It was by no
means a fruit of individual sex-love and had nothing to do with the
latter, for the marriages remained as conventional as ever. Monogamy was
the first form of the family not founded on natural, but on economic
conditions, viz.: the victory of private property over primitive and
natural collectivism. Supremacy of the man in the family and generation
of children that could be his offspring alone and were destined to be
the heirs of his wealth--these were openly avowed by the Greeks to be
the sole objects of monogamy. For the rest it was a burden to them, a
duty to the gods, the state and their own ancestors, a duty to be
fulfilled and no more. In Athens the law enforced not only the marriage,
but also the fulfillment of a minimum of the so-called matrimonial
duties on the man's part.

Monogamy, then, does by no means enter history as a reconciliation of
man and wife and still less as the highest form of marriage. On the
contrary, it enters as the subjugation of one sex by the other, as the
proclamation of an antagonism between the sexes unknown in all preceding
history. In an old unpublished manuscript written by Marx and myself in
1846, I find the following passage: "The first division of labor is that
of man and wife in breeding children." And to-day I may add: The first
class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of
the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy, and the first class
oppression with that of the female by the male sex. Monogamy was a great
historical progress. But by the side of slavery and private property it
marks at the same time that epoch which, reaching down to our days,
takes with all progress also a step backwards, relatively speaking, and
develops the welfare and advancement of one by the woe and submission of
the other. It is the cellular form of civilized society which enables us
to study the nature of its now fully developed contrasts and
contradictions.

The old relative freedom of sexual intercourse by no means disappeared
with the victory of the pairing or even of the monogamous family. "The
old conjugal system, now reduced to narrower limits by the gradual
disappearance of the punaluan groups, still environed the advancing
family, which it was to follow to the verge of civilization.... It
finally disappeared in the new form of hetaerism, which still follows
mankind in civilization as a dark shadow upon the family."[23]

By hetaerism Morgan designates