens, which appeared about 40 thousand years ago. sexual intercourse, there was exogamy - systematic sexual relations between members of different genera. There is a group (dual-gender) marriage, where all men of one gender are men of all women of another gender, and men of this second gender, respectively, - men of women of the first.
torn from each other. Group marriage has not yet become a personal marriage, ie there are no permanent "married" couples. Under such a relationship, it was impossible to determine the line of paternity. The origin of the children was considered only by the mother, only the female lineage was recognized. The children knew only their mothers.
Sisters with their children, blood brothers and other relatives were the maternal lineage. The material basis of group marriage was mainly the household, as hunting could not always ensure the welfare of the genus. Double marriage was not regulated by the community - it was supported only by the good will of the partners, so it was not yet monogamous. A man could be in such a paired relationship with several women, just as a woman could be in a relationship with several men.
Such a marriage was rather primitive-egalitarian, ie equal. This form of marriage arose about 25-24 thousand years ago, which was due to the transition to new forms of economic relations within the genus, the emergence of personal property.
the next step towards the establishment of the family, its transformation into an economic unit of society. The man gave "his" wife from another family part of the surplus, the woman could give him his own. And while there was a gift exchange, the relationship between man and woman was maintained. This is how an individual couple got married.
The formation of a separate paired family involved inadequate gift exchange, ie that a man gave a woman more than she gave him. Thus, the husband became the breadwinner of the family, wife and children. Such a practice caused the emergence of such a permanent economic unit within the dual-tribal organization as a community consisting of paired families. Each of them included a man, a woman and her children.
In this form, the marriage looked like a union between a man and a woman, and one of the goals of this union was to ensure the maintenance and upbringing of the woman's children. Finally, with the emergence of double marriage, sexual intercourse between partners was regulated not only by moral norms but also by certain socio-economic relations.
The emergence and strengthening of private property led to the establishment of class relations, which laid the foundations of modern marriage. - monogamy. Monogamous marriage and the monogamous family achieve their classical form only in a mature class society.
Since the ownership of private property on the means of production became the basis forsludge created in society, the man acts as a breadwinner only because he is the owner of the means of production. The development of new economic relations changed the role of partners in the family, the woman actually became a slave to her husband, maternal law was abolished. According to F. Engels, it was a world-historical defeat of the female sex, as a result of which "the man seized the helm of power in the house, and the woman was deprived of her honorable position, enslaved, turned into a slave to his desires, a simple tool of childbearing." / p>
In a slave-owning and feudal society, women were deprived of many civil rights. They were also in an unequal position before the law, which declared a man the ruler of all family members. In ancient Rome, a husband after a year of living with his wife could make her his slave or sell him into slavery. The woman's paternal family, by taking her daughter under its wing at least once a year, saved both her freedom and her citizenship rights.
husband's home. This day became a family holiday, when a woman was released from her usual household chores, congratulated, and presented with gifts. The holiday fell on March and it is a modern tradition to celebrate March 8 - International Women's Day.
In bourgeois society, the family begins to lose its patriarchal character and acquire the features of equality, egalitarian family. In such a family, the husband and wife worked, both supporting their children. Their marriage was based on equal relations. Thanks to the women's movement for their liberation since the end of the XIX century. they began to have basic economic and political rights. At present, only in four countries are women deprived of the right to participate in parliamentary elections (Liechtenstein, San Marino, South Africa, Andorra). The rights of women are limited in three countries (Spain, Bolivia, Guatemala). The main prerequisite is the consent of the future spouse to the marriage, its registration. Otherwise, one of the spouses may declare the marriage invalid through the court. The need to include this condition in the number of those that determine the validity of marriage, caused by (albeit infrequent) cases of abduction (according to tradition) of brides. However, consent is not yet a sufficient basis for the marriage to be valid.
The second condition for marriage is the marital age of the future spouse.
Adherence to the principle of monogamy is the third condition for marriage, moreover, Deviation from this principle is considered a crime in our country and is prosecuted, as is well known, by the relevant articles of the Criminal Code.
