ABSTRACT
Bronislaw Malinowski, the first great anthropologist who lived among primitive peoples, learned their language, and made painstaking observations of their daily habits, came away with the belief that the human family was a universal institution. The Republican proposal that has received the most attention is to eliminate welfare and use the savings to set up orphanages and other state institutions to care for children who are then abandoned. Herbert Gutman's work stands as a huge barrier to anyone offering simple solutions to the problem of contemporary welfare dependency. Gutman's book and all other accounts of the period clearly show that black men had adopted farming and become the heads of monogamous households. In monogamous societies, with their emphasis on paternal claims, illegitimacy is a scandal that may disqualify a woman from ever gaining a husband. Under the influence of European Christianity, African slaves traded matrilineal polygyny for what Margaret Mead once described as a "brittle monogamy".
