Among various tribes of South America the husband of the woman limits the practice to a few hygienic precautions; this is the couvade reduced to its simplest expression.[1033]
This custom was found in Asia, among the Tartars, by Marco Polo. It still exists in Bengal, among the Larkas, although attenuated; on the occasion of a birth the parents quit the house, the wife and husband are both declared unclean for eight days, and during that time the husband cooks the food. After which the masculine filiation of the child is proclaimed by solemnly giving him the name of his grandfather.[1034] We shall be mistaken if we imagine that the couvade is special to very inferior races. The Greco-Roman writers have quoted a certain number of examples observed among the barbarians of the ancient world. Strabo relates that the Iberian women, after the example of those of the Celts, Thracians, and Scythians, quit their beds as soon as they are delivered, and give them up to their husbands, whom they tend.[1035] Diodorus tells us that in Corsica, after a woman has given birth to a child, the husband goes to bed as if he were ill, and he remains there an appointed number of days like a lying-in woman.[1036]
In his Argonautica Apollonius of Rhodes speaks of a people of Tibarenedes, on the north-west coast of Asia Minor, who had the custom of the couvade: “As soon as the married women are delivered, their husbands groan, lie on beds, and cover their heads. All this time their wives give them strengthening food, and prepare baths for them suitable for lying-in women.”[1037] It is probable that more than one trace of this “lying-in” still exists in Europe, in superstitious and popular practices. Quite recently a Russian has informed me that it is still in use in the Baltic provinces, but naturally in a form of survival in which the meaning is lost. It is, however, complete enough; the husband goes to bed, utters groans and cries, and his neighbours hasten to his side. And lastly, M. Léon Donnat told me lately that he had discovered the couvade still practised in the little island of Marken, in the Zuydersee.
However strange it may be, a custom that is thus widely spread in countries, races, and epochs extremely diverse must have had a serious raison d’être. It cannot be attributed to mere caprice.
Now the only plausible explanation is that which gives to the couvade the value of our registry of birth. Not, perhaps, all over the world, but here and there, at the moment when the effort was being made to found the paternal family, or at least to determine masculine filiation, some very simple-minded tribes conceived the idea of symbolising the share of the man in procreation by the gross mimicry of childbirth. By this practice, so well calculated to strike the attention, the father openly affirmed his paternity, and doubtless acquired certain rights over the new-born child. Let us note that the custom has been especially preserved among the American Indians, that is to say, in a country where the system of the maternal family has been, and still is, widely spread. The couvade probably represents an effort to emerge from it. It shows that the man will no longer share his wife or wives, that he claims to have children which are certainly his own, and who will doubtless inherit his possessions. It is, in short, a revolt of individualism against primitive communism. The mimicry is gross and strange, but in a social condition where there exists neither lawyer, nor mayor, nor register of civil acts, testimonial proof is the great resource, and, in order to make it sure and durable, men have willingly had recourse to striking and complicated practices which are calculated to engrave the remembrance of a fact on the memory of those present.
The procedure of primitive Rome offers us many examples of the same kind; and notably in the formalities of emancipation, when the Roman father made, three times in succession, a simulation of selling his son.
VII. The Primitive Family.
In the preceding pages I have collected together, with as much exactitude as I could, all that we know of the familial clan and the maternal family. It would be bold to assert that such have been the primitive and always necessary forms of the family. It is indisputable, however, that they are or have been very common in all countries and in all races. But these are types of familial association already regulated and complicated. Anterior to them there must have existed, in the little human hordes, a complete anarchy, most often characterised by the despotism of the strongest male, dominating a small flock of women and children, who were meekly submissive to his caprices—in fact, a sort of bestial patriarchate. Among thinly-scattered races, without intelligence or industry, practical monogamy was established at the very outset. We know that this was the case with the stupid Veddahs of Ceylon, when they wandered in simple families in the virgin forests of their island, incapable of constituting even the smallest horde. As soon as men have grouped themselves in small societies, regulated even in a slight degree, the familial clan with its confused kinship must frequently have been constituted, but on plans which were necessarily variable according to the conditions and exigencies of the social life. All that was possible has surely been attempted; sometimes regulated promiscuity, for each man claimed his rights, sometimes the mixed polyandric and polygynic household, elsewhere simple polyandry, when the women were scarce, and at other times monogamy.
I repeat, all that was compatible with the maintenance of the little social group must have been tried at first; and then selection assured the permanent adoption of such or such a system. As soon as men began to take note of descent, it was always uterine filiation that they held in account; paternal descent was less evident, and less easy to prove; it has been nearly everywhere the latest, and the widely-spread custom of the couvade proves that it was not established without difficulty. It has ended, however, by triumphing, all over the world, in the states that are still barbarous, but which have a complex social and political structure, where the primitive tribal régime has more or less disappeared, and where a line of demarcation sufficiently strong separates the interests of the individual from those of the group to which he belongs. In short, the social transformation from which the paternal family has arisen has nearly always coincided with a radical change in the régime of property, which has simultaneously become individual or, at least, familial.