Folkways, by William Graham Sumner

A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages,
Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals

CHAPTER IX

SEX MORES

Meaning of sex mores. — The sex difference. — Sex difference and evolution. — The sex distinction; family institution; marriage in the mores. — Regulation is conventional, not natural. — Egoistic and altruistic elements. — Primary definition of marriage; taboo and conventionalization. — Family, not marriage, is the institution. — Endogamy and exogamy. — Polygamy and polyandry. — Consistency of the mores under polygamy or polyandry. — Mother family and father family. — Change from mother family to father family. — Capture and purchase become ceremonies. — Feminine honor and virtue; jealousy. — Virginity. — Chastity for men. — Love marriage; conjugal affection; wife. — Heroic conjugal devotion. — Hindoo models and ideals. — Slavonic sex mores. — Russian sex mores. — Tribes of the Caucasus. — Mediæval sex mores. — The standard of the "good wife"; pair marriage. — "One flesh." — Pair marriage. — Marriage in modern mores. — Pair marriage, its technical definition. — Ethics of pair marriage. — Pair marriage is monopolistic. — The future of marriage. — The normal type of sex union. — Divorce. — Divorce in ethnography. — Rabbis on divorce. — Divorce at Rome. — Pair marriage and divorce. — Divorce in the Middle Ages. — Refusal of remarriage. — Child marriage. — Child marriage in Hindostan. — Child marriage in Europe. — Cloistering women. — Second marriages; widows. — Burning of widows. — Difficulty of reform of suttee in India. — Widows and remarriage in the Christian church. — Remarriage and other-worldliness. — Free marriage. — The Japanese woman.

357. Meaning of sex mores. The sex mores are one of the greatest and most important divisions of the mores. They cover the relations of men and women to each other before marriage and in marriage, with all the rights and duties of married and unmarried respectively to the rest of the society. The mores determine what marriage shall be, who may enter into it, in what way they may enter into it, divorce, and all details of proper conduct in the family relation. In regard to all these matters it is evident that custom governs and prescribes. When positive institutions and laws are made they always take up, ordain, and regulate what the mores have long previously made facts in the social order. In the administration of law also, especially by juries, domestic relations are controlled by the 343mores. The decisions rendered by judges utter in dogmatic or sententious form the current notions of truth and right about those relations. Our terms "endogamy," "mother family," "polyandry," etc., are only descriptive terms for a summary of the folkways which have been established in different groups and which are capable of classification.

358. The sex difference. The economy and advantage of sex differentiation are primarily physical. "As structural complexity increases, the female generative system becomes more and more complex. All this involves a great expenditure of energy, and we can clearly see how an ovum-producing organism would benefit by being spared the additional effort required for seeking out and impregnating another organism, and how, on the other hand, organisms whose main reproductive feature is simply the production of spermatozoa would be better fitted for the work of search and impregnation if unhampered by a cumbersome female generative system. Hence the advantage of the sexes being separate."1129 Here we have the reason why the sexes are independent and complementary, but why "equality" can never be predicated of them. Power in the family, in industry, in civil affairs, war, and religion is not the same thing and cannot be. Each sex has more power for one domain, and must have less power for another. Equality is an incongruous predicate. "Under the influence of the law of battle the male has become more courageous, powerful, and pugnacious than the female.... So, too, the male has, in the struggle, often acquired great beauty, success on his part depending largely, in many cases, upon the choice of the females who are supposed to select the most beautiful mates. This is thought to be notably the case with birds."1130 In some few cases the female seeks the male, as in certain species of birds. Some male fish look after the eggs, and many cock-birds help to build the nest, hatch the eggs, and tend the young.1131 When the females compete for the males the female is "endowed with all the secondary characters of the polygamous male; she is the more beautiful, the more courageous, the more 344pugnacious." This seems to show that the secondary characters are due to sex selection.1132 Men are held to be polygamous by descent and in their "instincts as at present developed." "The instinct for promiscuous intercourse is much stronger among men than women, and unquestionably the husband is much more frequently all in all to the wife than she to him."1133

359. Sex difference and evolution. According to the current applications of the evolution philosophy it is argued that "inheritable characters peculiar to one sex show a tendency to be inherited chiefly or solely by that sex in the offspring."1134 Women are said to be mentally more adaptable.1135 This is shown in their tact, which is regarded as a product of their desire to adapt themselves to the stronger sex, with whose muscular strength they cannot cope. If a woman should resist her husband she would provoke him, and her life would be endangered. Passive and resigned women would survive. "Here at any rate we may have one of the reasons why women are more passive and resigned than men."1136 Their tact is attributed to their quicker perception and to their lack of egoism. "The man, being more self-absorbed than the woman, is often less alive than she to what is going on around."1137 The man has a more stable nervous system than the woman. Combativeness and courage produce that stability; emotional development is antagonistic to it. "In proportion as the emotions are brought under intellectual control, in that proportion, other things being equal, will the nervous system become more stable."1138 Ages of subjection are also said to have produced in women a sense of dependence. Resignation and endurance are two of women's chief characteristics. "They have been educated in her from the remotest times."1139 Throughout the animal kingdom males are more variable than females. Man varies through a wider scale than woman. Dwarfs and giants, geniuses and idiots, are more common amongst men than amongst women.1140 Women use less philosophy; they do not think things out in their relations and analysis as men do. 345Miss Kingsley said that she "had met many African men who were philosophers, thinking in the terms of fetich, but never a woman so doing."1141

On the facts of observation here enumerated nearly all will agree. The traits are certainly handed down by tradition and education. Whether they are evolutionary is far more doubtful. They are thought to be such by virtue of applications of some generalizations of evolutionary philosophy whose correctness, and whose application to this domain, have never been proved.

360. The sex distinction; family institution; marriage in the mores. The division of the human race into two sexes is the most important of all anthropological facts. The sexes differ so much in structure and function, and consequently in traits of feeling and character, that their interests are antagonistic. At the same time they are, in regard to reproduction, complementary. There is nothing in the sex relation, or in procreation, to bring about any continuing relation between a man and a woman. It is the care and education of children which first calls for such a continuing relation. The continuing relation is not therefore "in nature." It is institutional and conventional. A man and a woman were brought together, probably against their will, by a higher interest in the struggle for existence. The woman with a child needed the union more, and probably she was more unwilling to enter it. It is almost impossible to find a case of a group in which marriage does not exist, and in which the sex relation is one of true promiscuity. We are told that there is no family institution amongst the Bako, dwarfs in Kamerun. They obey animal instincts without restriction.1142 This means that the origin of the family institution lies in the period before any group formations now open to our study, and promiscuity is an inference as to what preceded what we can find. A woman with a child entered into an arrangement with a man, whether the father or not was immaterial, by which they carried on the struggle for existence together. The arrangement must have afforded advantages to both. It was produced by an agreement. 346The family institution resulted and became customary by imitation. Marriage was the form of agreement between the man and the woman by which they entered into the family institution. In the most primitive form of life known to us (Australians and Bushmen) the man roams abroad in search of meat food. His wife or wives stay by the fire at a trysting place, care for the children, and collect plant food. Thus the combination comes under the form of antagonistic coöperation. It presents us the germ of the industrial organization. It is a product of the folkways, being the resultant custom which arises, in time, out of the ways of satisfying interests which separate individuals, or pairs, invent and try. It follows that marriage in all its forms is in the mores of the time and place.

361. Regulation is conventional, not natural. The sex passion affects the weal or woe of human beings far more than hunger, vanity, or ghost fear. It has far more complications with other interests than the other great motives. There is no escaping the good and ill, the pleasure and pain, which inhere in it. It has two opposite extremes, — renunciation and license. In neither one of these can peace and satisfaction be found, or escape from the irritation of antagonistic impulses. There is no ground at all for the opinion that "nature" gave men an appetite the satisfaction of which would be peaceful and satisfactory, but that human laws and institutions have put it under constraints which produce agony.1143 The truth is that license stimulates desire without limit, and ends in impotent agony. Renunciation produces agony of another kind. Somewhere between lies temperance, which seems an easy solution, but there is no definition of temperance which is generally applicable, and, wherever the limit may be set, there, on either side of it, the antagonistic impulses appear again, — one of indulgence, the other of restraint, — producing pitfalls of vice and ruin, and ever renewing the strain and torment of the problem of right and duty. Therefore regulation is imperatively called for by the facts of "nature," and the regulation must come from intelligence and judgment. No determination of what the regulation should 347be has ever yet been found in law or ethics which does not bear harshly on great numbers, and in all stages of civilization numbers are found who violate the regulations and live outside of them.

362. Egoistic and altruistic elements. Here, then, is the case: the perpetuation of the species requires the coöperation of two complementary sexes. The sex relation is antagonistic to the struggle for existence, and so arouses egoistic sentiments and motives, while it is itself very egoistic. It is sometimes said that the struggle for existence is egoistic and reproduction altruistic, but this view rests upon a very imperfect analysis. It means that a man who has won food may eat it by himself, while reproduction assumes the coöperation of others. So far, well; but the struggle for existence assumes and demands co-operation in the food quest and a sharing of the product in all but a very small class of primitive cases; and the sex passion is purely egoistic, except in a very small class of cases of high refinement, the actuality of which may even be questioned. The altruistic element in reproduction belongs to the mores, and is due to life with children, affection for them, with sacrifice and devotion to them, as results produced by experience. It is clear that a division between the food quest as egoistic and reproduction as altruistic cannot be made the basis of ethical constructions. To get the good and avoid the ill there is required a high play of intelligence, good sense, and of all altruistic virtues. Under such a play of interests and feelings, from which no one is exempt, mass phenomena are produced by the ways of solving the problem which individuals and pairs hit upon. The wide range and contradictoriness of the folkways in regard to family life show how helpless and instinctive the struggle to solve the problem has been. Our own society shows how far we still are from a thorough understanding of the problem and from a satisfactory solution of it. It must be added that the ruling elements in different societies have molded the folkways to suit their own interests, and thus they have disturbed and confused the process of making folkways, and have spoiled the result.

