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Updated: May 16, 2025
The monogamic form of the family was, to be sure, enforced upon the slaves, but the family life was often broken up; for even when the owner of the slaves was kind-hearted and humane, on his death his property would be sold and the families of his slaves scattered. Under such conditions it is not surprising that the negro learned little of family morality.
The exclusiveness of monogamic fellowship, the out-coming of the deep hunger for a unique experience in affection, can be greatly misinterpreted by failing to see that it is human nature's effort to keep to the golden mean as one is driven by tremendous impulses toward the supreme man-woman comradeship.
In the great majority of marriages success depends exclusively upon the knowledge of the art of love possessed by the two persons who enter into it. A life-long monogamic union may, indeed, persist in the absence of the slightest inborn or acquired art of love, out of religious resignation or sheer stupidity. But that attitude is now becoming less common.
For nine months a woman carries her baby as a part of her own body; then for three years the father and mother carry the child in their arms; for a score of years they must support, protect and train it before they let it go to seek its own. Hence sexual love must be persistent as well as monogamic.
First, it became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith; secondly, as a social institution it antedated by many decades the monogamic Negro home.
The history of the rise and development of prostitution enables us to see that prostitution is not an accident of our marriage system, but an essential constituent which appears concurrently with its other essential constituents. The gradual development of the family on a patriarchal and largely monogamic basis rendered it more and more difficult for a woman to dispose of her own person.
The ethical responsibility of individuals for the physical or social or psychical harm of their sexual actions upon other individuals, e.g., in prostitution and illegitimacy. The hygienic, ethical, and psychical laws that promote physical and mental health in monogamic marriage. The established principles of heredity and eugenics which foretell the possible coming of a better race of humans.
But as regards ancestor-worship in general, it would be incorrect; since polygamy or polygyny, and polyandry may coexist with ruder forms of ancestor-worship. The Western-Aryan societies, in the epoch studied by M. de Coulanges, were practically monogamic. The ancient Japanese society was polygynous; and polygyny persisted, after the establishment of the domestic cult.
The question involves very obscure physiological and psychological considerations. A man who aims to become a novelist naturally pries into these matters whenever he can, but the vital facts are very often hard to come by. It is probable that a great number of people could be paired off in couples who would make permanently happy and successful monogamic homes for their sound and healthy children.
This primitive monogamy, however, as we have already seen, was not accompanied by the social, legal, and religious elements that the historic monogamic family has largely rested upon. On the contrary, this primitive monogamy rested solely upon an instinctive basis, and, as we have seen, unless children were born it was apt to be relatively unstable.
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