Why Marriage Was Invented

“And it is one very remarkable feature in their marriages, that the same jealousy our wives have to hinder and divert us from the friendship and familiarity of other women, those employ to promote their husbands’ desires, and to procure them many spouses; for being above all things solicitous of their husbands’ honor, ’tis their chiefest care to seek out, and to bring in the most companions they can, forasmuch as it is a testimony of the husband’s virtue. Most of our ladies will cry out, that ’tis monstrous; whereas in truth, it is not so; but a truly matrimonial virtue, and of the highest form.” Montaigne, “Essays”

The institution of marriage varies a great deal in primitive societies. In many the idea of marriage binding for life does not actually exist. A man and a woman live together for as long as it suits them and when it doesn’t suit anymore they find someone else. Matrilineal societies in which the very idea of a Father is alien and the adult male role model is the Uncle are common and probably the natural state of humanity. This tendency of natural ties between the Uncle and Nephew to be stronger than that between Father and Son can crop up in unexpected places.

Among the primitive and barbaric Germanic peoples, people who we are assured by classical writers exercised a legal authority to kill their wives, and could hardly be considered in any way matriarchal we find that the matrilineal kinship bond was stronger than the patrilineal kinship bond. Female primates are notorious in anthropological circles for their promiscuous behaviors. It is far more likely that a sister’s son will have the genetic inheritance of a male than the offspring of a female he has had sex with. There is no guarantee that he is the only male having sex with her or that the children thus produced are his. This being true it is quite plausible that the biological instinct of the male is not to be a Father, but to be an Uncle and that our modern system of monogamous marriage has redirected this behavior to a different recipient. An Uncle in a state of nature, would be more likely to be safeguarding the survival of his own genes by supporting and aiding a Sister’s Son than by spending that support and aid on the children of a female he happened to have sex with.

This same pattern of female kinship bonding, and even of females forming strong bonding groups with females from outside their kinship group also occurs among Chimpanzees and Bonobo or pygmy Chimpanzees considered by many to be humanities closest living primate relative.

You will note a patriarchal or patrilineal organization in Chimpanzee and Bonobo society. The female leaves her father and mother and cleaves to the society of a different natal group. This is the opposite of the Biblical verse cited elsewhere in this work where the man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife. In this situation, since all the adult males come from the same kinship group all the offspring share a great deal of the same genetic material. In this particular anthropological and historical evidence supporting a fundamentally matrilineal family system as being natural to humanity may suggest a significant and inexplicable difference between us and our nearest primate relatives in our instinctive social organization. The difference, if it exists may not be that great. Observers of Bonobo and Chimpanzee society had a difficult time determining how it was organized.

Groups would combine and dissolve without any apparent reason or order until it was discovered that there were large groups made up of smaller groups.

The maternal bond among primates such as the Bonobo endures virtually for life, and a male in Bonobo society gets his social status from that of his mother as in Egypt property and social rank passed down in the female line. Even though Bonobo and Chimpanzee society as a whole is based on male kinship grouping within that general umbrella it breaks down into matrifocal units made up of a female and her children.

Still, marriage varies tremendously in primitive hunter/gatherer societies. The matrilineal model is sufficiently frequent and present at such a stage of development to suggest that it is the natural human model. When you contemplate the extreme variety of marriages in primitive society there is only one logical conclusion. Marriage is an unnatural act.

Lots of things are unnatural acts; farming, writing, cooking, and soap among others. These are all good things. We can, I think, all agree that soap is a good idea. Just because something is unnatural doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It does mean that it can take some getting used to.

The question is, is our institution of marriage a good or a bad thing. The variety in the institution of marriage vanishes almost universally with the development of agriculture. Some variety remains. Polygamy among the wealthy is fairly universal outside the European cultural tradition. Overall, though, marriage is for life. Men work outside the home, women in the home. Societies become patriarchal instead of matrilineal.

