“There is an evolution of society,” said Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien last June when announcing a new national policy opening marriage to gay couples.[1]  Jacqueline Murray, columnist for The Toronto Globe and Mail, agrees that evolution is at work here: “Extending marriage to people of the same sex may be the final frontier and the logical conclusion of this evolution.”[2]  Writing in The Boston Globe, Virginia Postrel argues that social institutions such as marriage are themselves “the result of an evolutionary process”; gay marriage, as such, represents another promising “experiment in living” contributing to forward evolution.[3]  Ellen Goodman concludes that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling that homosexuals have a right to marriage “may be as evolutionary as it is historic,” adding: “The evolution of gay rights and marriage laws now merge into the definition of marriage written by the Massachusetts court.”[4] 

This focus on evolution is revealing and important.  It points toward the ideology that drives the gay marriage campaign, and the deeper conflict of ideas in which we are now engaged.

On the one hand, there is the view put forth by prominent early anthropologists that marriage is, in essence, an unchanging institution, universal to humanity.  As Edward Westermarck explained over 100 years ago: “Among the lowest savages, as well as the most civilized races of men, we find the family consisting of parents and children, and the father as its protector.”  Holding this family system together was marriage, combining “a regulated sexual relation” with “economic obligations.”  In Westermarck’s view, distinct maternal, paternal and marital instincts all existed, each rooted in human nature.  Indeed, he said that “the institution of marriage…has developed out of a primeval habit.”  While variations in the details could be found in different human cultures, the fundamental marriage bond was unchanging.[5]  Or as George Murdock wrote in his great 1949 anthropological survey:  “The nuclear family is a universal human social grouping.”  Moreover, “[a]ll known human societies have developed specialization and cooperation between the sexes roughly along this biologically determined line of cleavage.”  Murdock concluded:

…marriage exists only when the economic and the sexual are united into one relationship, and this combination only occurs in marriage.  Marriage, thus defined, is found in every known human society.[6]

“THE EVOLUTION OF MARRIAGE”

On the other hand, a different theory of marriage has exerted a profound influence, from the 1880’s to our day.  As one prominent sociologist has explained, “Social science developed only one comprehensive theory of family change, one based on nineteenth century evolutionary ideas.”[7]  Applying Charles Darwin’s concept of “natural selection” to human behavior, these theorists have argued that human marriage is an evolving institution.  As we have already seen, this very notion—and the theory behind it—today drives one argument for gay marriage.  Where did this theory come from?  What does this theory of social evolution say?  How has it affected American views in the past?  Does it bear any truth?

The classic formulation of “the evolution of marriage” idea is found in Lewis Morgan’s 1877 book, Ancient Society.  In fact, this book was the result of a U.S. government investigation of the social lives of the American Indians.  Morgan focused particular attention on the Iroquois, but drew broader conclusions.  In his view, the family was an active agent, never stationery, moving in evolutionary fashion from lower to higher forms.  The three main stages in this process, he said, were:

• Among pre-historic savages, group marriage, where unrestricted sexual intercourse supposedly existed within a tribe, such that every woman belonged to every man, and every man to every woman.  Sexual orgies were routine practices.  In this perfectly promiscuous social order, Morgan argued, children were common to all and descent or lineage was traced through the mother’s family, the maternal “gens,” since paternity could not be established.  This, in turn, gave power and authority to women.

• Among barbarians, the pairing family.  This construct rested on the nuclear pairing off of one man to one woman, and a limitation on inbreeding through creation of the incest taboo.  And yet, the pairing family still held on to remnants of the old ways, as where sisters would be the mutual wives of their mutual husbands, and where maternal lineage would remain primary.  Still, enforcement of the incest taboo led to an evolutionary advance, Morgan said, including the expansion of human skulls and brains.

• Finally, among civilized people, the monogamous family, resting on patriarchal controls and enforced chastity and fidelity among women,  in order to ensure the fathers’ lineage.[8]

The writer drawing out the political implications of Morgan’s work was Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto.  In his 1884 book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels underscored Morgan’s importance:

“The discovery [of] the original maternal ‘gens’ has the same signification for primeval history that Darwin’s theory of evolution had for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy.”

And yet, in an important break with Morgan, Engels refused to see the modern monogamous marriage as superior or good.  Indeed:

Monogamy…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.

Specifically, Engels denied that romantic sexual love could survive in marriage.  Moreover, he said that the human urge for primeval group marriage survived even in civilized nations through a turn to prostitutes by the men, and to adultery by the women.

Engels also laid out how the pending communist revolution will allow an evolutionary return to group marriage.  Action components included:

1. Put all women into outside labor: “…the emancipation of women is primarily dependent on the reintroduction of the whole female sex into the public industries.”

