gentile society, is shown for instance by the fact, amongst many others, that although, generally speaking, marriage was not allowed between the various members of the gens, an exception was made in the case of an orphan heiress, who was allowed to marry within the gens, so that her property might remain within it. However much the laws of inheritance might change, property still had to remain within the gens. Speaking of the organisation of the gens, Engels says: "How wonderful is this gentile constitution in all its natural simplicity! No soldiers, gendarmes or policemen, no nobility, kings, regents, prefects or judges, no prisons, no law suits—and still affairs run smoothly. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the entire community involved in them, either the gens or the tribe or the various gentes among themselves. Only in very rare cases is the blood revenge threatened as an extreme measure. Our capital punishment is simply a civilised form of it afflicted with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilisation. Not a vestige of our cumbersome and intricate system of administration is needed … the communistic household is shared by a number of families, the land belongs to the tribe, only the gardens are temporarily assigned to the households. The parties involved in a question settle it … there cannot be any poor and destitute—the communistic household and the gentes know their duties towards the aged sick and disabled. All are free and equal, including the women."
But these gentile institutions were such only within the tribe. Tribe and tribe were enemies to one another, and as private property increased so at first the laws of inheritance changed, there developed paternal law and the inheritance of property by the father's children, thus giving greater power to particular families; and as the means of production developed, that is, as the methods of creating wealth required more and more labour, slavery came into vogue, and the family, first in the patriarchal form and then in the more private form of the present day, gained greater importance and the gens institution became weaker and weaker, until it gave rise to the primitive form of present-day society in which the possessing classes live on the exploitation of the dispossessed classes, whether the position of the latter in society is that of body slave, serf, or wage slave. But in all these changes private property was the driving force, as Morgan says in speaking of the change of Grecian society from the gens organisation into that of political society. "Property was the element which was demanding the change. The development of municipal life and institutions, the aggregation of wealth in walled cities, and the great changes in the mode of life thereby produced, prepared the way for the overthrow of gentile institutions."
The Position of Women in Society
Side by side with this, the household, as a social institution or function, necessarily shrinks in importance, the social life of society