348363. Primary definition of marriage; taboos and conventionalization. The definition of marriage consists in stating what, at any time and place, the mores have imposed as regulations on the relations of a man and woman who are coöperatively carrying on the struggle for existence and the reproduction of the species. The regulations are always a conventionalization which sets the terms, modes, and conditions under which a pair may cohabit. It is, therefore, impossible to formulate a definition of marriage which will cover all forms of it throughout the history of civilization. In all lower civilization it is a tie of a woman to a man for the interests of both (or of the man). It follows that the sex relation has been a great arena for the use and perfection of the mores, since personal experience and reflection never ceased, and a great school for the education of the race in the use of intelligence, the development of sympathetic sentiments, and in a sense of the utility of ethical regulations. The sex taboo is the set of inhibitions which control and restrain the intercourse of the sexes with each other in ordinary life. At the present time, in civilized countries, that intercourse is limited by taboo, not by law. The nature and degree of the taboo are in the mores. Spanish, French, English, and American women, in the order named, are under less and less strict limitations in regard to ordinary social intercourse with men. The sex taboo could, therefore, be easily pursued and described through the whole history of civilization and amongst all nations. It seems to be arbitrary, although no doubt it has always been due, in its origin, to correct or incorrect judgments of conditions and interests. It is always conventional. That it has been and is recognized is the sum of its justification. When Augustine met the objection that Jacob had four wives he replied that that was no crime, because it was under the custom (mos) of Jacob's time.1144 This was a complete answer, but it was an appeal to the supreme authority of the mores.

364. Family, not marriage, is the institution. Although we speak of marriage as an institution, it is only an imperfect one. It has no structure. The family is the institution, and it was 349antecedent to marriage. Marriage has always been an elastic and variable usage, as it now is. Each pair, or other marital combination, has always chosen its own "ways" of living within the limits set by the mores. In fact the use of language reflects the vagueness of marriage, for we use the word "marriage" for wedding, nuptials, or matrimony (wedlock). Only the last could be an institution. Wedlock has gone through very many phases, and has by no means evolved along lines of harmonious and advancing development. In the earliest forms of the higher civilization, in Chaldea and Egypt, man and wife were, during wedlock, in a relation of rational free coöperation. Out of this two different forms of wedlock have come, the harem system and pair marriage. The historical sequences by which the former has been produced could be traced just as easily as those which have led up to the latter. There is no more necessity in one than in the other. Wedlock is a mode of associated life. It is as variable as circumstances, interests, and character make it within the conditions. No rules or laws can control it. They only affect the condition against which the individuals react. No laws can do more than specify ways of entering into wedlock, and the rights and duties of the parties in wedlock to each other, which the society will enforce. These, however, are but indifferent externals. All the intimate daily play of interests, emotions, character, taste, etc., are beyond the reach of the bystanders, and that play is what makes wedlock what it is for every pair. Nevertheless the relations of the parties are always deeply controlled by the current opinions in the society, the prevalent ethical standards, the approval or condemnation passed by the bystanders on cases between husbands and wives, and by the precepts and traditions of the old. Thus the mores hold control over individual taste and caprice, and individual experience reacts against the control. All the problems of marriage are in the intimate relations. When they affect large numbers they are brought under the solution of the mores. Therefore the history of marriage is to be interpreted by the mores, and its philosophy must be sought in the fact that it is an ever-moving product of the mores.

350365. Endogamy and exogamy. Although it seems, at first consideration, that savages could not have perceived the alleged evils of inbreeding, yet a full examination of the facts is convincing that they did do so. In like manner, they were led to try to avert overpopulation by folkways. They acted "instinctively," or automatically, not rationally. Inbreeding preserves a type but weakens the stock. Outbreeding strengthens the stock but loses the type. In our own mores each one is forbidden to marry within a certain circle or outside of another circle. The first is the consanguine group of first cousins and nearer. The latter is the race to which we belong. Royal and noble castes are more strictly limited within the caste. Amongst savage peoples there were two ideas which were in conflict: (1) all the women of a group were regarded as belonging to all the men of that group; (2) a wife conquered abroad was a possession and a trophy. Endogamy and exogamy are forms of the mores in which one of these policies has been adopted to the exclusion of the other. Of that we have an example in civilized society, where royal persons, in order to find fitting mates, marry cousins, or uncles, or nieces, and bring on the family the evils of close inbreeding (Spain); or they take slave women as wives and breed out the blood of their race (Athenians, Arabs). The due adjustment of inbreeding and outbreeding is always a difficult problem of policy for breeders of animals. It is the same for men. The social interests favor inbreeding, by which property is united or saved from dispersion, and close relationship seems to assure acquaintance. At Venice, in the time of glory and luxury, great dowers seemed to threaten to dissipate great family fortunes. It became the custom to contract marriages only between families which could give as much as they got. "This was not the least of the causes of the moral and physical decline of the Venetian aristocracy."1145

366. Polygamy and polyandry. Polygamy and polyandry are two cases of family organization which are expedient under certain life conditions, and which came into existence or became obsolete according to changes in the life conditions, although 351there are also cases of survival, due to persistence of the mores, after the life conditions have so changed that the custom has become harmful. Population, so far as we know, normally contains equal numbers of the two sexes, except that there are periods in which, for some unknown reason, births of one sex greatly preponderate over those of the other.1146 There are also groups in which the food quest, or other duty, of the men is such that many lives are lost and so the adults of the two sexes are unequal in number.1147 Therefore, in a normal population, polygamy would compel many men, and polyandry many women, to remain unmarried. Polyandry might then be supplemented by female infanticide. That any persons in a primitive society should be destined to celibacy is so arbitrary and strange an arrangement that strong motives for it must be found in the life conditions. Two forms of polygamy must be distinguished. (a) In primitive society women are laborers, and the industrial system is often such that there is an economic advantage in having a number of women to one man. In those cases polygamy becomes interwoven with the whole social and political system. Other customs will also affect the expediency of polygamy. Every well-to-do man of the Bassari, in Togo, has three wives, because children are suckled for three years.1148 (b) In higher civilization, with surplus wealth, polygamy is an affair of luxury, sensuality, and ostentation. It is only in the former case that polygamy is socially expedient, and that women welcome more wives to help do the work and do not quarrel with each other. In the latter case, polygamy is an aberration of the mores, due to selfish force. There are very many examples of polygamy in which the two motives are combined. These are transition stages. Polyandry is due to a hard struggle for existence or to a policy of not dividing property. A Spartan who had a land allotment was forced to marry. His younger brothers lived with him and sometimes were also husbands to his wife. Wives were also lent out of friendship or in order to get vigorous offspring.1149 352Here state policy or the assumed advantage of physical vigor overrode the motives of monogamy which prevailed in the surrounding civilization. In Plautus's comedy Stichus a case is referred to in which two slaves have one woman (wife). Roman epitaphs are cited in which two men jointly celebrate a common wife.1150 These are cases of return to an abandoned usage, under the stress of poverty. An emigrating group must generally have contained more men than women. Polyandry was very sure to occur. It is said that immigrant groups can be found in the United States in which polyandry exists, being produced in this way. Many aboriginal tribes in India, amongst which the Todas are the best known, practice polyandry. Przewalsky says that in Tibet polyandry is attributed to a tax on houses in which there is a married woman.1151 Primarily it is due to poverty and a hard habitat. Two, three, or even four brothers have a wife in common. The Russian traveler adds that rich men have a wife each, or even two, and Cunningham1152 confirms this; that is to say, then, that the number of wives follows directly the economic power of the man. The case only illustrates the close interdependence of capital and marriage which we shall find at every stage. In the days of Venetian glory "often four or five men united to maintain one woman, in whose house they met daily to laugh, eat, and jest, without a shadow of jealousy. If, however, the cleverness of a woman brought a young patrician into a mesalliance, the state promptly dissolved the bond in its own way."1153 The polyandry of the Nairs, on the Malabar coast, has been cited to prove that polyandry is not due to poverty. It is due to the unwillingness to subdivide the property of the family, which is of the modified mother-family form, all the immediate kin holding together and keeping the property undivided. Subdivisions of this people differ as to details of the custom and it is now becoming obsolete. Of course "moral doctrines" have been invented to bring the custom under a broad principle.1154 It appears, however, that the husbands, in the Nair system, are 353successive, not contemporaneous. The custom is due to the Vedic notion that every virgin contains a demon who leaves her with the nuptial blood, causing some risk to her husband. Hence a maiden was married to a man who was to disappear after a few hours, having incurred the risk.1155 Here, then, we have a case of aberrant mores due to a superstitious explanation of natural facts. Polygamy of the second form above defined is limited by cost. Although polygamy is allowed under Mohammedan law, it is not common for a Mohammedan to have more than one wife, on account of expense and trouble. Lane estimated at not more than one in twenty the number of men in Egypt, in the first half of the nineteenth century, who had more than one wife. If a woman is childless, her husband may take another wife, especially if he likes the first one too well to divorce her.1156 That is to say, polygamy and divorce are alternatives. Other authorities state that polygamy is more common and real amongst Mohammedans than would appear from Lane's statement. In the cities of Arabia more than one wife is the rule, and the Arabs in Jerusalem take three or four wives as soon as they have sufficient means. The poorest have at least two.1157

367. Consistency of the mores under polygamy or polyandry. When the life conditions, real or imagined, produce polygamy, monogamy, or polyandry, all the mores conform to the one system or the other, and develop it on every side. All the concepts of right and wrong — rights, duties, authority, societal policy, and political interest — are implicit in the mores. They must necessarily all be consistent. A Nair woman is no more likely to overstep the mores of her society than an English woman is to overstep the mores of hers. "The relations between the sexes in Malabar are unusually happy."1158 Tibetan men are said to be courteous to women.1159 Tibetan women like polyandry. They sneer at the dullness and monotony of monogamic life.1160 Thus the ethics follow the customs.

