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Was this due, as Morgan thought, to a primitive practice of promiscuity which prevented tracing relationships through fathers? The reply is, that among the many maternal peoples now well known, among whom relationships are traced through mothers only, we find no evidence of the practice of general promiscuity now or even in remote times.
But while such sexually anarchistic women are not common in America, there is reason for fearing that, unless some unexpected check comes to this undercurrent towards sexual freedom, it may be found ten or twenty years hence that a surprisingly large number, but never a majority, of unmarried young women have fallen into the sexual promiscuity that is so common among unmarried men of the same ages.
Bachofen would have us believe that the mother-right of the ancient world, was due to a revolt of women against the degraded condition of promiscuity, which previously had been universal among mankind, a condition in which men had a community of wives, and openly lived together like gregarious animals. Das Mutterrecht, Intro., p. xxiv. and p. 10.
There is danger in quoting to young men the estimates as to prevalence of social diseases and, therefore, of promiscuity. Fear of consequences will not control one who is led to believe that he is doing what most men do. Dr. W.S. Hall, in "Life's Problems," has given in a few pages the necessary protective knowledge. See "The Sexual Necessity," by Drs. Howell and Keyes.
At any rate, one must conclude that the lowest existing savages found in the nineteenth century had definite forms of family life, and that the type usually found was the simple pairing monogamy which we have just mentioned. Objections to the Hypothesis of a Primitive State of Promiscuity.
But the brilliant effect which has pleased us is like some gorgeous pageant connected with the worship of a stupid and ferocious divinity; nay, rather, if we let our thoughts dwell upon the matter, if we remember how, while the prisons and ship-holds were pestilent with the Jacobite men and women penned up like cattle in obscene promiscuity, while the mutilated corpses were lying still green, piled up under the bog turf of Culloden, while so many of the bravest men of Scotland, who had supplicated the Young Pretender not to tempt them to a hopeless enterprise, were cheerfully mounting the scaffold "for so sweet a prince," Charles Edward was dancing at Versailles in his crimson silk dress and diamonds, with his black-eyed boast the eldest-born Princess of France.
He affirms that these groups can have had no idea of kinship, and that the men would hold their women, like their other goods, in common, which is, of course, equal to a general promiscuity. There he agrees with Bachofen’s belief in unbridled hetaïrism, but a very different explanation is given of the change which led to regulation, and the establishment of the maternal family. According to Mr.
If you would pay us a visit and see the working of our caste system, our club system, our guild system, you would admit that nowhere else in the world, least of all, perhaps in North America, which has a regrettable tradition of social promiscuity, could you keep yourselves so entirely to yourselves. There is no good discussing this.
The facts put forth in support of the theory do not justify the conclusion, Westermarck says, that promiscuity has ever been a general practice among a single people and much less that it was the primitive state.
This prohibition against keeping one's own must have arisen when there were very few inhabitants in Tahiti, for it is the outcome of a natural guarding against sexual relationship in tribes or communities where all are thrown together intimately, and stringent opposition to such practices needed to prevent promiscuity.
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