2. Socialize property:  “With the transformation of the means of production into collective property the monogamous family ceases to be the economic unit of society.  The private household changes to a social industry.  The care and education of children becomes a social matter.”

3. Free love:  “Will not this be sufficient cause for…a more unconventional intercourse of the sexes and a more lenient public opinion regarding virgin honor and female shame.”  And,

4. And ‘No Fault’ Divorce:  “If marriage founded on love is alone moral, then it follows that marriage is moral only as long as love lasts.”[9]

LOSING THE ECONOMIC FUNCTION

I dwell on Engels here because a watered-down version of this Marxist evolutionary understanding spread far and deep in the United States, working to undermine both the economic and the sexual aspects of marriage, and testifying to the power of ideas.  Regarding the economic function, for example, the first important Social History of the American Family appeared in 1917, complete with the familiar evolutionary argument.  “American history consummates the disappearance of the wider familism and the substitution of the parentalism of society,” wrote historian Arthur Calhoun.  Since natural parents were, by and large, unfit for parenthood in the new order, he said, society came “to accept as a duty” the upbringing of the young.  Ever more children passed “into the custody of community experts who are qualified to perform the complexer functions of parenthood…which the parents have neither the time nor knowledge to perform.”  Calhoun concluded:

The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to the family; the family goes back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of civilization.  The modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world and home interests can no longer be supreme.[10]

Another influential, sanitized version of marriage and family structures in evolution appeared in the work of sociologist William Ogburn, of the University of Chicago.  An analytical Marxist, Ogburn emphasized that the prime force in history was technology, or “material culture,” and that after a period of time, what he called “culture lag,” social institutions would adjust to the new material realities.  Commissioned by President Herbert Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends to examine family life, Ogburn described in 1933 an American marriage and family system steadily diminishing.  Once “the chief economic institution, the factory of the time, producing almost all that men needed,” the family now stood stripped of all productive tasks, these having passed to the factories.  At the same time, “the educational and protective functions” of the family had gone to government, because state institutions had “greater technical efficiency.”  Already by the 1930’s, he reported, American homes “are merely ‘parking places’ for parents and children who spend their active hours elsewhere.”  Even so, “the evidence points to the further transfer of functions from the home,” including the care of pre-school children.[11]

During the 1940’s and 1950’s, prominent sociologists called “functionalists” attempted to take this bad news about the loss of family functions and turn it into a positive good.  Talcott Parsons of Harvard University, the leader of this school of thought, acknowledged that among Americans “many of the ‘auxiliary’ functions [of the family], such as those of economic production which are common in kinship units, are here reduced to a minimum.”  But this was all to the good, he said, for it made modern families sleek and efficient, able to focus on critical psychological tasks:  “The relations are clarified because this modern family is ‘stripped down’ to what apparently approaches certain minimum structural and fundamental essentials,” he wrote.  Indeed, “the American family has been evolving into a new stability in which the emphasis is on the nuclear family.”[12]  Critical to this, Parsons thought, was what he called “role differentiation,” where wives/mothers took on the emotional tasks of gratification, warmth, and stability while husband/fathers focused on instrumental tasks in the outside world.

If the nuclear family consists in a defined ‘normal’ complement of the male adult, female adult and their immediate children, the male adult will play the role of instrumental leader and the female adult will play the role of expressive leader.[13]

He acknowledged that this “companionship” or “companionate” family exacted a high emotional price from husband and wife, as they elaborated and refined their functional roles.  Indeed, to succeed at the tasks assigned by Parsons, the couple almost had to become “the traditional family” on steroids.  Men served their families as Chairman-of-the-Board figures, looking outward, he said.  Women looked inward, focusing on “glamour patterns,” “personal adornment,” and the crafting of a pleasant home environment to ease psychological tensions.[14] 

“Personality adjustment,” toward these ends, Parsons insisted, became the core task of the companionate marriage of the 1950’s.

Another figure in this school, William J. Goode, saw the whole world essentially adopting this model.  Characterized by few productive tasks, weak ties to kin, high mobility, relatively high divorce, and “intense emotional” interaction, this structure marked the next step in global family evolution:

Everywhere the ideology of the [companionate] family is spreading….It appeals to the disadvantaged, to the young, to women, and to the educated.

It succeeded, he said, because of the close fit between this family form and the modern industrial system.  Revealingly, though, in the year 1963 Goode also argued that the strong role differences between husbands and wives were more-or-less permanent:

[W]e do not believe that any family system now in operation, or likely to emerge in the next generation, will grant full equality to women.