354368. Mother family and father family. The ultimate reasons for the mother family and for a change to the father family are in the life conditions, industrial arts, war, pressure of population, etc. In fact, our terms are only names for a group of mores which cover some set of interests, and we need to be on our guard against the category fallacy, that is, against arguing from the contents of the classification which we have made. The term "matriarchate" encouraged this fallacy and has gone out of use. By the mother family we mean the system in which descent and kin are reckoned through women, not through men. In that form of the family the relation of man and wife is one of contract. The woman must be thought of as at her home, with her kin, and the husband comes to her. She has great control of the terms on which he is accepted, and she and her kin can drive him away again, if they see fit. The children will be hers and will remain with her. The property will remain hers, while her husband must abandon his property when he comes to her. The next male friend of a woman will be her brother, not her husband, and the next male guardian of a child will be his mother's brother, not his father. Words of relationship, address, etc., must all conform to the fundamental notion which rules the family. Religion, political control, modes of warfare and alliance, and education are all constructed to fit the family-form. At puberty boys are taken into the political organization (tribe) to which the father belongs and get political status from that. By birth each one is a member of a blood-kin group (clan) on which depend blood revenge and other duties and by which marriage is regulated. All this grows up as a part of the folkways, instinctively, without plan or guidance of intelligent control. Yet it has been wrought out, along the same logical lines of custom and rule, all over the world by savage peoples. We meet with many variations of it in transitional forms, or in combination with later institutions, but they belong to the time when this arrangement is breaking down, and passing into the father family. The mother family system is definite and complete when flourishing and normal. By the totem device the mother family is made capable of indefinite extension, and a verification is provided for 355its essential facts. The status of women, in the mother family, was strong and independent. Often important societal functions were entrusted to them, and their influence was so high that it produced great results, like the conferring of glory on braves, and the election of war chiefs. In cases, as for instance the ancient Lycians, the men were treated with harshness and abuse. The distribution of social power between the sexes gave opportunity for this, and the opportunity was seized.1161

369. Change from mother family to father family. It may well be believed that the change from the mother family to the father family is the greatest and most revolutionary in the history of civilization. By changes in the life conditions it becomes possible for the man to get his wife to himself away from her kin, and to become the owner of his children. In the mother family those arrangements could only be suggested to him as modifications of his experience which would be eagerly to be desired, i.e. as objects of idealization. When the life conditions so changed that it became possible, the father family displaced the mother family. All the folkways followed the change. Family arrangements, kin, industry, war, political organization, property, rights, must all conform to the change. The wife is obtained by capture, purchase, or later by contract. By capture or purchase she passes under her husband's dominion, and she may not be a consenting party. She loses status by the change. In the earlier period the man might get a wife by capture. She would be either a work-wife or a love-wife. Now a real status-wife would be obtained by real or fictitious capture and get her status from that fact; that is, she becomes very much at the mercy of her husband. The same is true of a purchased wife. The relation of a wife to her husband is analogous to property. The same is true of the relation of children to their father. The husband gives, sells, or lends wife or daughters as he sees fit, although an interference with his dominion over them without his consent would be a thing to be earnestly resented. Loyalty and fidelity to husband became the highest duties of wives, which the husband enforced by physical penalties. Female honor, for 356wives, consisted in chastity, which meant self-submission to the limitations which men desired in wives and which the mores had approved, for the mores teach the women what conduct on their part is "right," and teach them that it is "right" that they should be taken as wives by capture or purchase. Female virtue and honor, therefore, acquire technical definitions out of the mores, which are not parallel to any definitions of virtue and honor as applied to males. In Deut. xxi. 10 the case of a man enamored of a captive woman is considered, and rules are set for it. The woman may not be sold for money after she has been "humbled." It is evident that the notions of right and wrong, and of rights in marriage and the family, are altogether contingent and relative. In the mores of any form of the family the ideas of rights, and of right and wrong, will conform to the theory of the institution, and they may offer us notions of moral things which are radically divergent or antagonistic.

370. Capture and purchase become ceremonies. As population increases and tribes are pushed closer together, capture loses violence and is modified by a compromise, with payment of money as a composition, and by treaty, until it becomes a ceremony. Then purchase degenerates into a ceremony, partly by idealization, i.e. the purchase ceremony is necessary, but the arrangement would seem more honorable if some other construction were put on it. The father, if he takes the customary bride price but is rich and loves his daughter, so that he wants to soften for her the lot of a wife as women generally find it, gives a dowry and by that binds her husband to stipulations as to the rights and treatment which she shall enjoy. In Homer's time, no man of rank and wealth gave his daughter without a dowry, although he took gifts for her, even, if she was in great demand, to a greater value.1162 What the rich and great do sets the fashion which others follow as far as they can. In the laws of Manu we see purchase not yet obsolete, but already regarded as shameful, if it really is a sale, and so subjected to idealization; that is, they try to put another construction on it. The ceremonies of purchase and capture lasted for a very long time, because there was 357no other way to indicate the bond of wedlock until the promise came into use. That has never furnished a bond of equal reality to that of capture or purchase.

371. Feminine honor and virtue. Jealousy. As the old ceremonies become obsolete the property idea fades out of the marital relation, and the woman's exclusive devotion to her husband is no longer a rational inference from capture or purchase by him, but becomes a sentiment of sex. Idealization comes into play again and sets a standard of female honor and duty which rests on womanhood only, and therefore does not apply to men. It is the lot of every woman to stand beside some man, and to give her strength and life to help him in every way which circumstances offer opportunity for. Out of this relation come her ideas of her honor, duties, and virtue. Jealousy on the part of the husband also changes its sense. He thinks it an abomination to lend, sell, or give his wife. Jealousy is not now the sentiment of a property owner, but it is a masculine sex sentiment which corresponds to the woman's sex honor and duty. What she gives to him alone he accepts on the same basis of exclusiveness.

372. Virginity. We have many examples of peoples amongst whom girls are entirely free until married, on the rational ground that they are under obligations to nobody. They are under no taboo, marriage being the first application of the sex taboo. Farnell1173 says that the first sense of parthenos was not "virgin," but unmarried. The Oriental goddess of impure love was parthenos. Artemis was perhaps, at first, a goddess of people who had not yet settled marriage mores, but had the mother family, amongst whom women were powerful. In the development of the father family fathers restricted daughters in order to make 359them more valuable as wives. Here comes in the notion of virginity and pre-nuptial chastity. This is really a negative and exclusive notion. It is an appeal to masculine vanity, and is a singular extension of the monopoly principle. His wife is to be his from the cradle, when he did not know her. Here, then, is a new basis for the sex honor of women and the jealousy of men. Chastity for the unmarried meant — no one; for the married — none but the husband. The mores extended to take in this doctrine, and it has passed into the heart of the mores of all civilized peoples, to whom it seems axiomatic or "natural." It has often been declared absurd that sex honor, especially for women, should be made to depend on a negative. It seems to make an ascetic and arbitrary standard for everyday life. In fact, however, the negation is imposed by the nature of the sex passion and by the conditions of human life. The passion tends to excess. What is "natural" is therefore evil. Negation, restraint, renunciation, are imposed by expediency. Perhaps it is the only case in which man is driven to error and evil by a great force in his nature, and is thus forced, if he would live well, to find a discipline for himself in intelligent self-control and in arbitrary rules. This would justify the current usage of language in which "morals" refers especially to the sex relation.

373. Chastity for men. In modern times there is a new extension of idealization, by which it is attempted to extend to men the same standard of chastity and duty of chastity as to women. Two questions are here confused: (a) whether unmarried men and women are to be bound by the same obligation of chastity; (b) whether married men and women are to be bound by the same rule of exclusion. The Hindoo lawgivers demand the same fidelity from husband and wife.1174 In the treatise on Economics which is ascribed to Aristotle,1175 although there is no dogmatic statement of law or duty, all the prescriptions for the husband and wife are the same, and the man is said to injure the wife by infidelity. Aristotle1176 propounds the rule of taboo on all sex relations except in marriage, which is the doctrine of pair marriage

360(sec. 383). In the Economicus of Xenophon1177 the relations of husband and wife are expounded at length in terms of great respect and esteem for a wife. The work seems to be rhetorical and dramatic, not actual, and it is represented as very exceptional and astonishing that such relations should exist between any man and his wife. In Plutarch's Morals the tract on "Conjugal Precepts" is written in an elevated tone. It is not specific and seems open to the suspicion of being a "pose." However, the doctrine is that of equal duty for husband and wife, and it may be taken to prove that that was the doctrine of the neostoics. Seneca wrote, "You know that it is a base thing that he who demands chastity of his wife should himself corrupt the wives of others."1178 And again, "Let him know that it will be the worst kind of an injury to his wife for him to have a mistress."1179 Augustine tells a story that Antoninus Pius granted a man a divorce for adultery of his wife, provided the man could show that he had, by his mode of life, maintained fidelity to his wife, and that the emperor added the dictum that "it would be unjust that a man should be able to exact a fidelity which he did not himself observe."1180 Augustine himself maintained the full equality of spouses in rights and duties. Ulpian said that "it seems to be very unjust that a man demands chastity of his wife while he himself does not show an example of it." This dictum got into the Digest where the jurists of all succeeding ages could have it before their eyes.1181 It did not often arrest their attention. These utterances, so far as they are sincere expressions of convictions, do not represent the conduct of any school, and perhaps not even that of the men who recorded them. They belong to a period of great corruption of the sex mores of the upper classes, and of rapid extension of such corruption to the lower classes. A character in Plautus's comedy of The Merchant1182 complains of the difference in codes for unchaste husbands and unchaste wives. If every woman has to be content with one husband, why should not every man be forced to be content with one wife? Jerome 361made the most explicit statement of the Christian rule: "Amongst us [Christians] what is not permitted to women is not permitted to men. The same obligation is held to rest on equal conditions."1183 This is the assertion of a celibate and an ascetic. Perhaps it may be held to apply to pre-marital duty, but it is doubtful whether he had that in mind. All the other statements quoted apply only to the mutuality of conjugal duty. Of all of them it must be said that they are isolated flights of moral enthusiasm, and by no means present the prevailing code or the mores of the time. They do not express the life rules which have ever yet been observed by any but selected and limited classes in any society. The writings of Chrysostom and Augustine show plainly that the Christians of Jerome's time did not practice the doctrine which he uttered. It has never yet been a part of the mores of any society that the same standards of chastity should be enforced against both sexes before marriage. "At the present day, although the standard of morals is far higher than in pagan Rome, it may be questioned whether the inequality of the censure which is bestowed on the two sexes is not as great as in the days of paganism."1184 Conjugal affection has been the great cause of masculine fidelity in marriage. Laertes refused to take Eurykleia lest he should hurt his wife's feelings.1185 Plutarch, in his tract on "Love," dwells upon its controlling power, its exclusiveness, and the devotion it cultivates. Observation and experience of this kind may have produced the modern conviction that a strong affection between spouses is the best guarantee of happiness and truth. This conviction, with the code which belongs with it, have spread further and further, through wider and wider classes, and it is now the accepted moral principle that there ought to be no sex gratification except inside of pair marriage. What that means is that no one could formulate and maintain in public discussion any other rule as more reasonable and expedient to be the guiding principle of the mores, although it has not yet become such. Also, "the fundamental truth that the same act can never be at once venial for a man to demand and infamous for a woman to 362accord, though nobly enforced by the early Christians, has not passed into the popular sentiment of Christendom."1186 Passing by the assertion that the early Christians enforced any such rule, which may well be questioned, we ask: Why are these views not in the mores? Undoubtedly it is because they are dogmatic in form, invented and imposed by theological authority1187 or philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience of life and cannot be verified by it. Woman bears an unequal share of the responsibilities and duties of sex and reproduction just as certainly and justly as man bears an unequal share of the responsibilities and duties of property, war, and politics. The reasons are in ultimate physiological facts by virtue of which one is a woman and the other is a man.

