IT is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs. It is distinguished from pairing marriage by the much greater strength of the marriage tie, which can no longer be dissolved at either partner’s wish. As a rule, it is now only the man who can dissolve it, and cast off his wife. The right of conjugal infidelity remains his even now.

“As we learn from, for example, Greek history, it was the existence of slavery side-by-side with monogamy, the existence of beautiful young slaves who belonged to the man, that from the very beginning stamped on monogamy its specific character as monogamy only for the woman, but not for the man. And it retains this character to this day.

“Monogamy was not in any way the fruit of individual sex-love; marriages remained as before marriages of convenience. It was the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property. The Greeks themselves put the matter quite frankly: the sole aim of monogamous marriage was to make the man supreme in the family, and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own....”

“... monogamous marriage first makes its appearance in history not as the reconciliation of man and woman but as the subjugation of the one sex by the other. It announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period. In an old unpublished manuscript, written by Marx and myself in 1846, [The reference here is to German Ideology – A Sen] I find the words: “The first division of labour is that between man and woman for the propagation of children.” And today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others. It is the cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be already studied.”

–  (Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State)

However, it is just not possible to retain a whole apple in one’s hand after eating half. “But that seems to have been the husbands’ notion, until their wives taught them better. With monogamous marriage, two constant social types, unknown hitherto, make their appearance on the scene – the wife’s attendant lover and the cuckold [a man whose wife has committed adultery – A Sen] husband. The husbands had won the victory over the wives, but the act of crowning the victor was magnanimously undertaken by the vanquished. Together with monogamous marriage and hetaerism (extramarital sexual intercourse by men), adultery became an unavoidable social institution – denounced, severely penalized, but impossible to suppress.”