Where did the idea of monogamy come from and how is it political?
Monogamy comes from Christianity, and as far as its political function, monogamy was a notion of governance (husband over wife and children) that became established by the medieval period and has been very important in Western political theory. In U.S. law, monogamy has defined sexual morality. Until the beginning of the 20th century, sex outside marriage was considered immoral and so monogamy was the dividing line between morality and immorality–the legal view of this stayed the same until the 1940s. The larger public meaning of monogamy is hard to discern because it’s so deeply imbedded in our political system– but at the time of the American Revolution, statesmen saw direct and positive parallels between monogamous marriage based on the couple’s mutual consent, and republican government based on the people’s consent– so that governance between a husband and wife was similar to the governance which takes place between an elected politician and the public. The pairing of monogamy a