374. Love marriage. Conjugal affection. "Wife." It must be assumed that even in the lowest form of society a man may have preferred one woman to others, but love between a man and a woman is not a phenomenon of uncivilized society. It begins with wealth and luxury. Love stories can be found in very early folklore, legends, and poetry, but they belong to idealization, to romance and unreality. Realistic love stories are now hardly a century old. It is evident that they lead idealization. They put cases and solve them, and every reader forms a judgment whether the case has actuality and whether the solution is correct. Love in half-civilization and in antiquity was erotic only. The Greeks conceived of it as a madness by which a person was afflicted through the caprice or malevolence of some god or goddess. Such a passion is necessarily evanescent. The ancient peoples in general, and the Semites in particular, did not think this passion an honorable or trustworthy basis of marriage. The Kaffirs think that a Christian wife, married for love, is shameful. They compare her to a cat, the only animal which, amongst them, has no value, but is obtained as a gift.1188 The gandharva marriage of the Hindoos was a love marriage, and was not honorable. It was free love and became, in practice, an entirely informal union without institutional guarantees.1189 This would be, at best, 363a conscience marriage, to which a man would adhere from a sense of duty, the strength of which would depend on personal character only.

In all these cases the views entertained were justified, if love meant only erotic passion. On the other hand, we have seen (sec. 362) that conjugal love controls the will by the highest motives. It is based on esteem, confidence, and habit. It presents all varieties and degrees, from exploitation on one side and servility on the other, to good-fellowship on both sides. It depends on the way in which each pair arranges its affairs, develops its sentiments, and forms its habits. Conjugal affection makes great demands on the good sense, spirit of accommodation, and good nature of each. These are very great pre-conditions. It is no wonder that they often fail. In no primitive or half-civilization does the word "wife" bear the connotations which it bears to us. In Levit. xxi. 1 a case may be seen in which a man's blood kin takes precedence of his wife. Arabs, in the time of Mohammed, did not think that the conjugal tie could be as serious and strong as the kin tie, because the former is institutional only; that is, it is a product of convention and contract.1190 Public demonstrations of love they thought offensive and insulting to the woman. People of rank often admitted no suitors for their daughters. It was thought a disgrace to give a daughter into the power of an outsider. They killed female infants, not, like the poor, because they could not afford to rear them, but from fear of incurring disgrace from them.1191 By veiling the women are excluded from all social intercourse with men and from any share in intellectual interests.1192 They cannot win conjugal affection — certainly not from educated men. Erotic passion fills Mohammedan poetry and is cultivated at home. The few cultivated women of the higher classes emancipate themselves from moral restraints, often without concealment.1193 In Mohammed's last sermon he said: "You have rights against your wives and they have rights against you. They are bound not to violate marital fidelity and to commit no act of public wrong. If they do so, you have the power 364to beat them, yet without danger to their lives."1194 Islam is not a field in which conjugal affection could be expected to develop.1195 "A Japanese who should leave his father and mother for his wife would be looked upon as an outcast." Therefore the Bible "is regarded as irreligious and immoral."1196 The notion that a man's wife is the nearest person in the world to him is a relatively modern notion, and one which is restricted to a comparatively small part of the human race.

375. Heroic conjugal devotion. In general, the European analogy for the relation of husband and wife in the rest of the world, now or in past ages, would be rather that of master and servant. The erotic sentiment has generally been thought of as independent of marriage, possible in it, generally outside of it; and it has often been thought of as improper and disgusting between husband and wife. There is a poetical suggestion in Homer that marriages are made in heaven. Zeus is said to select a man's wife with a view to the fate allotted to him.1197 Achilles says that every wise and noble man cherishes his wife.1198 Ulysses says, "Nothing is better or more conducive to prosperity than that husband and wife should live together in concord."1199 Hector and Andromache manifested faultless conjugal affection. Penelope was a type of the devoted wife, a type which must be ranked lower than that of Andromache, because it does not imply equality of the spouses. Valerius Maximus (fl. 25 A.D.)1200 gave a chapter to "Conjugal Love." He found a few cases in which spouses, both male and female, had died for or on account of each other. They do not represent the mores. There is a tragic or heroic element in them all. That is the way in which conjugal love would strike the mind of an ancient man in his most serious moments. Apuleius1201 gives the case of Charites who had intense love for her husband. Her base lover was a victim of erotic passion. Stobæus (fifth or sixth century A.D.) collected and classified passages from Greek authors on various topics. Titles 63 365to 73 are about women and marriage. The views expressed run to both extremes of approval and disapproval. No one of the writers has apparently any notion of conjugal affection. In some cases under the tyrannical Roman emperors of the first century women showed extreme wifely devotion.1202 Roman tombstones (not unimpeachable witnesses) testify to conjugal affection between spouses.1203 In the Icelandic sagas women show heroic devotion to their husbands, although they make their husbands much trouble by self-will and caprice.1204 The barbarian invaders of the Roman empire are reported to have been remarkable for conjugal fidelity. Salvianus excepts the Alemanni.

376. Hindoo models and ideals. In the Mahabharata, the heroic poem of Brahminism dating from about the beginning of the Christian era, much attention is given to beauty and love. Many marriages are made for love, which is regarded as the best motive. A love relation needed the approval of the girl's parents, otherwise it ran down to the gandharva form. A hero, who abducted a girl for his brother, released her when she pleaded that she loved another to whom she had given her promise, although her father did not yet know it. The favored lover renounced her on account of the abduction, but she said that she would never choose another. "Whether he lives long or only a short time, whether he is rich in virtue or poor, the husband is chosen once for all. When once the heart has decided and the word has been spoken, let the thing be done."1205 These words are now regarded in Hindostan as the completest and noblest possible expression of marriage and the woman's attitude to it. A model wife in the heroic period was amiable to all, and made herself beloved by politeness and friendliness, and by her virtue and proper behavior. She gave great attention to her parents-in-law. She was reserved in speech and submissive, and she charmed her husband by her grace, wit, and tenderness.1206 The Mahabharata contains episodes of strong devotion of men to their wives and of heroic self-sacrifice of wives for their 366husbands. In Hindostan now the relations of husband and wife are not mutual. The man's mother must always be the first to him. "This is in full accordance with the national sentiment which stigmatizes affection which asks for equal return as shop-keeping."1207 "Who talks of vulgar equality," asks the Hindoo wife, "when she may instead have the unspeakable blessedness of offering worship."1208

377. Slavonic sex mores. The southern Slavs and people of the Caucasus have allowed their sex mores to run into some extreme forms which to outsiders seem vicious. Young married women contract a very intimate relation to their bride attendants, of whom two attend a bride on her wedding day. She is but a girl, and is given to a man whom she never saw before, does not like, and never can like; she comes into a strange house where it is of the first importance for the rest of her life that she shall please her parents-in-law by the greatest humility and submission; she is forbidden by custom to approach her husband freely; she scarcely sees him during the day; yet she may freely converse with his brothers, who were her bride attendants. The elder one, if he is married, and if he is polite to her, becomes her best friend. An Albanian who has been away at work will not bring back a gift for his wife. He shows more attention to the wife of his elder brother. The Servian bride is ashamed of her marital relation, and thinks it indecent to address her husband in public, even after she has borne him children. He remains a stranger to her, and her relation to him is scarcely more than that of sex. Her brother she loves beyond any other. She will mourn for him with the deepest sorrow, but it would be a shame for a woman to mourn for her husband, much more for a bride to mourn for her bridegroom. In former times it was improper for a man to begin conjugal life immediately after marriage. The bride attendants, brothers of the groom, spent the first night by the side of the bride, and for the next three nights the mother or sister of the groom slept with the bride. The groom is reluctant. A Servian woman is derided if she has a child within a year after marriage. In some districts sex morality is very high, in others 367very low. In Carinthia it is worst. There, in the Gurkthal, the illegitimate births are twice as numerous as the legitimate, so that the marriage institution hardly exists. In Slavonic Croatia persons who marry are indifferent to each other's previous conduct with others. Amongst other southern Slavs, at a wedding, the groom must neither talk nor eat, out of shame, and the bride must weep while being dressed. It is reported from Bocca di Cattaro, in the Balkan peninsula, that public contempt is so severe against illicit acts by men before marriage that such acts are very rare amongst those who have any reputation or position to lose.1209

378. Russian sex mores. A custom widely prevalent through parts of Great Russia and the adjacent Slavonic regions, until the nineteenth century, was that the father married his son, as a boy, to a marriageable young woman, whom the father then took as his own concubine. When the son grew up his wife was advanced in life and the mother of several children. He then did what his father had done. The large house and joint family offered temptation to this custom, and has generally been believed to be to blame for it. Rhamm contradicts that opinion.1210 The same custom existed amongst the Bulgarians.1211 Another motive for it is suggested, that the father wanted to increase the number of laborers in the big house. In 1623, in Poland, the death penalty was provided for a man who should so abuse his daughter-in-law.1212 The same custom is reported from the Tamils of southeast India.1213 In the mountains on the southwestern frontier of Russia there was, in the eighteenth century, an almost entire lack of sex mores. Amongst all the Slavonic peoples females are in a very inferior status and owe formal deference to males. In Bulgaria the wives are from five to ten years older than the husbands, because boys of fourteen begin to make love, but to adult marriageable women.1214 All these facts make it a phenomenon worthy of special mention that the people of the Ukrain are very continent, cherish a high ideal of love between the sexes, and greatly dislike 368all improprieties in language and conversation.1215 The popular Russian wedding songs are sad. The bride is addressed as a happy child, free in her father's house, with a sad future before her, of which she is blissfully ignorant.1216 In Karelia "a bride radiant with happiness is an unknown sight. With the betrothal begins the time of tears, which lasts until the marriage feast in the house of the bridegroom. Even if she is happy and contented the mores require that she shall shed tears and affect sadness."1217 The "wailer" is a functionary in a Russian village. She teaches the bride to bewail the loss of her "maiden freedom."1218