The fourth condition is the absence of any kinship between the future spouses.
Finally, the fifth condition is the mental health of those who marry. The law does not allow marriage between persons, one of whom has been declared legally incompetent due to mental illness. The appearance of mental defects after marriage entitles one of the spouses to divorce.
Regulating personal and property relations between spouses, parents and children, determining the conditions of marriage and divorce, Fundamentals of Marriage and Family Law are aimed primarily at strengthening the family, protecting the interests of children. Thus, the state protects the interests of society as a whole, given the influence of the family on relations in it, on the nature of social processes taking place in it.
The history of the family as such begins from the moment when the development of productive forces reach a level that ensures the separation of a monogamous family from one man and one woman living in a lasting marriage, as well as their offspring.
The first type of family was patriarchal, where male supremacy belonged. Such family relationships were called patriarchy. Under the influence of changing living conditions, patriarchy takes various forms. In some countries of the East, polygyny is still practiced, in which a man is in several marriages at the same time. In Europe and most of the world, the evolution of the patriarchal family was towards monogamy.
At the beginning of its formation, the patriarchal family was very large and could number several hundred people. It included relatives and descendants of one parent along with their wives, children and relatives. The family also included slaves and concubines. Due to its internal reserves as a large production unit, the patriarchal family, having survived slavery, survived under feudalism. But the development of the capitalist mode of production destroyed it for the rest.
The industrialization of production, the earlier separation of labor from the family gave rise to a new variety - the nuclear family (from the Latin "nucleus" - the nucleus). This term was first used by the American sociologist J. P. Murdoch, who thus referred to a family consisting only of the necessary I her education members - men and women. Such a family can have as many children as it wants, although it does not exclude their absence.
A nuclear family can be complete or incomplete. The latter has one of the parents and his children. The nuclear family has become a kind of response to the needs of modern industrial society. It is more mobile, and social production is known to often require people to move from one area to another. This type of family is more democratic in the sense that it does not require a single profession for its members, forms different lifestyles, expands the range of forms of leisure, etc. The social security system, development of services, increasing pensions also stimulate the formation of nuclear because they remove the need for support from sick and elderly people from close relatives. The number of families, which include three generations of relatives, is steadily declining.
In the conditions of modern social production, the skills and abilities to reveal one's talents play an increasing role. Relatives can do little to help in this, which in turn limits the frequency of meetings between them, weakens their relationship. authority, determines the structure of the family. Dominants in the spectrum of these relations form two main types of family - authoritarian and democratic. An authoritarian family is based on the strict, indisputable submission of a woman to her husband (or husband to wife), and children to their parents. For a democratic family is characterized by equal participation of spouses in family life, their joint decision-making. The latter is possible with mutual respect between family members, taking into account both the peculiarities of different life situations, and personal qualities and abilities of both to share intra-family roles.
In contrast to the authoritarian family, where one of spouses monopolize the helm of government, in a democratic family, as a rule, there is no "official" head. Emerging life situations bring to the fore the leader, that is, the spouse (and sometimes adult children) who has the greatest authority in resolving specific issues.
Sociological research shows that the structure of the modern nuclear family is evolving towards the formation of an egalitarian family (from the Latin egalitäre - equalizer), in which all adult members have an equal share of rights and responsibilities, while children occupy a fairly independent position. / p>Analysis of family functions helps to answer the question posed earlier: what role does it play in society? Of course, the very functions of the family, their place, meaning and subordination reflect, on the one hand, the influence of society on the family, on the other - it performs a number of social tasks related to its place in the social structure.
Many researchers emphasize the growing importance of functions in the modern family that meet emotional and socio-psychological needs. The latter is especially noticeable in the practice of relations between the urban family, which, to a lesser extent than the rural family, has retained the features of the productive share of society.
One of the main functions of the family is economic. The historical forms of the family that preceded the nuclear one were closely connected with production activities. In the conditions of pre-capitalist formations, labor was not separated from the family. From an early age, children joined the type of work in which they were employed, as a rule, all family members. Each historical form of the family was characterized by a special organization of consumption and life.
