Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

Discontent in the Bürgerliche Society 1900–1933 • 223Transition from one stage to the next was the result of primordial struggles betweenthe sexes. The lowest stage was characterized by hetaeric sexuality and instability inthe male line of descent. ‘Man’s sexual life’, Bachofen explained, was ‘promiscuousand public.’ 26 To symbolize his sexual uniting with a woman, man ‘thrust his staff inthe earth, an image of his own act’. 27 Women, ‘wearied by continuous cohabitation’and the male tyranny it represented, revolted against men. 28 ‘The staff’, accordinglywas ‘wrenched from the male and the woman became his master.’ 29 Marriage andmatriarchy resulted from the revolt of women against unregulated sex and gave themother domination over the family and state. 30The construction of the original basis of heterosexual relations should be understoodby its oppositional political value. Sex-labor exploitation, in Bachofen’s analysis,was interpreted as the earliest form of labor, a labor and exploitation which hadits roots in the oldest profession. Here Bachofen cited the Greek physician, SextusEmpiricus, from the third century on the meaning of the dos (dowry). Sextus’ observationof sex exploitation as the origin of the dos (dowry), was supported by Plautus’mythical address to an Etruscan woman: ‘You earn your dowry with your body’. 31 InBachofen, accordingly, the dowry was originally a payment for the labor of sex, bywhich women earned their keep.This sex-labor exploitation precipitated a primordial struggle between the sexes.By means of revolution, according to Bachofen, women raised primordial mankindto a higher stage of development by instituting marriage and founding the family.The beginning of marriage was linked to women’s higher moral consciousness andrevolt against sex-labor exploitation by men. ‘The very word matrimony or mothermarriage’,Bachofen argued, ‘was based on the fundamental idea of mother right;one said matrimonium, not patrimonium (father-marriage)’. 32 ‘Familia’, he continued,related ‘at first only to the mother’. 33 Once conquered by women, men wereforced to submit to monogamous sexual relationships in the confines of marriage.‘Matriarchy [was] necessary to the education of mankind and particularly of men’,and the rigorous law of marriage was upheld by women who checked intemperatemanhood. 34 ‘It is the woman’s vocation’, Bachofen argued, ‘to tame man’s primordialstrength and to guide it into benign channels.’ 35The final primordial stage, according to Bachofen, was characterized by amazonianism,an unnatural exaggeration of matriarchy that resulted in another strugglebetween the sexes. 36 As the story went, the primordial women of Lemnos murderedall the males and resorted to an amazonian life when their men begin cohabiting andmarrying Thracian girls they captured in war. Soon bands of warlike maidens pouredvictoriously across Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and Gaul. ‘The Amazons’, Bachofenwrote, ‘renounced marriage and founded a society which not only played an outstandingpart in the history of our race through the devastation which it brought on theworld, but also contributed more than anything else to the downfall of the matriarchate.’37 This extreme militarism of amazonianism compelled men to band togetherand defeat what had become female tyranny. 38