379. Tribes of the Caucasus and Sahara. The Cherkess of the Caucasus live in big houses, in a joint family, under the authority of a patriarch. Wives were bought or captured in common, but so many as the men. Darinsky thinks that those who could, and wanted to, buy separate wives threatened the arrangement. Hence the men, in a body, opposed monogamic unions. Such unions were a crime against the crowd. Hence the customs arose which are now prevalent, — the concealment of all marital relations, the public ignoring of each other by the spouses, and the practical jokes and horseplay at weddings by boys and neighbors. It is a survival of old manifestations of opposition and disapproval.1219 The men of the tribes in Sahara are often absent for days together. This gives the women liberty. The men begrudge this and punish the women for assumed infidelity. Some of the women are famous prostitutes.1220

380. Mediæval sex mores. The mediæval sex mores were produced out of two opposite currents of thought, — that women were evil and dangerous and to be shunned, and that women were lovely and adorable, and worthy of reverence and worship. Both of these sets of ideas degenerated into folly and vice, and became modes of selfishness and luxury. Elaborate hypocrisy and insincerity became common. Technical definitions of terms were used to obscure their ethical significance. Minne came to have a bad meaning and was used for erotic passion. Courtoisie became a 369term for base solicitation.1221 Gower, in the Vox Clamantis (1382), tried to distinguish and specify sensual love. He inclines to the monkish view of women, but he describes good and noble women. Alanus ab Insulis in his De Planctu Naturae1222 bewailed the vices of mankind and the vicious relations of men and women. His aim is to distinguish between good and evil love. He wrote at the height of the woman cult. In the Romaunt de la Rose the thing discussed seems to be positive vice. It is said that the way to win women is by lavish gifts. The meretriciousness of women and their love of luxury are denounced. If a marriage turns out badly, the men say that God made it, but God is good, and evil is due to man.1223 In the Paston Letters (fifteenth century) marriage appears to be entirely mercenary.1224 A girl tells her lover what her father will give with her. If he is not satisfied he must discontinue his suit.1225 "My master asked mockingly if a man might not beat his own wife."1226 The one love match in the book is that of Margaret Paston with a man who was a servant in the family. Margaret's mother, the most interesting person in the Letters, although she left £20 to her grandson by this marriage, left nothing to her daughter. Schultz1227 thinks that marriages turned out as well in the Middle Ages as now, and that adultery was no more frequent; also that ecclesiastics were not then more licentious than now. He quotes freely from Geiler and Murner, who were leading moral preachers of the fifteenth century. Geiler preached in Strasburg Cathedral. Murner was a Franciscan. Geiler is incredibly coarse and outspoken. He pretended to state cases within his knowledge of men who made gain of their wives, and of wives who entered into arrangements with their husbands to make gain for both. He preached from these as illustrative cases and tried to dissuade both men and women from matrimony.1228 Chateau life was monotonous and stupid, especially for women, who were moreover partly secluded in special apartments. The young men and women had very little chance to meet. The 370hope of happiness for women was in marriage.1229 Although the woman's consent was necessary, she was controlled by her male relatives, even if a widow, but she had little individuality and generally welcomed a suitor at once.1230 The jongleurs of the twelfth century were vulgar vagabonds. Love, in their conception, is sensual, and women are treated by them with great levity. The women, in their songs, woo the men. In the thirteenth century women are described as more dignified and self-respecting. Siegfried flogged his wife black and blue.1231 Brunhild was also beaten by her husband. The women manifest great devotion to their husbands, especially in adversity, even fighting for them like men.1232 We are constantly shocked at the bad taste of behavior. At Lubeck, if a young widow was married, the crowd made an uproar in front of the house and the bridegroom was forced to stand at show on a certain four-cornered stone in the midst of noisy music "in order to establish the good name of himself and wife."1233 The carnival was an occasion of license for all the grossness and obscenity in the popular taste.1234 The woman cult was a cult of free love and was hostile to honorable marriage. Even in the twelfth century there were complaints of corruption by bad literature. The nobles and knights degenerated in the crusades and in the Italian wars of the Hohenstaufen.1235 "The doctrine of the church appeared to be a support of the family, but it was not such. On the contrary, the bonds of the family were more loosened than strengthened by the ascetic-hierarchical religiosity of the church."1236 Dulaure1237 quotes Gerson and Nicolas de Clemangis that convents in the fifteenth century were places of debauch. Geiler, in a sermon in Strasburg Cathedral, gave a shocking description of convents.1238 A convent is described as a brothel for neighboring nobles.1239 At the end of the fifteenth century the revolt and change in the mores which produced the 371Protestant schism caused the social confusion on which Janssen lays such stress in his seventh and eighth volumes. It was a case of revolution. The old mores broke down and new ones were not yet formed. The Protestants of the sixteenth century derided and denounced the Roman Catholics for the contradictions and falsehoods of celibacy, and the Catholics used against the Protestants the looseness as to marriage. Both were right.

381. The standard of the "good wife." Pair marriage. It is safe to believe that if any woman ever entered into a marriage which was not repugnant to her she entered it with a determination to be a "good wife." Her education under the mores of the society around her gave her the notion and standard of a good wife. The modern sentiments of love and conjugal affection have been produced in the middle class. They probably have their roots in the mores of the bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages and in those of the lowest class of free people in the Greco-Roman empire. This middle class is the class which has taken control of modern society, and whose interests are most favored by modern economic developments. They have set aside the old ideas of male dominion and of ascetic purity. In the middle of the nineteenth century the poems of Coventry Patmore and the novels of Anthony Trollope perhaps best expressed the notions of conjugal affection which English-speaking people entertained at that time. It seems that now those notions are thought to be philistine, and there is a reaction towards the old aristocratic standards. The "good husband," as correlative to the good wife, belongs to modern pair marriage. The erotic element has been refined and suppressed, or at least disavowed. The ideals which have been accepted and favored have disciplined and concentrated masculine waywardness, and they have made the sex sentiments more durable. All this has integrated the family more firmly, and the family mores have cultivated and preserved the sentiments. We have seen many cases in which, out of the unconscious and unpremeditated action of the mores, results have been produced which have been most important for the weal or woe of men, but it is one of the most marvelous of these cases that conjugal affection, perhaps the noblest of all sentiments, should 372have been developed out of the monopolistic tyranny of men over women, and out of the ascetic negation of sex, the common element in which is a prurient and unhealthy sensuality.

382. "One flesh." The notion or figure of "one flesh" is not peculiar to the Jewish or Christian religion. In the Old Testament it clearly refers to carnal union. It has been used to express the ideal that marriage should be the fusion of two lives and interests. It is instructive to notice, in all the discussions of marriage which are to be found in all ages, how few and commonplace are the things which have been said, and how largely refuge has been taken in figures of speech. "One flesh," if not carnal, is only ritual, but ritual conceptions are only conventional conceptions, — good amongst those who agree to repeat the formulas and perform the ritual acts. They are not realities. The problem of marriage is that two human beings try to live together. They are two and not one. Since they are two, their tastes, desires, characters, and wills are two. Ethical philosophers or jurists may be able to define the "one-flesh" idea by translating it into rights and duties, but no state authority can enforce such a definition. Therefore it is nugatory. The idea belongs in an arena beyond state or family, where two make a world. It is beyond the mores also, except so far as the mores have educated the man and woman to a sense of the conduct which is necessary to marital harmony, by the judgments which are current on the hundreds of cases, real or imaginary, which come up for discussion. How then shall two wills be one will? The old way was that one will (the woman's) always was bound to yield. Since that no longer seems right, the modern way is endless discussion, a defeat for one, and all the inevitable consequences in daily experience and effect on character.

383. Pair marriage. Pair marriage is the union of one man and one woman in which all the rights, duties, powers, and privileges are equal and alike for both, the relationship being mutual and reciprocal in all points. It therefore produces a complete fusion of two lives and interests. Pair marriage and all its attendant mores are products of monopoly. Herodotus1240 says of 373the Agathyrsi that they practiced communalism of women in order that they might all be brethren, without envy or enmity to each other. That is one solution. In it peace and harmony are given a higher place than sex interests. Pair marriage aims at the highest satisfaction of sex interests by monopoly. It sacrifices peace and harmony. Any monopoly exists for the benefit of those who are embraced in it. Its evil effects are to be found by turning to those who fail to get entrance to it. While our mores now require that a man and woman shall come together through love, and therefore make a selection of the most special and exclusive kind, we have no apparatus or intelligent method for making such a selection. The notion that such a selection is necessary, therefore, adds a new difficulty and obstacle. Pair marriage also, partly on account of the intenser sentiment of parenthood and the more integrated family institution, increases expense, and makes the economic conditions of marriage more severe. Pair marriage forces a large fraction of the population to celibacy, and it is they who are the excluded who suffer by that arrangement. This bears chiefly on women. Everything which violates the taboo in the mores is vice, and is disastrous to all who participate in it. The more real pair marriage is, the more disastrous is every illicit relation. The harm is infinitely greater for women than for men. Within the taboo, unmarried women lead aimless existences, or they are absorbed in an effort to earn a living which is harassed by especial obstacles and difficulties. This is the price which has to be paid for all the gain which women get from pair marriage as compared with any other form of sex relation. It assumes that every man and woman can find a mate, which is not true. Very little serious attention is paid to this offset to the advantages of pair marriage. The mores teach unmarried women that it is "right" that things should be so, and that any other arrangement would contain abominations which are not to be thought of. Probably the unmarried women rarely think of themselves as victims of the arrangement by which their married sisters profit. They accept a life career which is destitute of self-realization, except for those few who are so gifted that they can make independent careers in the struggle 374for existence. Nearly all our discussions of our own social order run upon questions of property. It is under the sex relation that all the great problems really present themselves.

384. Marriage in modern mores. It is very remarkable that marriage amongst us has become the most distinct example there is, and the most widespread, of ritual (what is said in the marriage ceremony, in its rational sense, is of little importance, and people rarely notice it. What force attaches to "obey"?), of religious intervention in private affairs, and of the importance attached to a ceremony. If two people cohabit, the question of right and wrong depends on whether they have passed through a certain ceremony together or not. That determines whether they are "married" or not. The reason is, because if they have passed through the ceremony together, no matter what was said or done, they have expressed their will to come into the status of wedlock, as the mores make it and as the state enforces it, at the time and place. The woman wants to "feel that she is married." Very many women would not feel so in a civil marriage; others want a "fully choral" ceremony; others want the communion with the wedding ceremony. Perhaps the daughter of a great nobleman might not feel married without a marriage settlement. Thus the active effect of the mores may be observed in contemporary custom, and it is seen how completely the notion of being duly married is produced by the mores of the society, or of a class or sect in it.