The separation of labor from the family under capitalism left it with the function of accumulating material goods. In the conditions of our country, taking into account the prospects of revival of private and further development of cooperative forms of ownership, one should hope to strengthen the considered function of the family, although until recently it was envisaged to narrow its scope. To some extent, there is a revival of the production function.
Considering the historical forms of family and marriage, we must turn to the classic work of F. Engels "The origin of the family, private property and the state", which was written in 1884 p. and has some significance and scientific value today.
In "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" Engels revealed the laws and major stages of development of the primitive communal system and the causes of its inevitable demise. He showed the emergence and development of the family, private property, classes and the state, ie the forces that undermined this primitive society from within and led to the formation of a class society.
In science for a long time, until the 60's years of the last century, the family was considered the original, most ancient form of ancient society, from which later arose the genus, tribe, state:
In this paper, Engels proved that such a formula does not reflect the real state of affairs.
< F. Engels studied the results of Morgan's research, vol was the work of a number of scholars on the history of ancient society, after which he gave a new explanation of the historical forms of family and marriage.nature and has not yet produced anything, but only took ready-made products of the material world. This period was characterized by disorderly sexual intercourse - every woman belonged to every man, as well as every man - every woman. This is the tribal period. Marital relations are built indiscriminately by relatives, without taking into account the degree of kinship. Marriages were allowed both horizontally and vertically - between parents and children, between brothers and sisters. It is clear that such periods as marriage, family are unknown to this period; neither family nor marriage existed here, but there was a tribe like an indivisible cell.
From this initial state, two forms of group marriage emerged:
A related family is the first stage of family development. This is a form of family, when a related group (horde, village) is divided into different layers of generations. Marriages are built within generations. Marriage between members of different generations is forbidden, but in one generation they are allowed, despite the blood relationship. So, all siblings, relatives and side relatives - live together without restriction. Marital relations here are built horizontally and are prohibited vertically, ie between parents and children. It was a progress, a step forward in the development of the family. Parents live in one circle, and children in another.
Brothers and sisters - relatives, cousins, etc. - are all considered brothers and sisters and therefore men and women of each other. The sibling family relationship at this stage of the family includes mutual sexual relations as a matter of course. Punalua.
Punalua is the second stage of family development, when not only parents and children, but also brothers and sisters can be married.
Punalua - in the language of the people of Hawaii means "spouse" - so called men who have women in common and women who have men in common. The range of marital (sexual) relationships is even more limited. Here the restrictions are not only vertical but also horizontal. Men of one group enter into marital (sexual) relations with women of the second group. This is how exogamy, ie extramarital marriage, occurs. The group of sisters has a common group of men, but women are excluded from this group of men, and men's sisters are excluded from the group of women. With this form of family, it is still unknown who the child's father is, but it is known who the mother is. If she calls all the children of the common family her own and performs maternal duties towards them, she still distinguishes her own children from others. It is clear from here. Once there is a group marriage, the origin can be established only from the maternal side, and therefore only the female line is recognized. second kind and had nothing to do with the woman's property. They are members of another kind (alien husbands). If a woman died, the property was left to her children, sisters, parents - they all made up what is called a family. Such a family was called orphan.
Men came to this family for marital cohabitation and were not relatives. Intra-family marriages were forbidden. There was a "maternal right", usually in a conditional, not a true sense of the word, because then there was no law as such. ' And there was a genus, as the original cell of the tribal system, as part of the tribe.
The existence of this form of marriage is not an accidental phenomenon, it has a material basis. This soil was then a collective household and women occupied a leading position in it. A strong household was created around the family, in which men hunted, and the entire burden of the household was borne by women, so they occupied an honorable and leading position in the family. The era of matriarchy has existed for tens of millennia.
As tribal life developed, the notion of kinship became more widespread. Consequently, the circle of persons between whom marital relations were forbidden expanded, and it was more difficult to find a woman with whom one could marry. Because of this, the man had to live with one woman, although this polygamy (polygamy) was not denied in principle.
