The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family

by Charles Letourneau

A nineteenth-century work of comparative anthropology tracing how marriage and family life were thought to have developed across human societies, written in the confident, sweeping style of early…

At a glance Written in an age hungry to explain human institutions as products of gradual… What it's about The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family surveys forms of union and… Drawing on the comparative method popular in the period, it assembles customs, laws and… Themes The book reflects the central preoccupations of Victorian social science…

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…