385. Pair marriage; its technical definition. Polyandry passed over into polygamy when sufficient property was at command.1241 There was a neutral middle point where one man had one wife. It follows that monogamy is not a specific term. It might be monogamy if one man had one wife but also concubines and slaves, or he might have but one wife in fact, although free to have more if he chose. The term "pair marriage" is needed as a technical term for the form of marriage which is as exclusive and permanent for the man as for the woman, which one enters on the same plane of free agreement as the other, and in which all the rights and duties are mutual. In such a union there may 375be a complete fusion of two lives and interests. In no other form of union is such a fusion possible. This pair marriage is the ideal which guides the marital usages of our time and civilization, gives them their spirit and sense, and furnishes standards for all our discussions, although it is far from being universally realized. The ideal is made an object of "pathos"1242 in our popular literature. Whence did it come? In truth, we can hardly learn. It existed, by necessity of poverty and humble social status, in the classes amongst whom Christianity took root. It found expression in the canon law. It resisted, in the lower classes, the attempt of the church to suppress it in order to aggrandize the corporation. It resisted, in the same classes, the corruption of the Renaissance. It has risen with those classes to wealth and civil power. In modern times "moral" has been used technically for what conforms to the code of pair marriage.

386. Ethics of pair marriage. Pair marriage has excluded every other form of sex relation. To modern people it is hard to understand how different forms of sex relation could exist side by side and all be right. The explanation is in the mores. A concubine may be a woman who has a defined and legally guaranteed relation to one man, if the mores have so determined. Her circumstances have not opened to her the first rank, that of a wife, but she has another which is recognized in the society as honorable. The same may be said of a slave woman, or of a morganatic wife. Amongst the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans of the empire concubines were a recognized class. A concubine was not a woman who had cast off her own honor until after the thirteenth century,1243 and although her position became doubtful, it was not disreputable for two or three centuries more. Morganatic marriages for princes have continued down to our own time. Whatever is defined and provided for in the mores as a way of solving the problem of life interests is never wrong. Hence the cases of sacral harlotry, of temporary marriage (as in China, Korea, Japan, and ancient Arabia), of royal concubines (since the king was forced to accept a status wife of prescribed rank, etc.), and all the other peculiar arrangements which have 376existed in history are accounted for. Pair marriage, however, has swept all other forms away. It is the system of the urban-middle-capitalist class. It has gained strength in all the new countries where all men and women were equal within a small margin and the women bore their share of the struggle for existence. The environment, in the new countries, favored the mores of the class from which the emigrants came. In the old countries the mores of the middle class have come into conflict with the mores of peasants and nobles. The former have steadily won. The movement has been the same everywhere, although the dates of the steps in it have been different. As to women, the countries which are at the rear of the modern movement keep the old mores; those which are at the head of it have emancipated women most, and have swept away from their legislation all toleration for anything but pair marriage. Vice, of course, still affects facts, and the growth of wealth and luxurious habits seems to be developing a tendency to take up again some old customs which bear an aristocratic color. It must be expected that when the economic facts which now favor the lower middle classes pass away and new conditions arise the marriage mores will change again. Democracy and pair marriage are now produced by the conditions. Both are contingent and transitory. In aristocratic society a man's family arrangements are his own prerogative. When life becomes harder it will become aristocratic, and concubinage may be expected to arise again.

It seems clear that pair marriage has finally set aside the notion which, in the past, has been so persistently held, — that women are bad by nature, so that one half of the human race is permanently dragging down the other half. The opposite notion seems now to be gaining currency, — that all women are good, and can be permanently employed to raise up the men. These fluctuations only show how each sway of conditions and interests produces its own fallacies.

387. Pair marriage is monopolistic. It has been shown that pair marriage is monopolistic. It produces an exclusive family, and nourishes family pride and ambition. It is interwoven with capital, and we have hardly yet reached the point where we can 377see what it will become with great wealth, and under the treatment of a plutocratic class. From what has been said it is evidently most important that man and wife should have been educated in the same mores. Pair marriage is also individualistic. It is the barrier against which all socialism breaks into dust. As the cost of a family increases, the connection between family and capital becomes more close and vital. Every socialist who can think is forced to go on to a war on marriage and the family, because he finds that in marriage and the family lie the strongholds of the "individualistic vices" which he cannot overcome. He has to mask this battery, however, because he dare not openly put it forward.

388. The future of marriage. It is idle to imagine that our mores about marriage have reached their final stage. Since marriage is free and individualistic as it exists in our mores, there is little care or pity for those who cannot adapt themselves to it, or it to their circumstances. They are allowed divorce, but not without some feeling of annoyance with them if they use it. It is also idle to imagine that those who are now satisfied will alone control the changes which the future will bring in the mores. It is not difficult to make marriage such that men will refuse it. Women have revolted against it in the past.1244 It is not beyond imagination that they might do so again.

389. Normal type of sex union. It may be, as Lecky says,1245 that "we have ample grounds for maintaining that the lifelong union of one man and one woman should be the normal or dominant type of intercourse between the sexes. We can prove that it is, on the whole, most conducive to the happiness, and also to the moral elevation, of all parties. But beyond this point it would, I conceive, be impossible to advance, except by the assistance of a special revelation. It by no means follows that because this should be the dominant type, it should be the only one, or that the interests of society demand that all connections should be forced into the same die."

390. Divorce. In the mother family the woman could dismiss her husband. This she could also do in all the transition forms 378in which the husband went to live with the wife at her childhood home. In the father family the wife, obtained by capture or purchase, belonged to her husband on the analogy of property. The husband could reject or throw away his property if he saw fit. It is clear that the physical facts attendant on the two customs — one that the man went to live with his wife, the other that he took her to his home — made a great difference in the status of the woman. In the latter case she fell into dependence and subjection to the dominion of her husband. She could not divorce him.

392. Rabbis on divorce. The school of the Rabbi Shammai said, "A man must not repudiate his wife unless he find in her actual immodesty." Rabbi Jochanan said, "Repudiation is an odious thing." Rabbi Eliezer said, "When a first wife is put away the very altar sheds tears."1258

393. The early Roman mores about marriage were very rigid and pitiless. It was in the family, and therefore under the control of the head of the family. No law forbade divorce, because such a law would have been an invasion of the authority of the male head of the family, but the censors, in the name of public opinion, long prevented any frivolous dissolution of marriage. Few divorces occurred, and then only for weighty reason, after the family council had found them sufficient. There was some stain attaching to a second marriage, after the death of the first spouse. Even men were subject to this stain.1259

394. Pair marriage and divorce. With the rise of pair marriage came divorce for the woman, upon due reason, as much as for the man. Hence freer divorce goes with pair marriage. Such must inevitably be the case, if it be admitted that any due reason for divorce ever can exist. The more poetical and elevated the ideas are which are clustered around marriage, the more probable it is that experience will produce disappointment. If one spouse enters wedlock with the belief that the other is the most superlative man or woman living, the cases must be very few in which 380disappointment and disillusion will not result. Moreover, pair marriage, by its exclusiveness, risks the happiness of the parties on a very narrow and specific condition of life. The coercion of this arrangement for many persons must become intolerable.

In the ancient German law there was absolute freedom of divorce by agreement. The pair could end the relation just as they formed it. In the laws of the German nations there was little provision for divorce upon the complaint of the woman. The law of the Langobards allowed it to her for serious bodily injury.1260

395. Divorce in the Middle Ages. It is pretended that the mediæval church allowed no divorce. This is utterly untrue. Under the influence of asceticism the church put marriage under more and more arbitrary restrictions, going far beyond any rules to be found in the Scriptures, or in the usages of the early church. Divorce was made more and more difficult. These two tendencies contradicted each other, for the greater the restrictions on marriage, the greater the probability that any marriage would be found to have violated one of them, and therefore to be ab initio void. This set it aside more absolutely than any divorce a vinculo could undo it. Also, when there was an ample apparatus of dispensation by which the rich and great could have their marriages dissolved, by the use of money or political power, the "law of the church" was no law. Still further, the mediæval church, while it had a doctrine of perfection and ideality for marriage, had also a practical system of concession to human weakness, by which it could meet cases of unhappy marriage. In the canon law, divorce and remarriage of the innocent party has been allowed to the man, in case of adultery, physical incapacity, leprosy, desertion, captivity, disappearance, and conspiracy to murder the husband, on the part of the wife; and to the wife, when the husband's misconduct rendered living with him impossible. However, a dispensation from the ecclesiastical authority was required.1261

396. The point of this is that no society ever has existed or ever can exist in which no divorce is allowed. In all stages of 381the father family it has been possible for a man to turn his wife out of doors, and for a wife to run away from her husband. They divorce themselves when they have determined that they want to do so. It would be an easy solution of marriage problems to assert that the society will use its force to compel all spouses who disagree, or for whom the marriage relation has become impossible through the course of events, nevertheless to continue to live in wedlock. Such a rule would produce endless misery, shame, and sin. There are reasons for divorce. Adultery is recognized as such a reason in the New Testament. It is a rational reason, especially under pair marriage. There are other rational reasons. Some of them are modern forms of the reasons allowed in the canon law, as above cited. The exegesis of the New Testament is not simple. It does not produce a simple and consistent doctrine, and therefore inference and deduction have been applied to it. 2 Cor. vi. 14 contradicts 1 Cor. vii. 12. The mores decide at last what causes shall be sufficient. The laws in the United States once went very far in an attempt to satisfy complaining married people. They were no better satisfied at last than at first. Scandalous cases produced a conviction that "we have gone too far," and the present tendency is to revoke certain concessions. The fact that a divorce has been legally obtained does not satisfy some former friends of the divorced so that they will continue social intimacy. A code grows up to fit the facts. Sects help to make such codes. Perhaps they make a code which is too stringent. The members of the sect do not live by it. They seek remarriage in other, less scrupulous sects, or by civil authority, or they change domicile in order to get a divorce. Thus the mores control. When the law of the state or of ecclesiastical bodies goes with the mores it prevails; when it departs from the mores it fails. The mores are also sure to act in regard to a matter which presents itself in a large class of cases, and which calls for social and ethical judgments. At last, comprehensive popular judgments will be formed and they will get into legislation. They will adjust interests so that people can pursue self-realization with success and satisfaction, under social judgments as to the rules necessary to preserve the institutions of wedlock and the 382family. The pursuit of happiness, either in the acquisition of property or in the enjoyment of family life, is only possible in submission to laws which define social order, rights, and duties, and against which the individual must react at every point. It is the mores which constantly revise and readjust the laws of social order, and so define the social conditions within which self-realization must go on.