The Punalua family did not stand still, it developed. What is this development? The marriage circle is beginning to narrow more and more, and this has led to the fact that not only brothers and sisters, but also cousins and then cousins began to be removed from it. That is why in the conditions of the ancestral system the Punalua family is replaced by a paired family (3rd form). There remains one, still weakly connected married couple - the molecule with the disintegration of which the marriage ends altogether. Merit in the formation of tacos Engels attributes the first marriage to a woman who, because of her biological development - greater attachment to a certain person (which is less common in men) - tried to live with one man.
The couple pushed out a group of married couples who were slowly disappearing due to the ban on marrying blood relatives. When a couple's family appears, there is the inclusion and purchase of women. This is an outward sign of a radical coup that took place in the depths of group marriage. For the most part, several paired families live in the same house, run a joint utility company, and the farm is run not by men but by women, because during marriage men move to women, not the other way around.
A paired family in conditions the tribal system was unstable, the marriage could be easily dissolved because it was based on personal feelings. The children remained with their mothers. At this stage of development, "maternal law" still prevails - the child receives from the mother the name of his ancestral union. The farm did not belong to a couple, but to a family, and it was a marital cell, not a household. This paired family cannot be confused with monogamy (monogamy), because in order for a paired family to develop into a lasting monogamous family, other reasons were needed than those that acted, namely, the action of social drivers was necessary. forces.
Domestication of domestic animals and breeding of herds created unprecedented sources of wealth and gave rise to new social relations. But who owned these riches - the surplus of food? At first, they certainly belonged to the family. when the surplus appeared, it had to be appropriated, and it was appropriated by a couple's family. As a result, the brocade family is undergoing radical changes. All the rest became the property of the man, because he created it. A paired family ceases to be a marriage cell and becomes an economic cell. She occupies an independent position and thus opposes herself to the role. for the benefit of the descendants of the female tribe, as it was before. But while the pedigree came from the mother, such a change could not be introduced. Therefore, the old order must be changed and, in the end, it was changed in favor of the paternal system of pedigree and inheritance. , that all future children pass into the family of their parents. It was a long process in which the pedigree of the maternal line was changed to the pedigree of the parents due to the fact that paternal authority under the influence of new economic reasons prevails in the family. The matriarchal paired family gives way to the patriarchal family, which grows out of its depths.
F. Engels wrote in his work: “The overthrow of maternal law was a worldwide historical defeat for women. The man seized power at home, and the woman lost her honorable position, was turned into a servant, a slave to his lust, a simple instrument of childbearing. "'
The patriarchal family is an intermediate link between the couple and monogamy. This is proved by the works of MM Kovalevsky, who studied the patriarchal family that existed among Serbs and Bulgarians. It is based on the domination of a man with a clear purpose - the birth of children. The origin of these children from the father is beyond doubt. And this is necessary in order for children, as direct heirs, to take possession of the father's property. A monogamous family is distinguished from a double marriage by strong marital ties that can no longer be broken at the request of the parties. Now, as a rule, only a husband can divorce and banish his wife. Only he has the right to adultery. The existence of slavery along with monogamy, the presence of young beautiful slaves at the complete disposal of man, gave monogamy from the very beginning a specific character, making it monogamy only for women and not for men.
Engels wrote: "Monogamy is not an example of a relationship between a man and a woman. It manifests itself as the enslavement of one sex to another, as a manifestation of the hostility of the sexes. "'
and the state defended the interests of private property. All these forms determine each other and do not exist without each other.
Engels noted that the monogamous family was not the fruit of love, it was a form of family based on economic conditions. So, summing up the above, it should be noted that in his work "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" Engels proved historically transitional nature of different forms of marriage and the family, showed that changes in the family and marriage have always been caused by changes in the material life of society, and the position of men and women in society was determined by their position in the family.
