The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family.

Written in an age hungry to explain human institutions as products of gradual development, this study turns its attention to the most intimate of them all: marriage and the family.

What it's about

The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family surveys forms of union and kinship across a wide range of societies, arguing that the family as its author's contemporaries knew it was not fixed and eternal but the outcome of a long process of change. Drawing on the comparative method popular in the period, it assembles customs, laws and reported practices from many cultures to sketch a developmental story, moving from earlier arrangements toward the domestic patterns of modern Europe.

Themes

The book reflects the central preoccupations of Victorian social science: progress, the classification of human societies into stages, and the belief that present institutions could be explained by uncovering their supposed origins. It treats marriage as a social and economic arrangement as much as a personal bond, and it raises enduring questions about the relation between custom, law and human nature.

Why it still matters

Read today, the work is valuable both as an argument and as an artefact. Many of its confident generalisations have been revised or overturned by later scholarship, and its assumptions about progress belong firmly to their time. Yet it remains a clear window onto how nineteenth-century thinkers tried to make the intimate order of family life into a subject for science, and onto the intellectual climate that produced modern anthropology and sociology.

Who it's for

For readers interested in the history of anthropology and social thought, in Victorian ideas about progress, and in the long conversation about the origins of the family. Approached with a critical eye, it offers a fascinating study of how one era tried to explain its own domestic arrangements.