397. Refusal of remarriage. The laws of every State in the United States, except South Carolina, allow marriage by a minister of religion or by magistrates. This does not mean that the legislatures meant to endow ministers of religion with authority to say who may marry and who may not. Ministers who agree not to marry divorced persons assume authority which does not belong to them. In England, with an established church, the fact has recently been ascertained that a clergyman cannot refuse to marry persons who may marry by the civil law as it stands. With us the number of sects and denominations is such that no hardship arises if one sect chooses to adopt stricter laws for the sake of making a demonstration or exercising educational influence, and decides to run the risk of driving its own members to other sects. What the next result of such action will be remains to be learned.

398. Child marriage. Child marriage illustrates a number of points in regard to the mores, especially the possibility of perversity and aberration. Wilutzky1262 thinks that child marriage amongst savages began in the desire of a man to get a wife to himself (monandry) out of the primitive communalism, without violating the customs of ancestors. Girls of ten or twelve years are married to men of twenty-five or thirty on the New Britain Islands. The missionary says, "The result of such an early union, for the girl, has been dreadful."1263 On Malekula girls are married at six or eight.1264 Similar cases are reported from Central and South America where girls of ten are mothers.1265 Rohlfs reports mothers of ten or twelve at Fesan.1266 The Eskimo practice child betrothal, 383so that wedlock begins at once at puberty.1267 Schwaner reports,1268 from the Barito Valley, that children are often betrothed and married by the fathers when the latter are intoxicated. The motives of the match are birth, kinship, property, and social position, and the marriage is hastened, lest the parents should see their plans to satisfy these motives frustrated by the children if they should delay. The intimacy of the children is left to chance. Wilken says that child marriage seems to be, in the Dutch East Indies, an exercise of absolute paternal authority, especially seeing that they have marriage by capture. The father wants to secure, in time, the realization of plans which he has made. Especially, the purpose is to make the man take the status-wife appointed for him by the marriage rule, — his mother's brother's daughter. Wilken also explains child betrothal and marriage by the fact that girls have entire liberty until betrothed, and the future husband wants to put an end to this. Girls are often betrothed at birth and married at six, although they remain with their parents. In some parts of the East Indies the custom is declining; in others it is extinct. In some places it continues, although marriage by capture is extinct. Where marriage by capture exists, the reason for child marriage is the fear that the girl may be stolen by another than the desired husband.1269

399. Child marriage in Hindostan. By the laws of Manu1270 a man may give his daughter in marriage before she is eight years old to a man of twenty-four, or a girl of twelve to a man of thirty, and he loses his dominion over her if he has not found a husband for her by the time that she might be a mother; yet intercourse before puberty is especially forbidden.1271 The Hindoos, including Mohammedans, practice child marriage and cling to it, in spite of the efforts of the English to dissuade them from it, and in spite of the opinion of their own most enlightened men that it is a harmful custom. It is deeply rooted in their mores. The modern Hindoo father or brother considers it one of the 384gravest faults he can commit to allow a daughter or sister to arrive at puberty (generally eight years) before a husband has been found for her. It is a disgrace for a family to have in it an unmarried marriageable girl. What is proper is that, from five to sixteen days after puberty, the previously married husband shall beget with her a child in a solemn ceremonial which is one of the twelve (or sixteen) sacraments of Hindoo life.1272 The idea of child marriage was that the woman should be already married to her chosen husband, so that she might be given to him at the proper time.1273 Moreover, "marriage completes, for the man, the regenerating ceremonies, expiatory, as is believed, of the sinful taint which every child is supposed to contract in the mother's womb; and being, for sudras and for women, the only [ceremony for this purpose] which is allowed, its obligatoriness is, as to the latter, one of the ordinances of the Veda."1274

400. The wife of the missionary Gehring was present at the marriage of a girl of ten to an adult man amongst the Tamil Mohammedans. The story of the child's shrinking terror is very pathetic. When her veil was withdrawn she fainted from nervousness and excitement. Those present showed no pity for her, but crowded around to enjoy the opportunity of gazing at her. They saw no reason why she was to be pitied.1275

401. If a girl has had no husband provided for her by her responsible male relative, she may act for herself, but then she forfeits her share in the family property. She may be abducted with impunity. In Manu1276 it is said that three years must elapse before she gets the right of self-disposition. The right is long since a dead letter. The "Law of Manu" can lose its authority where it is favorable to women! or when it runs counter to the mores, for Hindoo women have no training to take up self-disposition, if the case occurs.1277 Female virtue is rated low, and must be secured by marriage. Independent action by a boy and girl is against the mores and could only lead to inferior forms 385of marriage, by love or capture.1278 Finally, religion bears its share in furnishing motives for child marriage. The souls of ancestors cannot stay in heaven unless there are male descendants to keep up the sacrifices. It is, therefore, impossible to provide male descendants too soon. Among the Tamil-speaking Malaialis of the Kollimallais hills a man takes an adult wife for his little son, and with her he begets a son who will perform this religious duty for himself and his son. This goes on from generation to generation.1279

402. Nevertheless, it is held to be proved that in ancient India child marriages were unknown and that women were often far beyond puberty before they were married. The human husband was also held to be the fourth. Three gods had preceded him in each case.1280 The custom of child marriage has now spread to the lowest classes, and in the lowlands of the Ganges cohabitation follows at once upon child marriage, with very evil results on the physique of the population.1281

There was child marriage in Chaldea 2200 years B.C.1282

403. Child marriage in Europe. The marriage of children was not in the mores of the ancient Germans. The mediæval church allowed child marriage for princes, etc. The motive was political alliance, or family or property interest.1283 The fable was that Joseph was an old man and the Virgin Mary only a girl. This story was invented to make the notion of a virgin wife and mother easier. The marriage was only a child marriage. In England, from the end of the thirteenth to late in the seventeenth century, cases of child marriage occurred, at first in the highest classes, later in all classes, and finally most frequently in the highest and lowest classes. In Scotland premature marriages were so common that, in 1600, they were forbidden, the limits being set at fourteen and twelve years for males and females respectively. The chief motive was to avoid feudal dues on the part of tenants in chief of the crown, if the father should 386die and leave infants who would become wards liable to forced marriages or to mulcts to avoid the same.1284

404. Child marriage is due, then, to the predominance of worldly considerations in marriage, especially when the interests considered are those of the parents, not of the children; also to abuse of parental authority through vanity and self-will; also to superstitious notions about the other world and the interests of the dead there; also to attempts, in the interest of the children, to avoid the evil consequences of other bad social arrangements.

405. Cloistering. The custom of cloistering women has spread, within historic times, from some point in central Asia. The laws of Hammurabi show that, 2200 years B.C., men and women, in the Euphrates Valley, consorted freely and equally in life. Later, in the Euphrates Valley, we find the custom of cloistering amongst the highest classes. It became more and more vigorous amongst the Persians and spread to the common people. It was not an original custom of the Arabs and was not introduced by the Mohammedan religion. It was learned and assumed from the Persians.1285 Seclusion of women, to a greater or less degree, has prevailed in the mores of many nations. In fact, there is only a question of degree between an excessive harem system and our own code of propriety which lays restraints on women to which men are not subject. The most probable explanation of the customs of veiling and cloistering is that they are due to the superstition of the evil eye. Pretty women attracted admiration, which was dangerous, as all prosperity, glory, and preëminence were dangerous under that notion. When pretty women were veiled or secluded, the custom was sure to spread to others. The wives and daughters of the rich and great were secluded in order to shield them from easy approach, and to pet and protect them. This set the fashion which lesser people imitated so far as they could. The tyranny of husbands and fathers also came into play, and another force acting in the same direction was the seduction exerted on women themselves by the flattering sense of being cared for 387and petted. Lane1286 tells us that "an Egyptian wife who is attached to her husband is apt to think, if he allows her unusual liberty, that he neglects her, and does not sufficiently love her; and to envy those wives who are kept and watched with greater strictness." "They look on the restraint [imposed by husbands] with a degree of pride, as evincing the husband's care for them, and value themselves on being hidden as treasures." Women who earn their own living have to go into the streets and the market and to come in contact with much from which other classes of women are protected. The protected position is aristocratic, and it is consonant with especial feminine tastes. The willingness to fall into it has always greatly affected the status of women.

406. Second marriages. Widows. Second marriages affect very few people beyond those immediately concerned, and they are not connected with any social principle or institution so as to create what is sometimes called a "societal interest," unless there is current in the society some special notion about ghosts and the other world. Nevertheless, the bystanders have, until very recent times, pretended to a right to pass judgment and exert an influence on the remarriage of widows, and less frequently of widowers. The story of the status of widows is one of the saddest in the history of civilization. In uncivilized society a widow is considered dangerous because the ghost of her husband is supposed to cleave to her. Under marriage by capture or purchase she is the property of her husband, and, like his other property, ought to accompany him to the other world. When she is spared she has no rational place in the society; therefore widows were a problem which the mores had to solve. In no other case have societies shown so much indifference to misfortune and innocent misery. If a widow has value for any purpose, she falls to the heir and he may exploit her. On the Fiji Islands a wife was strangled on her husband's grave and buried with him. A god lies in wait on the road to the other world who is implacable to the unmarried. Therefore a man's ghost must be attended by a woman's ghost to pass in safety.1287 Mongol 388widows could find no second husbands, because they would have to serve their first husbands in the next world. The youngest son inherited the household and was bound to provide for his father's widows. He could take to wife any of them except his own mother, and he did so because he was willing that they should go to his father in the next world.1288 In the laws of Hammurabi the widow was secured a share in her husband's property and was protected against the selfishness of her sons. If she gave up to her sons what she had received from her husband, she could keep what her father gave her and could marry again. In later Chaldea annuities were provided for widows by payments to temples.1289 In the Mahabharata the morning salutation to a woman is, "May you not undergo the lot of a widow."1290