Thus, the family based on group marriage, according to Engels, was the result of a very low level of development of productive forces, when because of this people were forced to live in the primitive commune. The relationship that developed in such a family between men and women, with all the privileges of women, with the rule of "maternal law", was determined by the position occupied by men and women in primitive society. The low level of development of the productive forces provided to meet only the most limited human needs, and all the activities of primitive people were aimed at finding livelihoods. In this activity, the woman had a number of advantages over her husband, which provided her with a leading position. According to the natural division of labor by sex, a man fights, goes hunting and fishing, obtains food and produces the necessary tools. The woman works in the house and is engaged in production of food and clothes: cooks, bakes, sews, arranges housing. She was a housewife, and since the household in primitive society was common, the woman held a leading position in society. This dominance of women in society, as well as the fact that in the existing marital relations at that time she was the only reliably known parent of the younger generation, was the reason for the dominance of maternal law, ie the mother determined the origin of children, maternal inheritance.
How to explain that in the following social formations, which were based on private ownership of tools and means of production, the woman not only lost her original position, but also became dependent on the man?
Very common Sociological science has a theory of violence.
Yes, pre-revolutionary scientists in their work noted that in ancient times physical strength was highly valued and a man who could bear arms, ie who could defend his existence, was recognized as the full master life. With this way of life, a woman had to take there and, apparently, took the place of things, objects of law.
To confirm this theory, scientists take the ancient methods of marriage: abduction, buying women, etc. < / p>
However, such an explanation of the enslavement of women was not scientific, as it could not reflect the real situation and could not indicate the correct ways to liberate women.
Criticizing the theory of violence in the creation of classes, Engels showed that no Violence cannot occur before there is a surplus of products, because a certain apparatus is needed to support violence, just as tools are needed to carry out the act of violence itself. Thus, it is not a question of the physiological or physical superiority of each individual over the other, but of who appropriates the surplus of production, in whom it is concentrated, who can maintain the apparatus of violence.
Women in the family cannot be explained by physiological differences between the sexes, because they existed from the first days of human life and did not lead to a long period of prehistoric times to enslave women by men.
The explanation should be sought only in changes in material life society, and Engels explains the loss of a woman's original dominant position in the family by changes in the economic situation of this family in society. Only at a certain stage of development of human society could there be those radical changes in the situation of man and woman, which led to the enslavement of the latter.
production - made the labor force able to produce much more than is needed to maintain it. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great division of society into two classes - masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and with the advent of herds and other new wealth in the family, there was a revolution in the family itself. Due to the fact that fishing has always been a man's business, all the surplus that gave fishing went to the man, and although the woman participated in its consumption, but did not have a share of property; while the work of the husband became more productive, the work of the woman remained unproductive, it only met the urgent needs of the family, but did not create any wealth.
The division of labor in the family remained the same, but it is quite reversed domestic relations, which existed only because the division of labor outside the family became different.
Engels wrote: "... the same reason that previously ensured a woman's dominance in the home - limiting her work to occupation. housework - the same reason now affirmed the dominance of man in the house; women's domestic work has now lost its significance in comparison with men's industrial work; his work was everything, her work an insignificant appendage. "
As stated in Engels also proved that the reason for the greater economic enslavement of women was that women, along with the growth of productive forces, were excluded from social productive labor, and housekeeping lost its social character and became a private affair of each individual family. . The owner of the property, and thus became the husband, could not now satisfy the existing system of kinship and the resulting system of inheritance through the maternal line. He had a natural desire to bequeath his wealth to his own children and not to other people's children, and this could only be achieved through monogamy.
Some scholars have argued that monogamy embodies higher moral foundations in marital equality. .
Pre-revolutionary Russian scholars believed that monogamy arose with the general development of human culture, in which the predominance of sexual instincts, the degraded position of women is replaced by recognition of women's identity.
However, Engels showed that the transition from polygamy to monogamous marriage was caused by economic reasons. A man was able to achieve the legal consolidation of his power over a woman only when he rose above her economically.
However, the woman did not voluntarily give up her privileges and advantages; So Engels wrote that "monogamy does not appear in history as reconciliation between a man and a woman, much less as the highest form of marriage. On the contrary, it appears as the enslavement of one sex to another, as the proclamation of the hitherto unknown antagonism of the sexes in all previous history. "