Why?  Because:

The family base upon which all societies rest at present requires that much of the daily work of the house and children be handed over to women.[15]

While seeming to affirm the traditional family, the narrow conception of family tasks in “companionate marriage” actually left families vulnerable.  For example, Federal policy came to favor the functionless home.  Government housing agencies pushed designs that eliminated work rooms, pantries, large kitchens, sewing rooms, and parlors, to be replaced by functionless “open spaces.”  As urban planner John Dean explained in 1953, suburban homes should focus on maintaining “family interaction without recourse to the traditional housekeeping dwelling unit.”  Instead of designs “inherited from the family farm,” homes should be built more in harmony with modern life patterns focused on psychological intimacy and consumption.[16]  Architect Svend Reimer, writing in 1951, stressed that “housing attitudes must be related to long-term trends of social change in the family.”  They must evolve.  In place of formal, single-purpose, and work rooms, suburban homes should have open, “flexible rooms that serve the every day life of the family and reduce household chores to the minimum.”  He concluded: “The goal of home construction lies in…a frictionless family life.”[17]  Similarly, federal education policy under the Smith-Lever and Smith-Hughes Acts, which had favored training in homemaking and homebuilding tasks from 1914 into the early 1950’s, shifted curricula in favor of training girls in more ambiguous psychological tasks.

THE FEMINISTS RETURN

Alas, in 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared.  The book lashed out at the “companionate marriage” celebrated and defended by Parsons, Goode, and the other functionalists, and it launched the new feminism on American soil.  But in essence, Friedan was herself a believer in social evolution.  She simply argued that the functionalists wanted to have their evolutionary cake and to eat it, too.  She reported that Parsons himself had admitted:

…that the ‘domestic’ aspect of the housewife role ‘has declined in importance to the point where it scarcely approaches a full-time occupation for the vigorous person’; that the ‘glamour pattern’ is ‘inevitably associated with a rather early age level’…[and] ‘that in the adult feminine role there is quite sufficient strain and insecurity… [manifested] in the form of neurotic behavior….’

And still, Friedan complained, Parsons had the gall to insist that women adjust themselves to these disordered roles.    

The suburbs, which Parsons praised as fitting homes for companionate families, drew her scorn as well.  Friedan called them “ugly and endless sprawls,” where women did “the time-filling busy work of suburban house and community.”  She blasted “the open plan” of most new suburban housing, “noisy” places without walls and doors, where the woman in her kitchen would never be without her children, and where the “one free-flowing room” created a continual mess. 

Some part of Friedan’s argument seemed to imply a return to an older, more agrarian family life.  But in the end, as a servant of evolution, she resolved instead to eliminate the last remnants of economic cooperation in the home:

[F]or the suburban and city housewife, the fact remains that more and more of the jobs that used to be performed in the home have been taken away: canning, baking bread, weaving cloth and making clothes, educating the young, nursing the sick, taking care of the aged.  It is possible [for women] to reverse history—or kid themselves that they can reverse it—by baking their own bread, but the law does not permit them to teach their own children at home….[18]

So energized, Friedan’s book had a powerful impact.  The equity feminist movement quickly gained strength and won important political victories through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which mandated sexual equality in employment practices, and Title IX of the Education Act of 1971, which did the same for schooling.  Federal policy, which had already worked in the 1940’s and ‘50’s to create economically functionless homes, now aimed at ending even the “division of labor” between husband and wife, as expressed through the recently favored “companionate” model.

SEXUAL EVOLUTION

This evolutionary approach to the family also radically altered understanding of the “sexual” aspect of marriage; specifically, shifting its core meaning from “procreation” to “pleasure.”  Ogburn, again, was instrumental here.  He emphasized the profound importance of the sharply falling American birthrate: “In 1930, for the first time there were fewer children under five years of age in one census year than in the one preceding.”  This presaged an emptying of schools and depopulation.  More important for him, it pointed to a different kind of marriage:

…[T]here are many wives without children….In other families with only one or two children the mother devotes only a few years to child rearing.  Families without children may almost be classed as a different type of family.

