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 mores. 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 pugnacious." 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.
Miss 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. The 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 be 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.
+363. 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 antecedent 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.
+365. 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 there 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] Here 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 Cunningham[1152]
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 successive, 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.
+368. 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 its 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 wives, 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 no
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.
Darwin[1163] argued from the strength of jealousy amongst animals
"as well as from the analogy of the lower animals, more
particularly of those which come nearest to man," that
promiscuity could not have prevailed shortly before man "attained
his present rank in the zoölogical scale." Then he refers to the
anthropoid apes, which are either monogamous, or pair off for a
limited time, or are polygamous in separate families, or still
again polygamous but living in a society. The jealousy of the
males, and their special weapons for battling with their rivals,
make promiscuity in a state of nature extremely improbable. "It
does not seem possible for us to apprehend the emotion here
called 'jealousy' when shown by an animal. Amongst uncivilized
men the sentiment is that of the property holder. To lend or give
a wife is consistent with that sentiment, not a violation of it.
Hence it does not prove that jealousy does not exist."[1164] The
Veddahs are very careful of their wives. They will not allow
strangers in their villages, and do not even let their brothers
approach their wives or offer them food.[1165] They have pure
marital customs. Their neighbors, the Singhalese, have not pure
marital customs and are not jealous.[1166] In the East Indies,
not in all tribes but in many, betrothed persons are separated
until their marriage.[1167] Kubary says that the jealousy of the
Palau Islanders is less a sign of wounded feelings than of care
for external propriety.[1168] An oa ape (a gibbon) showed
jealousy whenever a little Malay girl, his playmate, was taken
away from him.[1169] Wellhausen[1170] says that "the suspicious
jealousy, not of the love of their wives, but of their own
property rights, is a prominent characteristic of the Arabs, of
which they are proud." The blood kin guard their property right
in the maiden as jealously as the man guards his property right
in his wife. A Papuan kills an adulterer, not on account of his
own honor, but to punish an infringement of his property rights.
The former idea is foreign to him. He does, however, show
jealousy of a handsome young man who captivates the women.[1171]
In 1898 a pair of wolves were kept as public pets in the Capitol
at Rome. The male killed a cub, his own offspring, out of
jealousy of the affection of the female for it. Then the female
died of grief.[1172] These cases show very different forms of
jealousy. The jealousy of husband and wife is similar, but not
the same as any one of them, and it differs at different stages
of civilization. It depends on the exclusiveness and intenseness
of devotion which spouses are held to owe each other. Beasts do
not manifest an emotion of jealousy so uniform or universal as
Darwin assumes in his argument, nor any sentiment like that of a
half-civilized man. The latter can always coerce the woman to
himself, but jealousy arises when the woman is left free to
dispose of her own devotion or attention, and she is supposed to
direct it to her husband, out of affection and preference. It is
the breach of this affection and preference which constitutes the
gravamen.
+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. Farnell[1173] 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 them
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. Aristotle[1176] propounds the rule of taboo on all sex
relations except in marriage, which is the doctrine of pair marriage
(sec. 383). In the _Economicus_ of Xenophon[1177] 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
Merchant_[1182] 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 made 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 accord, 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 authority[1187] 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, a
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 to 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. Apuleius[1201] 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 to 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 husbands. 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 very 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 all 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 term
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
([Symbol: cross] 1203) in his _De Planctu Naturae_[1222] 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. Schultz[1227] 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 hope 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] Dulaure[1237] 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 Protestant 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 have
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. Herodotus[1240] says of the 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 for 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.