The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Engels argues that monogamous marriage, private property, and the state are historically linked products of the transition from primitive communal society to class-based civilization. Drawing on Lewis Morgan's anthropology, he contends that when men gained control over property and sought to pass it to biological heirs, they overthrew earlier maternal-descent systems and imposed monogamy on women. This created the first class antagonism—between husband and wife—which Engels identifies as the prototype for all subsequent class oppression.

The phrase appears in Engels' account of the transition from pairing marriage to monogamy, which he describes as the moment when women lost their earlier social standing. Engels argues this defeat was not a natural or biological development but a consequence of economic change—specifically, the emergence of private property and the male desire to ensure inheritance by biological heirs. This formulation became foundational for socialist and Marxist feminist analyses of patriarchy as historically constructed rather than eternal.

Engels wrote this book after Marx's death, drawing on Marx's notes on Morgan but elaborating a distinct argument about gender relations. Some scholars argue Engels' treatment of women's subjugation is more systematic and central than anything Marx wrote himself. Others, like feminist theorist Kate Millett, criticized Engels for framing women's oppression primarily in economic terms, treating it as a class event rather than a total social and psychological phenomenon.

Engels' reliance on Morgan's now-discredited evolutionary schema—savagery, barbarism, civilization—has aged poorly, and anthropologists no longer accept the idea of a universal matriarchal stage. Marxist anthropologists have largely rejected the book's specific historical claims while preserving its materialist method. Critics on the left, including some Marxist anthropologists, dismiss it as 'almost completely bunk,' though others argue it remains valuable for its framing of gender oppression as economically embedded.

Engels based much of his argument on Lewis Henry Morgan's 1877 anthropological study Ancient Society, which Marx had also read and annotated. Engels adopted Morgan's periodization of human development and his theory of primitive matrilineal kinship, but added his own economic analysis of how private property transformed family structures. Engels sought to rescue Morgan's work from what he saw as a bourgeois 'wall of silence,' though contemporary anthropology has since rejected Morgan's evolutionary framework.

The book was first published in October 1884 in Hottingen-Zürich, Switzerland, rather than Germany. Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law, in force from 1878 to 1890, had suppressed socialist publications and organizations within Germany. Engels wrote the manuscript between late March and May 1884, and the Swiss location allowed the work to be printed and distributed without immediate censorship. An English translation did not appear until 1902.