Traditionally, the Iroquois had lived in communal longhouses based on matrilineal descent and matrilocal residence, giving women a great deal of power.

Because they lived and worked together, females in these communal households felt strong bonds of solidarity with one another, enabling them when necessary to take action against uncooperative men.

[4] Engels emphasizes the importance of social relations of power and control over material resources rather than supposed psychological deficiencies of "primitive" people.

Inbreeding is practically eradicated by the prevention of a marriage between two family members who were even just remotely related, while relationships also start to approach monogamy.

Engels refers to this economic advantage for men coupled with the woman's lack of rights to lay claim to possessions for herself or her children (who became hers after a separation) as the overthrow of mother-right which was "the world historical defeat of the female sex".

Engels argues that a relationship based on property rights and forced monogamy will only lead to the proliferation of sexual immorality and prostitution.

The only class, according to Engels, which is free from these restraints of property, and as a result from the danger of moral decay, is the proletariat, as they lack the monetary means that are the basis of (as well as threat to) the bourgeois marriage.

Following the death of his friend and co-thinker Karl Marx in 1883, Engels served as his literary executor, organizing his various writings and preparing them for publication.

[citation needed] While Engels' 1883 manuscript Dialectics of Nature was left uncompleted and unpublished, he successfully published Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats: Im Anschluss an Lewis H. Morgan's Forschungen (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan) in Zürich in the spring of 1884.

[5] Engels began work on the treatise after reading Marx's handwritten synopsis of Lewis H. Morgan's Ancient Society; or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization, first published in London in 1877.

[6] Engels believed that Marx had intended to create a critical book-length treatment of the ideas suggested by Morgan, and aimed to produce such a manuscript to fulfill his late comrade's wishes.

[7] Engels's first inclination was to seek publication in Germany in spite of the passage of the first of the Anti-Socialist Laws by the government of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

On April 26, 1884, Engels wrote a letter to his close political associate Karl Kautsky, saying he sought to "play a trick on Bismarck" by writing something "that he would be positively unable to ban".

[8] He felt this goal unrealizable owing to Morgan's discussions of the nature of monogamy and the relationship between private ownership of property and class struggle, however, these making it "absolutely impossible to couch in such a way as to comply with the Anti-Socialist Law".

[9] Engels viewed Morgan's findings as providing a "factual basis we have hitherto lacked" for a prehistory of contemporary class struggle.

[9] He believed that it would be an important supplement to the theory of historical materialism for Morgan's ideas to be "thoroughly worked on, properly weighed up, and presented as a coherent whole".