The new family as a part of the social order comes into existence through the social recognition of a relationship which is considered especially dangerous and can only be recognized by the performance of elaborate rites and ceremonies.  It is taboo for men and women to have contact with each other.  Contact may occur only under ceremonial conditions, guarded in turn by taboo, and therefore socially recognized.  The girl whose life from puberty on has been carefully guarded by taboos, passes through the gateway of ceremonial into a new life, which is quite as carefully guarded.  These restrictions and elaborate rituals which surround marriage and family life may appropriately be termed institutional taboos.  They include the property and division of labour taboos in the survival forms already mentioned, as well as other religious and social restrictions and prohibitions.

The foundations of family life go far back of the changes of recent centuries.  The family has its source in the mating instinct, but this instinct is combined with other individual instincts and social relationships which become highly elaborated in the course of social evolution.  The household becomes a complex economic institution.  While the processes of change may have touched the surface of these relations, the family itself has remained to the present an institution established through the social sanctions of communities more primitive than our own.  The new family begins with the ceremonial breach of taboo,—­the taboo which enjoins the shunning of woman as a being both sacred and unclean.  Once married, the woman falls under the property taboo, and is as restricted as ever she was before marriage, although perhaps in slightly different ways.  In ancient Rome, the wife was not mistress of the hearth.  She did not represent the ancestral gods, the lares and penates, since she was not descended from them.  In death as in life she counted only as a part of her husband.  Greek, Roman and Hindu law, all derived from ancestor worship, agreed in considering the wife a minor.[5]

These practices are of the greatest significance in a consideration of the modern institutional taboos which surround the family.  Students agree that our own mores are in large part derived from those of the lowest class of freedmen in Rome at the time when Christianity took over the control which had fallen from the hands of the Roman emperors.  These mores were inherited by the Bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages, and were passed on by them as they acquired economic supremacy.  Thus these practices have come down to us unchanged in spirit even if somewhat modified in form, to fit the changed environment of our times.

The standardization of the family with its foundations embedded in a series of institutional taboos, added its weight to the formulation of the Model Woman type referred to at the close of the preceding chapter.  The model wife appears in the earliest literature.  In The Trojan Women, Hecuba tells how she behaved in wedlock.  She stayed at home and did not gossip.  She was modest and silent before her husband.  The patient Penelope was another ideal wife.  To her, her son Telemachus says: