Marriage and Family Life
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:0:1 (931.1) MATERIAL necessity founded Marriage, sex hunger embellished it, religion sanctioned and exalted it, the state demanded and regulated it, while in later times evolving love is beginning to justify and glorify Marriage as the ancestor and creator of civilization’s most useful and sublime institution, the home.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:0:2 (931.2) Mating is purely an act of self-perpetuation associated with varying degrees of self-gratification; marriage, home building, is largely a matter of self-maintenance, and it implies the evolution of society.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:0:3 (931.3) marriage grew out of co-operation in self-maintenance and partnership in self-perpetuation, the element of self-gratification being largely incidental.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:1:1 (931.4) marriage was not founded on sex relations; they were incidental thereto. Marriage was not needed by primitive man, who indulged his sex appetite freely without encumbering himself with the responsibilities of wife, children, and home.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:1:2 (931.5) But no direct biologic urge led man into marriage—much less held him in. It was not love that made marriage attractive to man, but food hunger which first attracted savage man to woman and the primitive shelter shared by her children.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:1:3 (931.6) marriage was not even brought about by the conscious realization of the obligations of sex relations.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:1:6 (932.3) Mother love is instinctive; it did not originate in the mores as did marriage.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:1:8 (932.5) While the mother-child association is neither marriage nor home, it was the nucleus from which both sprang.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:2:2 (932.8) The mother-family was the only possible transition from the stage of group marriage in the horde to the later and improved home life of the polygamous and monogamous father-families.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:3:1 (933.6) It may be that the instinct of motherhood led woman into marriage, but it was man’s superior strength, together with the influence of the mores, that virtually compelled her to remain in wedlock.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:4:1 (935.1) Generally speaking, during any age woman’s status is a fair criterion of the evolutionary progress of marriage as a social institution, while the progress of marriage itself is a reasonably accurate gauge registering the advances of human civilization.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:5:10 (937.7) In the ideals of pair marriage, woman has finally won recognition, dignity, independence, equality, and education; but will she prove worthy of all this new and unprecedented accomplishment?
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:6:2 (938.6) marriage, the basis of home building, is the highest manifestation of that antagonistic co-operation which so often characterizes the contacts of nature and society. … But Marriage is not biologic; it is sociologic.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:6:7 (939.2) marriage is an institution designed to compose sex differences, meanwhile effecting the continuation of civilization and insuring the reproduction of the race.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:6:8 (939.3) marriage is the mother of all human institutions, for it leads directly to home founding and home maintenance, which is the structural basis of society.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:7:2 (939.5) Woman’s instinct to love and care for children conspired to make her the interested party in promoting marriage and primitive family life. Man was only forced into home building by the pressure of the later mores and social conventions; he was slow to take an interest in the establishment of marriage and home because the sex act imposes no biologic consequences upon him.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:7:3 (939.6) Sex association is natural, but marriage is social and has always been regulated by the mores. … marriage is now passing out of the property stage into the personal era.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:7:9 (940.5) marriage and family life have not always been identical but have of necessity been closely associated.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:7:27 (941.8) In the present industrial and urban era the marriage institution is evolving along new economic lines.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:7:28 (941.9) marriage, with children and consequent family life, is stimulative of the highest potentials in human nature and simultaneously provides the ideal avenue for the expression of these quickened attributes of mortal personality.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:8:1 (942.2) The prime incentive to marriage used to be economic; sex attraction was secondary. marriage, founded on self-maintenance, led to self-perpetuation and concomitantly provided one of the most desirable forms of self-gratification.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:8:2 (942.3) Originally, property was the basic institution of self-maintenance, while marriage functioned as the unique institution of self-perpetuation. … Property accumulation is becoming an instrument for augmenting all forms of self-gratification, while marriage is often viewed only as a means of pleasure.
Paper 84 – Marriage and Family Life
84:8:6 (943.1) Pleasures are indeed suicidal if they succeed in destroying property, which has become the institution of self-maintenance; and self-gratifications have indeed cost a fatal price if they bring about the collapse of marriage, the decadence of family life, and the destruction of the home—man’s supreme evolutionary acquirement and civilization’s only hope of survival.
