Mack Reynolds: Amazon Planet

“Now wait a minute,” Ronny said accusingly, pointing at her with his fork. “I’m not talking about exceptional people having affairs, or getting too many divorces. I’m talking about the basic family. The way I understand it, an Amazonian warrior can have three husbands and she keeps them cooped up in what amounts to a harem.”

She rolled her eyes upward as though in plea to heaven. “See here. In the first place, that term warrior is nonsense. It means no more than calling every woman a lady on Earth or Victoria. The original meaning of lady was a titled woman, a gentlewoman, but eventually the term became a gentilism, and you called any female a lady, even if she was an alcoholic thief. The same on Amazonia. Some people like to draw on mythology, continuously, just for fun. Have you noticed how much of the art is based on Amazonian myth? But to hear you talk, you’d think every woman on the planet was a swaggering soldier.”

“All right, so I’ll admit that I’ve been surprised there aren’t more women in uniform. That’s besides the immediate point.”

“I was getting to the fact that you’ve been confused by some of the terminology. Far from the family on Amazonia consisting of a bully of a female warrior, dominating a harem full of men, there is no family at all.”

Ronny pushed the rest of his food away.

“Zen!” he said. “That brings up a picture. No family at all. I suppose they find their children under cabbage leaves in the garden.”

She had to laugh, in spite of the fact that her face was already characteristically flushed in the debate.

“Don’t be drivel-happy,” she said. “This goes back to one of the arguments we had on the Schirra , the fact that nothing is so changing as human institutions. And among these is the family. Down through the ages we have seen evolve every type family imaginable, and we have seen, as well, periods when there was no family at all.”

“ When ?” he demanded. “I’ll admit we’ve had different types of family, under special conditions. Polygamy under the Arabs, because so many of the men were killed off in battle that there was a surplus of women; and polyandry, up in Tibet, before the advent of modern medicine. There was a surplus of men because so many women died in childbirth at that high altitude. But when was there no family at all? You’ve got to have some sort of family.”

“To begin with,” she said, “that example of yours of the Tibetans is probably wrong. Inadequate reporters of Tibetan society were probably describing a form of family that was one of the very oldest. All the men of the clan were married to all the women, all the children belonged to everybody. Your prejudiced reporter, his modern sensibilities shocked upon seeing such a society, might well report that the women had more than one husband. Of course they did, and the men more than one wife.”

Ronny was eyeing her in disbelief.

She went on. “That was a pretty primitive family if you ask me. In fact, I would call it no family at all. As man evolved, he hit upon a taboo, here and there, which prevented such relationships as those between parents and children. You can imagine the advantage this soon led to between those groups who had such a taboo, and those who didn’t—gentically speaking. Later on, some groups adopted a taboo against brother and sister relationships and again, those tribes which followed such a custom outstripped the ones who held onto the other type ‘family’.

“All this, of course, is oversimplifying. But eventually, out of these successful taboos, grew gentile society, in which each tribe was divided into genos as the Greeks had it, or gens as the Latins called them. It was forbidden to marry within your own gens. You had to take a husband or wife from some other gens, either within your own tribe, or from some other. All children from the relationship became members of the woman’s gens, when descent was in the female line. Later this was changed to descent in the male line and you took the name of your father’s gens. Very well, what it amounted to was that the gens was one enormous ‘family.’ All the children were the collective responsibility of the whole gens. All the adults were the mothers and fathers of all the children.

“However, this system fell of with the advent of civilization, the growth of herds and, with agriculture, the ownership of land. A man wanted his own children, who worked with him in the herds or in the fields, to inherit his property. He didn’t want it to go to the gens of his wife, as was the old system, or even his own gens. Slowly the family became monogamous, consisting only of a man, his wife, and his children.”

“Now wait a minute,” Ronny said. He was already tiring of both the subject and the lecture, but there was no easy way to break it off. “You mean not until comparatively recent times have we had a one-man-married-to-one-woman deal?”

“No, I don’t mean that. I think that as soon as our race had evolved much further than the outright animal, it began to tend toward a pairing relationship. That is, one man and one woman. This, I think, is eventually the normal relationship toward which we are trending and have always been. Even under gentile society, the usual thing was for one man and one woman to have a relationship. In those days it was easily broken and both could go their way, both were equal, neither had ties on the other. Man and woman complement each other. They act as a team and, instinctively you might say, the pairing family is the natural one.”

She plowed on. “But, yes, what we know as marriage and the family today, is comparatively recent. The marriage laws which developed, the marriage ceremonies, the religious teachings, the cultural taboos we came to think of as natural and normal, are new developments historically speaking. With the advent of the monogamous family, several needs had to be met. The man, wishing his children to inherit, had to make sure he was the father. Thus women were segregated, kept virtual prisoners in the gynaecea of the Greeks, the harem of the Arabs, the seraglio of the Turks. The laws and mores were such that a woman must be a virgin at marriage, but that was winked at in the man’s case. In fact, under the Code Napoleon, for example, the law conceded the right of the man to be unfaithful. A woman who was caught in adultery was punished with death, in some societies. There were other angles to these new marriage laws, however. In this new type family, with the man controlling all the wealth, the woman and children had to be protected from his being a complete brute. The laws forced him to remain with her during her pregnancy and while the children were young. He was obligated to support them.”

Ronny said impatiently, “Look, I don’t have time to take a complete course in the history of marriage and the family. Bring it down to here and now. What’s all this about there being no family and no marriage on Amazonia?”

She flushed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to bore you.”

“You’re not boring me, confound it.” he growled. “I’m just trying to make heads and tails of what goes on in this drivel-happy country.”

“Very well. Times have changed again. In a truly affluent society, the woman is no longer dependent upon the man, nor he on her. Nor, are the children dependent upon either. As in the days of the gens, society as a whole sees that nothing harms the child.”

“You mean,” he said accusingly, “parents don’t raise their own kids on this crazy planet?”

“It’s not the way I’d put it, but at the risk of shocking your conservative beliefs, Guy Thomas—”

“Call me Ronny,” he said wearily, “everybody else does.”

“A nickname? With a name like Guy, I wouldn’t think you needed a nickname. You know, you certainly seem different than you were on the Schirra . It’s as though you were playing a part then.”