The Pairing Family prohibited marriage with family members, and women were punished for adultery, while polygamy was a right reserved solely for men. In the Consanguine Family, all men and women were husbands and wives, respectively to each other, save parents and children the Punaluan Family restricted marriage between brothers and sisters. Across these stages, there was consistent erosion of the power given to women by society and the family structure slowly shifted away from polygamy. Chronologically, the stages of the family were the Consanguine Family, the Punaluan Family, the Pairing Family, and the Monogamous Family. The epochs of society were first classified by American ethnologist and a principal founder of scientific anthropology, Lewis Morgan, roughly in relation to the availability of sources of sustenance, and Engels credits him throughout the book for pioneering this framework.
This most recent reprint of the text includes a foreword that provides historical context to Engels’ time period for easier understanding, as well as an introduction that addresses the flaws of the argument in modern times, which is important to account for while reading.Įngels examines three different periods of society-Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization-in conjunction with the structure of family that characterized each period. Especially when considering the fact that it was printed a year after Karl Marx's death, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, though received as controversial for its time, provided the necessary historical balance to the pair's economy-centric Marxist literature.
The original publication in 1884, jointly with Engels’ prior publications with Karl Marx, “explained the rise of class conflict and exploitation in the context of increasing division of labor and growing commodity production” in an “anthropological-demographic dimension” (Wiltgen, 1979, p. In this treatise, Friedrich Engels (2021) also examined how society developed, doing so through thorough explanations of periods of society and the structure of family that correlated to it. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State introduces a perspective of gender history, positing that as human culture shifted away from community ideals, its power dynamics shifted from women to men. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
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