These changes are all about money. In a hunter-gatherer society the woman is the major worker and provider. A man fights and hunts, he is primarily a warrior not a breadwinner. A woman gathers and does almost all the basic work of survival. She builds the huts, she cooks the food, carries the burdens on the march. A woman will work all day long throughout her life. A man will do things occasionally with great physical intensity. The woman is financially independent of the man. She may still be held as chattel property, but where conditions allow she may have a great deal of freedom.

This financial independence vanishes with the development of agriculture, early industry, and trade. Men assume a greater responsibility for constant physical labor. They work longer harder hours than in a hunter-gatherer society.

More of the wealth of society is the direct result of their labor. Real wealth in society more than doubles as the workforce doubles when men become an important part of it and technology makes work more fruitful and those fruits more consistently reliable. Because much of the process of creating wealth is now becoming physically separated from the process of raising children, women cannot fully enjoy the fruits of the new methods of creating wealth unless they have a man.

The role of the man as a financial provider is un-natural, it is a cultural construct not a natural element of human behavior. As a cultural construct it is comparatively delicate and easily destroyed. When it is destroyed the economic quality of life of women decreases. In most hunter gatherer societies, women, despite the vital economic role they play, are chattel property not distinguishable in any way from slaves. Aristotle notes this in his Politics:

The Bible also notes this natural tendency.

A males dominance in nature is based not on his role as an economic provider but upon his physical strength and aggression. Marriage as implemented in Western Civilization changes this. It bases a mans status in the family his right and authority not on his ability to physically beat up his wife but upon his role as provider and breadwinner or upon his obedience to a higher authority such as God. An argument based on a role as an economic provider is inherently much less likely to result in the physical abuse of a woman than an argument based on raw physical strength. An argument based on obedience to God requires him to live up to various standards of virtuous and ethical behavior regarding his treatment of his wife and children. Marriage in the Western Tradition is inherently less likely to result in the physical abuse of women than a dominance relationship based on physical force.

Single women living with men have to a degree reverted to a state of nature. They are the economic mainstay of their families and the male must base his status behaviors on some other basis. Studies have shown that single women are much more likely to suffer physical abuse at the hands of their live in boyfriends than married women are at the hands of their husbands.

The destruction of traditional marriage with its stereotype/role model of the man as breadwinner attacks both the economic and physical security of the woman. (Role Model = Stereotype with a positive spin. Stereotype = Role Model with a negative spin.) It also increases the likelihood of domestic violence against children and obviously makes a more deprived and desperate home for children not in a traditional marriage situation.

Marriage allows a woman to live a fairly natural lifestyle, raising children, etc. despite having to do so in an artificial new world created by new more fruitful wealth generating technologies. Her life is closer to what it would have been in nature than a man’s is. Men must be educated, trained, almost brainwashed into placing their pride and self-respect into their new artificial role as breadwinner. The adaptations he must make to the new world are much greater. The overall conditions of both their lives generally change for the better despite these new demands. Both live longer healthier lives.

A woman who has a man is much richer than a woman without a man. A woman who does not may still be as well off as she would have been before the new methods of creating wealth were invented, but she will be poor compared to other women. In order to profit from the advances that create this new wealth, women have to find ways to catch and hang onto a man.

Ms. Morgan draws a similar but different picture in her book. While Ms. Morgan‘s book is a delight and I fully agree with her adoption of the aquatic hypothesis concerning human origins, she apparently follows the androcentric tradition of confusing hunter-gathering and early agriculture together and the changes they produced in human culture together. In fact matrilineal or matrifocal family organization remained common among hunter gathering groups of humans up to historical times. It even survived in some protected agricultural groups such as the Zuni Indians of the Southwest US. See Ruth Benedict “Patterns of Culture”.

Ms. Morgan suggests that economics drove men to assume ownership of women because of the economic importance of women as food providers. She suggests that a man growing up with the habit of being fed by his mother would transfer this expectation to his adult sexual partner. Then, if he found his new bread ticket feeding another adult male, he would be more angered by this than by his finding her having sex with another adult male because while food once consumed is gone for good, a female does not lose the ability to have sex with one male by having it with another.