Indeed, Ogburn called for a fundamental reappraisal of the meaning of marriage:

The relationship of husband and wife is clearly at the center of the problem of the modern family since most families have children with them for only a part of married life or not at all and since so many other functions of the family have declined.  The stability of the future family is not clearly seen.[19]

Ernest W. Burgess and Henry J. Locke, in their 1945 book The Family, agreed that as families shed their formal legal and economic functions, and shrank in size with fewer children, they reorganized around the principle of “companionship.”  This new step in social evolution rested on “mutual affection,” “sympathetic understanding,” and “comradeship,” rather than procreation.  The home now focused less on children and more on psychological intimacy and sexual love.[20]

Indeed, the “companionate marriage” elevated sex as a mode of self-definition.  True, during the 1940’s and 1950’s, sexuality remained tied by popular mores and expert opinion to marriage.  But as functional productive tasks and children diminished as the ends of marriage, these same experts urged men and women to reach for higher levels of sexual and emotional compatibility.  Companionate marriage, the experts said, rested on passion, romantic affection, emotional intimacy, and “shared ecstacy,” not children.[21]

Unwittingly, but clearly, this analysis fed directly into the sexual revolution of the 1960’s.  The first event here separated sex from procreation, an advance bolstered by introduction of the birth control pill in 1964.  For a brief time, acceptable sex and marriage remained bound.  The U.S. Supreme Court caught this spirit in its 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision.  While the court declared that married couples had a Constitutional right to buy and use birth control, it also reaffirmed that “marriage is a coming together for better or worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.”[22]  But this was the last time that the nation’s High Court would use such language.  Within a few years, a new singles culture embracing sexual experimentation, a feminist movement affirming pre-marital sex, and media attention to “swinging” and “wife-swapping” out in the suburbs combined to separate sex from marriage.  The so-called “Population Bomb” scare during the late 1960’s gave another radical imperative to change: children should be avoided in marriage altogether.  “Motherhood: Who Needs It?” was the feature article in a September 1970, issue of Look magazine.  Hope for the nation lay with those “younger-generation females” who recognized that “it can be more loving to children not to have them.”[23]  The “childless marriage,” once deemed a true sadness, became the “child free” marriage, noble and forward looking.  According to historian Stephanie Coontz, the final step in the sexual revolution came in the 1970’s, when “a gay movement questioned the exclusive definition of sexual freedom in terms of heterosexuality.”[24] 

In short, the evolutionary appearance of the diminished “companionate marriage”—one without economic function and one with the sexual function redefined from “procreative” to “pleasure seeking”—cleared the path for more claims to change; and eventually to demands for “gay marriage.”   Indeed, according to one scientist, due their “playful, creative character…[y]ou could say that homosexuals are at the pinnacle of human evolution.”[25]  And who can deny such superior humans their due?

FAITH AND SCIENCE

So what shall we make out of all this?  People of Biblical faith have one answer: Genesis 1 and 2, where we find marriage cast as an immutable, unchanging aspect of God’s creation, fixed from the beginning:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.  And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth”…. Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh.[26]

Here we see marriage affirmed as both sexual (“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”) and economic (which is how I read the passage regarding “subdue” and “have dominion”).  It might be said that the author of Genesis seems to agree with Westermarck and Murdock.

What does recent science actually teach?  The surprise here is that contemporary work in both paleo-anthropology and evolutionary psychology  undercuts theories regarding the evolution of marriage.  A 2003 paper featured in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, for example, examines “skeletal size dimorphism” (that is, the difference in male and female size) in Australopithecus afarensis, a hominidor human ancestor said to have lived 3-4 million years ago.  Among the apes and other mammals, sexual dimorphism—difference in size—is greatest when sexual coupling is random or where one male accumulates numerous females.  Dimorphism is least when male and female pair off in monogamous bonds.  Overturning earlier assessments, this new study finds that Australopithecus males and females were nearly the same size, no different than men and women today.  According to the Kent State research team, this means that this human ancestor was monogamous, with male and female in a permanent pair bond, “a social complex including male provisioning driven by female choice.”[27]

Ronald Immerman of Case Western Reserve University reports in a 2003 issue of the journal, Evolutionary Psychology, that from the very beginning, our distinctly human ancestors showed a unique reproductive strategy where a female exchanged sexual exclusivity for special  provisioning by a male.  “This sharing of resources from man-to-woman is a universal,” Immerman reports.  Again from the beginning of the human race, it appears that women chose men not on the basis of physical size, but because of male skills in provisioning and loyalty: that is, women have bonded to men who reliably returned to the cave, hut, or split level tract home with fresh meat or a good pay check.  In this monogamous order, promiscuity stands out as a disease, an evolutionary danger.  At the same time, the ethnographic “data suggest an independent man (to) child affiliative bond which is part of Homo’s sapiens bio-cultural heritage,” one found no where in the animal kingdom.  Immerman explains this trait, as well, by evolutionary selection.  Besides looking for reliable providers, women “were simultaneously selecting for traits which would forge a social father: a man who would form attachments—bond—with his young and who would be psychologically willing to share resources with those young.”[28]

