A Spanish chronicler, Herrara, reports that the Otomies of Mexico spent a night of trial with the woman that they desired to marry; they could quit her afterwards, but only on condition of not retaining her during the following day.[154]
Among the Sonthals also, an aboriginal tribe of India, whose marriages are celebrated simultaneously once a year, the candidates for marriage must first live six days together, and it is only after this trial that it is lawful for them to marry.[155] With certain Tartar tribes of Russia in Europe and of Siberia there existed an institution of experimental marriages lasting for a year, if the woman did not become a mother during that period.[156] In the island of Ceylon, according to Davy, there are also provisional marriages, confirmed or annulled at the end of a fortnight.[157]
Among the Jews in Morocco the Rabbis consecrate temporary marriages, for three or six months, according to agreement. The man only engages to acknowledge the child if needful, and to make a certain donation to the mother.[158]
Strabo tells us of an analogous custom prevailing in antiquity among the Tapyres (Parthians), according to which a woman, after having had two or three children by a man, was forced by law to change her husband.[159] This is almost exactly what Marshal Saxe demanded for Frenchwomen in the last century.
We must not confound these experimental marriages, which are regulated, and in some sort legal, with free and easily cancelled unions still more common, as, for example, those of the Nouka-Hivians, that are broken at will, provided there are no children;[160] those of the Hottentots;[161] those of the Abyssinians, who marry, part, and re-marry at will.[162] These last unions, founded merely on individual caprice, have nothing extraordinary about them, and we know that they are not rare in civilised countries.
Much more curious, from a point of view of sexual and conjugal morality, are the partial marriages, which only bind the parties for certain days of the week. This is a rare kind of marriage that seems improbable to us, yet it has been proved to have existed among the Hassinyehs of the White Nile, of Arab or perhaps Berber race.
By an agreement, which is sharply discussed beforehand, the Hassinyeh woman engages to be a faithful wife for a fixed number of days in the week, generally three or four, but this is in proportion to the number of heads of cattle given to the parents by the bridegroom as the price of their daughter, and it is the mother herself who makes the bargain. Naturally, on the days that are not reserved the woman is free, and she has a right to use her liberty as she pleases.[163]
These strange customs amongst the Arabs must surely date from old pre-Islamite ages, and we may class them with other antique customs, as, for example, marriage for a term, called mot’a marriage, which was in use with the Arabs until the time of Mahomet, and which doubtless they imported later into Persia, where it exists in our own day. And again, in the kingdom of Omân, in the fourteenth century, the Sultan could still grant to a woman, indeed to any woman he pleased, the permission to have lovers according to her fancy, and her relations had no right to interfere.[164]
The partial marriage of the Hassinyeh Arabs is therefore not so surprising as it seems at first sight when isolated from other practices of the same kind. And it must be confessed that, immoral as it may appear to us, it is superior to the other modes of primitive conjugal association in use among the greater number of savage peoples. Doubtless it denotes an extreme of moral grossness, but at the same time it shows a certain respect for feminine independence, contrasting strongly with the animal subjection imposed on women in the greater number of societies of little or no civilisation. The situation of the woman who is owned and treated as a simple domestic animal, hired out or lent to strangers or to friends, according to the caprice of her master, but not allowed, at the peril of her life, to be unfaithful to her owner without his leave, is surely far more abject still.
I shall not dwell any more on these mere sketches of marriage, free and transient unions broken as soon as made, experimental marriages, three-quarter marriages, and marriages for a term, all of which show the very slight importance attached to sexual union by man in a low stage of development. And yet we must not refuse the name of marriage to these ephemeral and incomplete unions, since they are arranged by means of serious contracts which have been well discussed beforehand, and by agreements entered into at least between the husband and the relatives of the wife. The men of the horde or tribe do not, however, profess a very strict respect for these marriages; the husband is often uneasy in the enjoyment of his feminine property, and although legally obtained, he must always be ready to defend it.