[266] Démeunier, t. Ier. p. 191.
CHAPTER VII.
MARRIAGE BY PURCHASE AND BY SERVITUDE.
I. The Power of Parents.—The hypothesis of a primitive matriarchate—Maternal filiation and the condition of the woman—Parental right of property in children—Conjugal sales of little girls in Africa, Polynesia, America, and India.
II. Marriage by Servitude.—Labour and exchange value—Marriage by servitude with the Redskins, in Central America, in India, with the Hebrews—Influence of marriage by servitude on the condition of the woman.
III. Marriage by Purchase.—With the Hottentots and the Kaffirs in Middle Africa, in Polynesia, in America, with the Mongols in China, with the aborigines of India, with the Berbers, the Hindoos in Malasia, and in Greco-Roman antiquity—Dowry marriage—Moral signification of marriage by purchase.
I. The Power of Parents.
Marriage by capture, that is to say, the custom of rape, necessarily supposes a profound disdain for the ravished woman, and the antipathies or sympathies she may feel. It is indeed the truth that, as far back as we can carry our historical and ethnographical investigations, we find, with very rare exceptions, the subjection of woman is the rule in all human societies, and that the more backward the civilisation the harder was the subjection. Some sociologists have pretended that maternal filiation implied for the woman a sort of golden age—a reign of Amazons—during which the woman, as centre of the family, must have been honoured as its chief. All we know of ethnography gives the lie to this hypothesis. In the present day the matriarchate does not anywhere exist, but maternal kinship does, and we do not find that it involves a milder condition for the woman. This system of filiation necessarily indicates a gross state of society, in which paternity is still uncertain. Now, as a rule, the subjection of woman is in inverse ratio to the development of man. In primitive societies, where might is the only right, the woman, on account of her relative weakness, is always treated with extreme brutality. It would be difficult, without losing all human quality whatever, to be less intelligent than the Australian, and equally difficult to imagine a more cruel servitude than that of the Australian woman, always beaten, often wounded, sometimes killed and eaten, according to the convenience of her owner. The Fijians, much more intelligent than the Australians, amused themselves with beating their mother, and with binding their wives to trees in order to whip them.[267] A Fijian named Loti, simply to make himself notorious, devoured his wife, after having cooked her on a fire that he had forced her to light herself.[268] No kind of ferocious caprice was condemned by the morality of the country. But such manners are as far as possible from being consistent with the idea of a matriarchal society, in which a place of honour is accorded to the wife.
In primitive societies the condition of children is, if possible, still more subordinate than that of woman. Infanticide at the moment of birth is not even a venial fault. And later, the parents exercise the undisputed right of life and death over their progeny; and when slavery is instituted, the children become a veritable article of merchandise. In short, the rights of a father of a family are unlimited.
From this primitive right of property accorded to the parents over their children has resulted quite naturally all over the world the right of marrying them without consulting them at all. Moreover, as it had long been the custom to sell them, marriage was naturally considered as a commercial bargain, and by degrees marriage by purchase even took the place of marriage by capture, but after having long co-existed with it. Capture and purchase had each their advantages and disadvantages. Capture cost nothing, and it procured wives and concubines over whom the husband had every possible right; but, in practice, it was not exempt from danger, and once accomplished, it exposed him still to revenge and retaliation. Men became resigned, therefore, to the purchase of the wife, as soon as they could dispose of some exchange-values; and as nothing, absolutely nothing, was any obstacle to the caprice or avidity of the parents, the most unreasonable marriages were often negotiated, and notably the marriages of children.
This custom of selling children, especially girls, for a future conjugal association is very common all over the world.