It is an interesting and thought provoking theory but it is difficult to understand why the male would expect a female whom he had a one night stand with to assume the financial responsibility of feeding him when his own mother and her matrilineal group were already in the habit of doing so. It is also difficult to understand why a female responsible for the financial support of her own young and the males in her matrilineal group would welcome or accept the additional burden of financially supporting a freeloading male who should go home to his own matrilineal group for food. Among the Zuni Indians of the Southwest the woman has the absolute right to divorce the man at any time for any reason. If she puts his clothes outside the door of their home, he just picks them up and goes home to Mom and her matrilineal kinship group. There is no significant stigma attached to this, sometimes women just decide they want to change their sexual partners. Frequently the woman has already chosen her new sexual partner and tried him out. Ibid.

Habit is a strong shaper of behavior, and while it would be habitual and therefore easy for the females of a matrilineal group to accept the financial burden of feeding males who had grown up with them and whom they had been feeding all their lives, it would be a strange new and unwelcome burden to provide food over long periods to freeloading males for nothing but sex. Males would generally find it easier to be fed by their matrilineal groups than to get food from a casual sex partner.

It is far more likely that females exercising the power that they possessed as social animals with established alliances in female bonded groups as in Bonobo and Chimpanzee societies would have had a strong voice in any such arrangements. That voice would have tended to preclude the formation of economic bonds between the female and an outgroup male unless the male was an economic asset instead of a burden.

The economic importance of the male varies with the environment and the importance of his role as a warrior. Chimpanzee males are more aggressive, form stronger male bonded groups and engage in more intergroup aggression or war than Bonobo males do. This appears to be largely due to the difference in environment. Chimpanzee groups showing the most aggression are those living closest to the savannah and less in the forest. This variation in the role of the male with the prevalence of physical aggression in society or the environment may be seen among various human groups as well. A male as a guard dog may be an economic asset by preventing the theft of food by wandering aggressive males, but this is a role which can be filled by males in the matrilineal group as easily as it could be fulfilled by males bonding to the group from outside.

There is no guarantee that the sex ratio will be balanced in a matrilineal group. My grandmother Davis had two sons and two daughters, but she had 13 grandsons and no granddaughters. Matrilineal or other kinship groups without arrangements for adopting outsiders of either sex could end up with an unbalanced sexual ratio. In many cases this could impact their ability to compete with other kinship groups for resources in a negative manner. The importance of the male as a guarantee of security for the possession of resources such as group territory increases with the population density, which in turn increases with the ability of the species to exploit the territory for its own support.

This could have produced cultural mechanisms whereby women in matrilineal groups which found themselves lacking sufficient males to protect their territories could ‘capture’ outgroup males by feeding and taking care of them. The male would have the primary role of protecting his territory, by protecting his territory he would protect the females territory and her physical and economic security would be dependent on his ability to act as guardian and protector.

Exodus 2:17-22 ¹⁷

Here in an early period but quite recent compared to the Pleistocene, we find an example of this kind of mechanism in human society. It is the females doing the work which provides daily sustenance. The males job is that of protector or defender. A stranger male is adopted into the patriarchal group by giving him food and a wife. It is worth noting that bread comes first and a wife second. (The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.) Though the stranger male also demonstrated his willingness to aid in the economic challenges of the group by drawing water and watering the flock. Scarcity of resources, water, resulted in heightened competition and the importance of the male as guardian of territory and resources.

Increases in technological ability through animal husbandry and agriculture to exploit resources increased the population load on the land. This increased both the males role as an economic resource and his importance as security for the possession of those resources. This would have made the females of groups like that of Reuel which found themselves lacking sufficient male resources desperate to discover tactics for securing sufficient male resources.

This meant, in order to avoid losing their males, they would have had to invent standards which tended to prevent the male from wandering off to another group. This could mean voiding incest taboos and having brothers marry their sisters as was customary in Egypt, or forming new kinship groups based on permanent sexual partnerships with outsiders.

Women had to invent marriage for their economic and financial security because of changes in the basic economics of existence which occurred with the development of animal husbandry and agriculture. This coupled with various biological mechanisms which make the male generally dominant in social relationships would have produced the gradual transition to patriarchal society and marriage as we know it. Eventually as population increased further and external mechanisms for the enforcement of property rights developed the economic role of the male would become dominant and his role as guardian and protector largely symbolic and emotionally satisfying to the woman.

The male became the breadwinner and economic mainstay of the family through a combination of his increasingly symbolic but still real role as guarantor of property rights, and his increasingly developed role as a necessary worker to exploit that property. Since the male was the main guarantor of property rights, such rights were generally seen as existing inseparable from him. His role as guarantor of property rights was frequently instituted in the legal codes of early Civilizations where property rights were most strongly vested in the male.

This role of the male as economic mainstay developed even further with increasing developments in technology changed the fundamental processes of gathering wealth separating it more and more from the simple gathering environment in which females had been able to successfully combine child rearing and wealth gathering activities. Having already been pulled halfway into his role as breadwinner, further changes made that role, not his role as guardian and protector, his primary function in the family unit.

In an advanced society where men have a new artificial role as economic providers women who manage to latch onto a good man live longer, healthier, better lives than women who fail to do so. Having a specific man, instead of a periodically changing succession of men becomes very important to women. In this sense a good man is a good provider. This artificial role model or stereotype is fundamental to women’s well being, and destroying it reduces the quality of life for the vast majority of women.

Women who would have been happy with a temporary arrangement now want men to make promises. They need a commitment. The idea of marriage lasting a lifetime becomes dominant.

In order to get this kind of commitment women have to make some sacrifices. They have to make a similar commitment themselves. The bonds of matrimony develop. Marriage and the new forms of creating wealth impose unnatural burdens on both partners. Men work harder, have more responsibility for being a provider. Women can no longer just dump a man when they feel like a change.

Women who do not find one man are loose cannons. They disrupt society, threaten the stability of women who do have men. They destroy a good thing. Women, especially, are threatened by this. Social condemnation of unmarried women becomes the norm. It is probably women who invented marriage. It is probably women who initiated the moral condemnation of unmarried women having sex.

Societies which adopt this newfangled invention provide stabler homes, better nutrition, and more constant role models to children growing up than those which do not. This allows them to out compete societies which do not. The nature of marriage becomes fairly uniform throughout early civilization. It is a necessary social adaptation to changing economic realities.

Those things which made marriage necessary still exist. The means of getting wealth are still separate from the place of raising children. A man is still much more of an economic asset to women than in a hunter-gatherer society. A man is still the best and most reliable ticket to a decent share of the new wealth available to a woman.

Women who fail to accept this will not have an income and lifestyle equivalent to those who do. (This is as true today as it was 7000 years ago, something like 90% of people in poverty in this country are single parent families.)

http://www.jcpr.org/research_summaries/vol1_num1.html

This is especially interesting because California is the uber-liberal state, with probably the greatest level of state intervention in the private lives of its citizens.

http://www.equalrights.org/welfare/welfback.html

These statistics are generally taken from Feminist websites, and the solution they generally propose is that the US as a whole should implement more government programs to provide for single women. In other words the US as a whole should be more like California, but California is, as usual, among the worst states in the nation in these areas.

This strategy violates the fundamental principle of natural law that there should be some relationship between action and result. Placing the responsibility for their economic well-being on the state and not on the women involved guarantees that they will be less motivated to do the things which will actually produce their economic well-being. An individual man supporting a woman and children will act consistently to do so in a more effective and highly motivated manner than an impersonal state bureaucracy. Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” applies here as well as in other matters.

Completely unrealistic nonsense has distorted the picture of marriage since women’s liberation began. It has been suggested that a woman provides services worth tens of thousands of dollars every year to her husband. Women have been portrayed as slaves being exploited by men. A simple glance at the profile of poverty will give the lie to this nonsense. Women do need men economically. When two people marry they come from roughly the same socioeconomic class. A woman who has a child or children has to cook, clean, wash clothes, etc. regardless of whether she has a man or not.

The additional labor involved in adding one more serving to the food she is cooking, one more batch to the clothes she is washing, or picking up after one more person may amount to an hour or so a day. The man in this partnership will end up spending half or more of his pay on her, the children and their home. She receives from the man the equivalent of four to six hours pay in return for one or two hours work. It is well worth while for a woman to keep a man around the house.

FemiNazies see any male brokerage of financial resources in return for sex and marital fidelity as evil. They want complete 100% control of all the financial resources that result from a man’s sweat and labor and they demand that there should be absolutely no obligation on a woman to give anything in return. An example of this kind of reasoning may be found in Patricia Adair Gowaty’s essay “Power Asymmetries between the Sexes” “Evolution, Gender and Rape” 2003. She begins with a reasonable statement that absolute control of reproduction by either the male or female is harmful to the species and thus to both male and female. She ends advocating absolute control of reproduction by the female. It is worth noting that Ms. Gowaty spends most of her article quoting herself to substantiate her own opinions. She seems to be her own peer reviewed scientific authority. Virtually every point she makes is supported by ‘studies’ by Gowaty and little else. There is hardly a paragraph in the paper where she doesn’t quote her own previous work.

Men have a right to broker the financial resources they have earned through the sweat of their labor for other things they want like sex and sexual fidelity. If they are denied this right they will not waste their time working hard to earn the financial resources which would allow them to acquire these things and the total wealth generated by society will be less and women will be poorer and live more desperate lives. Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” at work again.

In any system where men are allowed a legitimate right to control their own property and broker it for other things they want like sex and marital fidelity, women who enter into this arrangement will be, on average, economically better off than women who do not. The additional resources which the man can contribute over what the woman could have achieved alone, two people with 48 hours a day as opposed to one with only 24 hours a day working to accomplish the task of supplying the needs of a woman with children will always be superior to one. Their children will have better access to resources and have a brighter future. The only way to avoid this is to deny men any property rights at all. This will reduce men to a slave population without any motivation to work and produce wealth at all. This, as demonstrated in the section of this book on slavery, will destroy the economic vitality of society as a whole. This is where FemiNazi rhetoric about male brokering of economic resources inevitably leads.

It is true that much of this the man would have had to spend on a house, etc. if living alone so it does not cost him that much. Both partners profit. Economically it is probably the woman who makes the greatest profit. On the other hand,

A man would have to live the same unnatural life of working long hours in artificial surroundings if he were not married. Marriage gives him a retreat from it all, a refuge filled with ‘domestick‘ comforts. It might be unfair to say that a man’s quality of life improvement in marriage is greater than that of the woman, but men do need to be married.

Marriage is, and always has been, primarily an economic partnership between two people. Women need it economically more than men, but both parties profit from it. It serves the needs of the Social Contract by providing a higher standard of living for Citizens, limiting the spread of sexually transmitted diseases by limiting promiscuity, and providing a stable environment for children to grow up in. It also allows each partner to assume the role in the partnership for which they are best suited by nature.

It is complicated in practice by the fact that human beings are involved. People have an unfortunate tendency to be dissatisfied with their current situation. In expressing this dissatisfaction to their partners, great misery can result.

Marriage still grates on the nature of humanity. It is one of those artificial cultural creations which have evolved to enable us to adapt to the new world we created when the earliest civilizations sprang up. This economic need for men grates on women, it is unnatural, a product of technological progress in the means of creating wealth. It is natural for Feminists to assume that since it grates on them men created it to oppress them. The truth though is that it is closer to a state of nature for women than for men, and the burdens it imposes as measured from burdens that would have existed in a state of nature are greater on men than on women. Women as a whole profit more by the institution than men though both profit. A majority of women surveyed would rather be stay at home moms than have to work. Economic factors makes that impossible for many of them.

Thirty years of fairly radical women’s liberation agenda have attacked subtle cultural institutions which work to make life better, safer, more economically secure and emotionally rewarding for women.