407. Burning of widows. It appears certain that the primitive Aryans practiced the burning of widows, perhaps by the choice of the widows, and that the custom declined in the Vedic period of India. The burning of widows and the levirate could not exist together.1291 As Manu1292 gives rules for the behavior of widows (not name any man but the deceased husband; not remarry), he assumes that they will live. The custom of suttee was strongest in the lower castes.1293 Akbar, the Mogul emperor, forbade suttee about 1600.1294 He acted from the Mohammedan standpoint. His ordinance had no effect on the usage. The English put an end to the custom in 1830. This did not affect the native states, where the latest instance reported took place in 1880.1295 A man who knows India well says that it was no kindness to widows to put a stop to suttee because, if they live on, their existence is so wretched that death would be better. Wilkins1296 quotes a Hindoo widow's description of the treatment she received, which included physical abuse and moral torture. She was addressed as if she was to blame for the death of her husband. The head of a widow is shaved, although Hindoo women care very much for their hair. She is allowed but one meal a day and must fast frequently. 389She is shunned as a creature of ill omen. Inasmuch as girls are married at five or six, all this may happen to a child of ten or twelve, if her husband dies, although she never has lived with him. In 1856 the English made a law by which widows might remarry, but the higher classes very rarely allow it. If they do allow it, the groom is forced to marry a tree or a doll of cotton, so that he too may be widowed. The mores resist any change which is urged, although not enforced, by people of other mores. The reforms proposed in the treatment of widows have no footing at all in the experience and the judgment of Hindoos, if we except a few theists in Calcutta, and they have never taken a united and consistent position. Monier-Williams1297 describes the case of a man who married a widow. He was boycotted so completely that all human fellowship was denied him. He had to go to a distant place and take a position under the government. Among the lower castes of the Bihari Hindoos a widow may marry the younger brother of her deceased husband, to whom her relation is always one of especial intimacy and familiarity.1298

408. Difficulty of reform. It appears that the difficulty about the remarriage of widows is due to the fact that it runs counter to fundamental religious ideas. The Hindoo reformers are charged with using forms of wedding ceremony which are inconsistent with facts. Some widows are virgins, but there is not always a father or mother to give them away by the formula of "virgin gift." The women all have a notion, taken from the words of a heroine in the Mahabharata, that a woman can be given but once.1299 They cling to the literal formula. By the form of first marriage also a woman passes into the kin of her husband for seven births (generations), the limit of degrees of consanguinity. It is irreligious and impossible to change the kin again, because consequences have been entailed which run seven generations into the future.1300 This is all made to depend, not on the consummation of the marriage, but on the wedding or even betrothal. The census shows that the taboo on the remarriage of widows and the custom of child marriage extend and increase together.1301 390Where husbands are scarce girls are married in childhood in order to secure them, and widows are not allowed to remarry.1302 By the remarriage of widows rajpoots and rajpoot families lose their rank and precedence.1303 In Homer the remarriage of men is rare, and only one stepmother is mentioned.1304 The prejudice against second marriages continued amongst the Greeks, even for men, for whom second marriage was restrained, in some parts of Greece by political disabilities, if the man had children. The reason given was that a man who had so little devotion to his family would have little devotion to his country.1305 In the classical period widows generally married again. Sometimes the dying husband bequeathed his widow. In later times some widows contracted their own second marriages.1306 Marcus Aurelius would not take a second wife as a stepmother for his children. He took a concubine. Julian, after the death of his wife, lived in continence.1307 On Roman tombstones of women the epithet "wife of one husband" was often put as praise.1308

409. Widows and remarriage in the Christian church. The pagan emperors of Rome encouraged second marriages as they encouraged all marriage, but the Christian emperors of the fourth century took up the ascetic tendency. About 300 the doctrine was, "Every second marriage is essentially adultery."1309 Augustine, in his tract on "Continence," uttered strong and sound doctrine about self-control and discipline of character. In the tract on the "Benefit of Marriage" he defended marriage, intervening in a controversy between Jerome and Jovinian, in which the former put forth the most extravagant and contradictory assertions about virginity. Augustine's formula is: "Marriage and fornication are not two evils of which the second is worse, but marriage and continence are two goods, of which the second is 391better." Although this statement is very satisfactory rhetorically, it carries no conclusion as to the rational sense of regulation of the sex passion, or as to the limit within which regulation is beneficial. Augustine laid great stress on 1 Cor. vii. 36. In a tract on "Virginity" he glorified that state according to the taste of the period. In a tract on "Widowhood" (chaps. 13 and 14), he repudiated the extreme doctrine about second and subsequent marriages, but he exhorted widows to continence. The church fathers, like the mediæval theologians, had a way of admitting points in the argument without altering their total position in accordance with the admissions or concessions which they had made. The positions taken by Augustine in these tracts about the sex mores cannot be embraced in an intelligible and consistent statement. "At a period of early, although uncertain, date the rule became firmly and irrevocably established, that no digamus, or husband of a second wife, was admissible to Holy Orders; and although there is no reason for supposing that marriage after taking orders was prohibited to a bachelor, it was strictly forbidden to a widower."1310 So it came about that, inasmuch as marriage was, in any case, only a concession and a compromise, and in so far a departure from strict rectitude, a second marriage was regarded with disfavor, and any subsequent ones were regarded with reprobation which increased in a high progression. This has remained the view of the Eastern church, in which a fourth marriage is unlawful. The Western church has not kept the early view, and has set no limit to remarriage, but orthodox and popular mores have frowned upon it after the second or, at most, the third. In Arabia, before the time of Mohammed, widows were forced into seclusion and misery for a year, and they became a class of forlorn, almost vagabond, dependents. It was a shame for a man if his mother contracted a second marriage.1311 In the Middle Ages popular reprobation was manifested by celebrations which were always grotesque and noisy, and sometimes licentious. They were called charivaris. They were enacted in case of the remarriage of widows and 392sometimes in the case of widowers. They are said to have been a very ancient custom in Provence.1312 This might mean that opposition to second marriages was due to Manichæan doctrines which were widely held in that region. The customs of popular reprobation were, however, very widespread, and nowadays amongst us the neighbors sometimes express in this way their disapproval of any sex relations which are in any way not in accord with the mores. In the Salic law it was provided that any woman who married a second time must do so at night.1313 The other laws of the barbarian nations contain evidence of disapproval.1314 Innocent III ruled, in 1213, that a man did not incur the ecclesiastical disabilities of second marriage, "no matter how many concubines he might have had, either at one time or in succession."1315 The mediæval coutumes of northern France are indifferent to second marriages.1316 The ancient German custom approved of the self-immolation of a widow at her husband's death, but did not require it. The remarriage of widows was not approved and the widows did not desire it. This was a consequence of the ancient German notion of marriage, according to which a wife merged her life in that of her husband for time and for eternity.1317 The usage, however, was softened gradually. The widow got more independence, and more authority over her children and property, over the marriage of her daughters, and at last the right to contract a second marriage after a year of mourning.1318 In England, in the eleventh century, a widow's dower could not be taken to pay her husband's taxes, although the exchequer showed little pity for anybody else. The reason given is that "it is the price of her virginity."1319 The later law also exempted a wife's dower from confiscation in the case of any criminal or traitor.1320 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in France, "a period in which, perhaps, people supported widowhood less willingly than in any other," the actual usages departed from the acknowledged standards of right and 393propriety.1321 The same was true in a greater or less degree elsewhere in Europe, and the widowed probably destroyed the prejudice against remarriage by their persistency and courage in violating it. In the American colonies it was by no means rare for a widow or widower to marry again in six or even in three months.

410. Remarriage and other-worldliness. It is evident that the customs in regard to the treatment of widows, second marriages, etc., are largely controlled by other-worldliness. If the other world is thought of as close at hand, and the dead as enjoying a conscious life, with knowledge of all which occurs here, then there is a rational reluctance to form new ties by which the dead may be offended. If the other world and its inhabitants are not so vividly apprehended, the living pursue their own interests, and satisfy their own desires.

411. Tree marriage. In several cases which have been presented, we have seen how the folkways devise means of satisfying interests in spite of existing (inherited) institutions which bear injuriously on interests. A remarkable case of this kind is tree marriage amongst the Brahmins of southern India. The established opinion is that a younger brother ought not to marry before an older one. The latter may be willing. That is immaterial. The device is employed of marrying the older brother to a tree, or (perhaps the idea is) to a spirit which resides in the tree. He is then out of the way and the younger brother may marry.1322

412. The Japanese woman. The Japanese woman has been formed in an isolated state, of a militant character, with strong and invariable folkways. "Before this ethical creature, criticism should hold its breath; for there is here no single fault, save the fault of a moral charm unsuited to any world of selfishness and struggle.... How frequently has it been asserted that, as a moral being, the Japanese woman does not seem to belong to the same race as the Japanese man!... Perhaps no such type 394of woman will appear again in this world for a hundred thousand years: the conditions of industrial civilization will not admit of her existence.... The Japanese woman can be known only in her own country, — the Japanese woman as prepared and perfected by the old-time education for that strange society in which the charm of her moral being, — her delicacy, her supreme unselfishness, her childlike piety and trust, her exquisite tactful perception of all ways and means to make happiness about her, — can be comprehended and valued.... Even if she cannot be called handsome according to western standards, the Japanese woman must be confessed pretty, — pretty like a comely child; and if she be seldom graceful in the occidental sense, she is at least in all her ways incomparably graceful: her every motion, gesture, or expression being, in its own oriental manner, a perfect thing, — an act performed, or a look conferred, in the most easy, the most graceful, the most modest way possible.... The old-fashioned education of her sex was directed to the development of every quality essentially feminine, and to the suppression of the opposite quality. Kindliness, docility, sympathy, tenderness, daintiness, — these and other attributes were cultivated into incomparable blossoming. 'Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever; do noble things, not dream them, all day long,' — those words of Kingsley really embody the central idea in her training. Of course the being, formed by such training only, must be protected by society; and by the old Japanese society she was protected.... A being working only for others, thinking only for others, happy only in making pleasure for others, — a being incapable of unkindness, incapable of selfishness, incapable of acting contrary to her own inherited sense of right, — and in spite of this softness and gentleness ready, at any moment, to lay down her life, to sacrifice everything at the call of duty: such was the character of the Japanese woman."1323

1129 Campbell, Differences in the Nervous Organization of Men and Women, 29.