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Updated: May 1, 2025
The most primitive form of complex human marriage which has yet been demonstrated as still in existence is what is called group-marriage, in which all the women of one class are regarded as the actual, or at all events potential, wives of all the men in another class.
There is an intermediate stage between hetaïrism and marriage, such as the group-marriage, held by him to have been practised among barbarous peoples. “Each man has a wife, but they are all permitted to have intercourse with the wives of others.” Das Mutterrecht, p. 18. Great stress is laid on the acquisition by women of the benefits of a marriage law.
Polyandry in the joint family group was not due to a licentious view of marriage; far otherwise, it was an expression of the communism which is characteristic of this organisation. This fact has been forgotten by many writers, who have regarded this form of the sexual relationships as a very primitive development, connected with group-marriage and promiscuous ownership of women.
N.W. Thomas, in his book on Kinship and Marriage in Australia, 1908, concludes that group-marriage in Australia has not been demonstrated, and that Professor Westermarck, in his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, as in his previous History of Human Marriage, maintains a skeptical opinion in regard to group-marriage generally; he thinks the Urabunna custom may have developed out of ordinary individual marriage, and regards the group-marriage theory as "the residuary legatee of the old theory of promiscuity."
Group-marriage, with female descent, as found in Australia, tends to become transformed by various stages of progress into individual marriage with descent in the male line, a survival of group-marriage perhaps persisting in the much-discussed jus primæ noctis.
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