Well, it would be going too far to say that evolutionary theory and the Book of Genesis have converged; quite significant differences remain over matters such as timing.  All the same, it would be fair to say that new research guided by evolutionary theory does agree with Genesis that humankind, from our very origin as unique creatures on earth, has been defined by heterosexual monogamy involving long-term pair bonding (that is, marriage in a mother-father-child household) and resting on the special linkage of the sexual and the economic, where two become one flesh.  The evolution of marriage occurred—but only once—3 to 4 million years ago when “to be human” came to mean “to be conjugal.”  All the other cultural variations surrounding marriage are mere details, “change” is the mark of cultural strengthening or weakening around a constant human model.  And, rather than being the “pinnacle” of evolution, homosexuality emerges as an obvious biological and cultural dead-end.  The practice is, by definition, sterile, and—on its own terms—evolution theory absolutely depends on reproductive success.  [As an aside, I do note that last year, certain scientists gathered at a professional session called “A Revolution in Evolution.”  In order to accommodate the homosexual agenda, these scientists argued that Darwin must have been wrong about “sexual selection,” now “reproductive success,” and the demographically suicidal quality of homosexuality.  Even evolutionary science, it appears, is now at risk of corruption by the gay and lesbian rights campaign! How ironic!][29]

A NEW HOME ECONOMICS

What then about the functionless home?  What shall we do with that place which recent evolution has supposedly stripped of economic activity?

Part of the answer is that the economic evolutionists, from Engels to Ogburn to Goode to Friedan, have simply been wrong about the status of the home economy.  It is true that many functions once conducted in homes were torn away by industrial organization in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries.  Yet, even in modern industrial nations, a vast amount of productive activity still occurs in households.  Australian economists now lead the way in rediscovering this truth.  For example, Duncan Ironmonger of the University of Melbourne offers a good summary of continuing home-centered activities, including meal preparation, laundry and cleaning, shopping, various forms of child care, elder care, gardening, pet care, repairs and maintenance, transportation, and volunteer community work.  Moreover, the author shows that the quality of these goods and services is often of higher value than that found in the marketplace (for example, compare the parental care of children to that found in a commercial daycare center).  The problem is that all of these activities occur on a non-cash basis, so their “economic value”—so to speak—is unclear and easy to ignore.  In response,   Ironmonger has carefully calculated the shadow value produced by “household industries”—through both labor and capital.  For Australia in 1992, he reports this so-called Gross Household Product was worth $341 billion, nearly equal to the economic value added by market production.  Assuming rough socio-economic equivalence between the USA and Australia (which is reasonable in this case), the same figure for the United States would be a Gross Household Product of almost $10 Trillion in 2004![30]  Even in Washington, I’d call that a significant number!

What then about marriage?  Simply put, we need to recover the cultural understanding of marriage as the union of the sexual (meaning the reproductive) and the economic, and insist that our law rest on this human universal.  In the short run, this is vital to the defense of marriage at a time when it faces profound legal and cultural challenges, rooted in false evolution talk.  In the long run, it is essential to the very health, even the  survival, of our nation.

We also need to encourage more productive and vital homes.  I know of several successful contemporary models, but will focus on just one.  The key here lies in that throwaway line from Betty Friedan, who—you may recall—said:

It is possible [for women] to reverse history—or kid themselves that they can reverse it—by baking their own bread, but the law does not permit them to teach their own children at home.[31]

Well, that—at least—has now changed, through the grassroots behavior and political action of homeschoolers since the early 1970’s.   In home education, we see the broad productive home visibly reborn, and an important “lost family function” returned to its proper place.  The educational effects are vast: homeschoolers are reinventing both American teaching and learning; and the children excel.  By grade eight, according to a federal government study, these children are—on average—almost four years ahead of their public and private school counterparts.  More important, though, these refunctionalized families remake the very psychology of homes.  They become beehives of activity: the evidence suggests that these families are more likely than non-homeschooling households to live in semi-rural locations, tend a vegetable garden, engage in simple animal husbandry, create home businesses, and turn to home births.

Regarding the latter, homeshooling families are also rebuilding the bond of marriage and procreative sexuality.  One 1997 survey found 98 percent of homeschooling children to be in married couple households.  The sexual division-of-labor in these homes was more pronounced: 52 percent of home schoolers lived in two-parent families with only one parent in the workforce, compared to 19 percent nationwide.  And these families were noticeably larger: with nearly twice as many children as the national average.  Indeed, 62 percent of homeschooling families have three or more children, compared to 20 percent nationwide; a third of these homes have four or more children, compared to only 6 percent nationwide.[32] 

‘Functional’ and ‘prolific,’ it appears, do go together, underscoring both the poetry and the power of that wonderful phrase, “and they become one flesh.”  

Endnotes: