Is it possible to advocate for universal human rights while quietly dismantling the institution one of its core articles was written to protect? Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) calls the family “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.” Yet modern ideologies of left and right alike have treated the family as raw material for economic policy, social engineering, or personal liberation.
What kind of family is being protected here and against whom? Against state attempts to conscript or redesign it? Against market pressures that hollow it out into a unit of production? Against internal hierarchies that deny equal dignity to its members? Three traditions give sharply different answers. A natural-law view sees the family as a pre-political community of commitment and care, especially for children, that the state should recognize but not reinvent. A Marxist and socialist critique treats the family as historically contingent, often a mechanism for reproducing class and gender domination. Liberal feminism, from John Stuart Mill onward, focuses on how marriage law has subordinated women and insists that equality and consent inside the household are non-negotiable.
This article reads Article 16 through that three-way tension. Rather than treating “the natural and fundamental group unit” as a settled formula, it takes the provision as a live site of argument about dignity, equality, and the proper limits of both state and market power over intimate life.
Article 16 in Context: Family as a Human-Rights Subject
Article 16 was drafted in the immediate aftermath of regimes that had tried to remake the family in their own image. Nazi German, Italian fascist and Soviet projects subordinated family life to ideological aims through eugenics, population policy, or party-directed education. The drafters of the UDHR and the countries that adopted it in 1948 had watched what happens when the state claims the right to define marriage, children, and loyalty from the top down. Article 16 is, in part, a response to that experience.
The provision does four things. First, it affirms that men and women of full age have the right to marry and start a family — the right to form this primary community without arbitrary interference. Second, it requires that marriage be entered only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses, elevating genuine consent over arrangement, coercion, or state decree. Third, it places spouses on equal footing “as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution,” making equality internal to the institution rather than a mere external aspiration. And fourth, it characterizes the family as “natural and fundamental” and “entitled to protection by society and the State,” signaling that this community possesses its own moral and social significance.
Two basic ideas follow from this history. First, the family is understood as something that exists before and beyond the state, where people learn care, dependence, and responsibility, and where children are shaped long before government enters the picture. Second, the state’s role is to safeguard consent, equality, and children’s well-being, and ensure that families have the material conditions to survive, but it is not meant to redesign the family to serve ideological, demographic, or economic goals.
These are the ideas that Marxist, socialist, and liberal-feminist critiques push against in different ways. The central question is how far those critiques can go without erasing the very protections Article 16 was written to provide.
The Pre-Political Family: Natural Law Logic Without the Jargon
Human rights do not come from the legislature; they rest on the inherent worth of human beings and the kinds of relationships that human life naturally calls for. Law can acknowledge and protect that dignity, or it can attack and distort it, but it does not invent it. On this view, the family is not a random social arrangement, but responds to something fundamental about who we are as embodied, dependent, and relational beings.
Within this framework, the family arises from a stable, freely chosen union in which two adults commit to shared life. That union is ordered toward mutual support and, in most cases, toward the bearing and raising of children. The family is the first place where a person encounters care, obligation, and moral formation in a sustained way. Long before anyone signs a contract, votes in an election, or stands in court, they have already lived years in a household, learning what it means to be received, to be dependent, to be corrected, to forgive and be forgiven, and to discover that their life has value in the eyes of others. The family is not the product of state planning but a basic pattern of human life that the state finds already there.
A government that claims to respect human rights must do more than declare that “the family is important.” It must help secure the material conditions that make ordinary family life possible. At the same time, if the family is the primary place where children are formed morally, emotionally, and culturally, then parents have the first responsibility for their children’s upbringing. Schools, child-welfare agencies, and social services are meant to assist where parents lack resources or where serious harm occurs, but they should not quietly displace the family as the normal setting in which a child learns how to live.
This logic also draws firm boundaries around what the state and economic systems may do. A regime that tries to absorb children’s formation by treating them chiefly as future instruments of a party, nation, or race breaks faith with the very idea that the family is a primary human community the state is meant to protect. Likewise, a policy framework that treats families merely as demographic units or labor factories, valuable only because they supply more workers, soldiers, or taxpayers, turns them into tools of larger projects rather than recognizing them as communities with their own integrity. The underlying claim of Article 16, read in this light, is that the family has a given moral shape and worth that law must respect. It is not raw material that can be remade at will to satisfy ideological, demographic, or economic goals.
Marx & Engels: The Family as Instrument and Obstacle
While natural law views the family as a basic human community that precedes the state, Marx and Engels force a sharp shift in perspective. They see the family as a structure shaped and constrained by the economic order around it.
Marx and Engels developed their theory during the Industrial Revolution when women and children were driven into factories for long hours, wages too low for a single earner to support a household, and home life reduced to whatever time remained after shifts in mills and mines. Engels argued in 1845 that when married women and children are pulled into the labor force on these terms, family life, in any meaningful sense, is shattered, with severe moral and social consequences for parents and children alike.
Engels later argued that the first division of labor in human history is not between different trades, but between man and woman within the household. The monogamous, bourgeois family that nineteenth-century Europe treated as “normal” was, for Engels, a mechanism of domination. The husband controls property, wages, and public status while the wife performs unpaid domestic and reproductive labor. He cast the husband as the “bourgeois” and the wife as the “proletarian,” making the family a miniature model of the wider capitalist order.
In a socialist society, production would be organized collectively, and the family would cease to function as an economic unit. Women would be fully incorporated into public labor on the same footing as men, while childcare, education, and domestic tasks would be “rescue[d] … from the influence of the ruling class.” As that transformation deepened, they expected the traditional family, tied to private property and dependency, to lose its centrality and eventually wither away. Early Soviet law sketched what this looked like in practice: religious marriage was stripped of legal effect in favor of civil marriage, divorce was made simple and easily obtainable, and informal unions began to receive legal recognition. The state, not the old household or the church, became the ultimate arbiter of families.
Marx and Engels made clear that the family is not insulated from economic pressures. Who has to work outside the home, who controls income and assets, and whose labor is visible or invisible are deeply shaped by the surrounding system. They showed how talk of “the family” can mask severe inequalities of power and burden. But there is also a serious risk in their solution. If emancipation is defined chiefly as escape from the roles embedded in the traditional household, and if full participation in public labor becomes the primary measure of freedom, then the family itself starts to look expendable. In the effort to liberate individuals from exploitation, the family is easily subordinated to the needs of the party, the economic plan, or the collective.
Mill & Liberal Feminism: Equality Against the Household
If Marx and Engels classified the family as a small-scale replica of class domination, John Stuart Mill went after it as a small-scale system of political subjection. Best known for On Liberty, Mill later turned his attention to the legal status of women in The Subjection of Women, and he did not mince words. After the abolition of chattel slavery, he wrote, marriage was “the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.” In his view, the wife’s legal position, bound to obedience, denied equal property and contract rights, and locked into prescribed domestic roles, was incompatible with the very liberal principles he had defended elsewhere.
Mill’s answer was a “principle of perfect equality.” Women, he argued, should have the same civil and political status as men, the same access to education, professions, and public life, and the same freedom to choose their path. The talents of half the human race should not be confined to the private sphere. Opening all fields of employment and achievement to women would not only do justice to them as persons. In his words, it would mean “doubling the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity.”
Laws began to dismantle the formal subordination of wives to husbands. Married women’s property acts, equal contract capacity, more meaningful rights to divorce, protections against domestic violence, and, in the twentieth century, movements toward reproductive autonomy. Read through a human-rights lens, these changes were clear gains: equality in marriage, freedom from coercion, and real opportunities that the UDHR is supposed to secure.
However, once you focus on individuals and their equal freedom, it becomes easy, especially in a market-driven society, to see the family mainly as a cluster of autonomous adults plus their future labor. Caring for children, supporting aging parents, or making long-term personal sacrifices can seem like obstacles to personal achievement rather than important human goods. The same legal reforms that rightly freed women from subordination can treat the family as nothing more than a set of mobile employees and consumers, while the hard work of caregiving becomes invisible or undervalued.
While socialist critics often see the traditional family as a structure of domination that should be replaced, liberal thinkers, for different reasons, can see it as a barrier to individual choice and full participation in the marketplace. Both perspectives, coming from opposite sides, can end up viewing the family as something to shrink, rearrange, or sidestep in the name of progress or freedom.
Beyond Ideology: Recovering What Article 16 Protects
By the time the UDHR was drafted in 1948, the drafters were well aware how Article 16 would sit right in the middle of competing ideologies. From the beginning, Article 16 was not neutral ground. Most UDHR articles start with “everyone,” but this one deliberately says “men and women.” The women involved in drafting pushed hard for that phrasing because, at the time, marriage law around the world plainly treated wives as inferior. Naming “men and women” was their way of writing equal rights into the heart of marriage and divorce, and of pushing back against both religious and cultural rules that kept women from choosing their spouse or leaving a harmful union.
The article was also shaped by the broader shadow of the Nazi regime. Although not a direct “response” to any single law, the memory of racial persecution made the drafters determined to affirm that adults could marry without barriers rooted in race, nationality, or religion, and that they would retain equal rights if the marriage ended. That is as far as the drafting committee was prepared to go on the issue of divorce, treating it as a matter of non-discrimination rather than declaring a “right to divorce.”
Over time, the meaning of those same words has stretched. Some interpreted “men and women” to argue that Article 16 only protects heterosexual marriage. Today, scholars and UN human rights bodies increasingly treat the phrase as simply naming both sexes as rights-holders, not restricting who they may marry. International legal experts have urged states to recognize same-sex unions, whether as marriage or civil partnerships, and to extend the same basic protections and benefits.
South African judge Albie Sachs warned that denying access to marriage is not a small technicality; it is a way of denying people “the status and dignity of being ordinary citizens.” That is a very Mill-like point: equality inside and around the household is part of full membership in the political community.
The “free and full consent” language in paragraph 2 is now read as a direct ban on child and forced marriage. Yet the abuses continue: young girls are still married off and sold to the highest bidder. Courts and treaty bodies have begun to treat these practices as serious human-rights violations. The case of Noura Hussein in Sudan—forced into marriage as a teenager and raped—the public auction of a 16-year-old girl in South Sudan on Facebook, the ICC’s recognition that forced marriage can be a crime against humanity, and the CEDAW Committee’s finding that Kyrgyz authorities failed to protect women and girls from bride kidnapping are all attempts to apply Article 16’s promise of consent to brutal realities on the ground. Here, Mill’s insistence on genuine choice meets the UDHR’s own language: no one should be pushed into the most intimate decision of their life by money, custom, or fear.
The “right to found a family” has shifted as well. In 1948, the drafters simply assumed that families meant married, heterosexual couples having children in the usual way. Since then, courts and UN experts have argued that if the right truly includes “founding” a family, it must cover decisions about when and whether to have children, access to contraception, and assisted reproduction. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, for example, treated a ban on in-vitro fertilization as a violation of this right. Former UN Under-Secretary-General Dr. Nafis Sadik put it in plain terms: if women cannot decide whether, when, and with whom to have sex and bring children into the world, they cannot enjoy real equality or live in dignity.
Conclusions
So where does this leave us with Article 16? First, it means we cannot romanticize the family. Marx, Engels, and Mill were right that the home can be a place of exploitation and violence, especially for women and children. Any serious reading of Article 16 must take those dangers seriously: “protecting the family” cannot mean giving a free pass to abuse behind closed doors or to laws that strip spouses of equal status.
But second, we cannot simply solve these problems by hollowing the family out. When the state, the market, or a political movement treats families as nothing more than a source of labor, a set of flexible relationships, or a platform for ideology, it undermines exactly what Article 16 was meant to safeguard. Laws cannot engineer a single “ideal” household model, nor dissolve the family into a collection of free-floating individuals. The law must protect the family as a primary community of care.
Article 16 for our time says three things. First, adults have a right to form families that reflect the equal dignity of the sexes because that equality flows from their shared human nature, not from the state’s permission, and it may not be denied on grounds like sex or race. Second, children have a right to grow up in stable, responsible relationships, to be received as persons with rights, and to be protected from both private abuse and public manipulation because the bonds between parent and child arise from the very fact of giving life and care. Third, law and policy should recognize that the family is a basic community rooted in human nature and prior to the state, and should therefore create the material, legal, and cultural space in which families can exist and flourish through decent work, housing, education, and fair justice systems without trying to remake them into instruments of any particular ideological or economic project.
The family is called “natural and fundamental” because it grows out of basic human needs. No legislature invented those realities, and no ideology can dissolve them. If rights come from our shared nature, then protecting the family is not a policy choice but a duty. Human rights law succeeds when it recognizes what is already true about us and fails when it tries to rewrite what nature has given.
Joshua Villanueva is JURIST’s Washington, DC Correspondent and an LL.M. candidate in National Security and U.S. Foreign Relations Law at The George Washington University Law School.
