There are several reasons why a man may desire to possess more than one wife. First, monogamy requires from him periodical continence. He has to live apart from his wife, not only for a certain time every month,[3033] but, among many peoples, during her pregnancy also.[3034] Among the Shawanese, for instance, “as soon as a wife is announced to be in a state of pregnancy, the matrimonial rights are suspended, and continency preserved with a religious and mystical scrupulosity.”[3035] This suspension of matrimonial rights is usually continued till a considerable time after child-birth. Among the Northern Indians, a mother has to remain in a small tent placed at a little distance from the others during a month or five weeks;[3036] and similar customs are found among many other peoples.[3037] Very commonly, in a state of savage and barbarous life, the husband must not cohabit with his wife till the child is weaned.[3038] And this prohibition is all the more severe, as the suckling-time generally lasts for two, three, four years, or even more. In Sierra Leone, it was looked upon as a crime of the most heinous nature if a wife cohabited with her husband before the child was able to run alone.[3039] Among the Makonde, in Eastern Africa, says Mr. Joseph Thomson, “when a woman bears a child, she lives completely apart from her husband till the child is able to speak, as otherwise it is believed that harm, if not death, would come to the infant.”[3040] In Fiji, “the relatives of a woman take it as a public insult if any child should be born before the customary three or four years have elapsed.”[3041] This long suckling-time is due chiefly to want of soft food and animal milk.[3042] But when milk can be obtained,[3043] and even when the people have domesticated animals able to supply them with it,[3044] this kind of food is often avoided. The Chinese, who are a Tartar people, and must have descended at one time from the “Land of Grass,” entirely eschew the use of milk.[3045]
Professor Bastian suggests that it is on hygienic grounds, though almost instinctively, that a man abstains from cohabitation with his wife during her pregnancy, and as long as she suckles her child.[3046] But the reason seems rather to be of a religious character. Diseases are generally attributed by savages to the influence of some evil spirit.[3047] Among many peoples the attainment of the age of puberty is marked by most superstitious ceremonies.[3048] A woman, during the time of menstruation, is looked upon with a mystic detestation.[3049] It is therefore quite in accordance with primitive ideas that the appearance of a new being should be connected in some way with supernatural agencies. Among the Ashantees, according to Mr. Reade, “when conception becomes apparent, the girl goes through a ceremony of abuse, and is pelted down to the sea, where she is cleansed. She is then set aside; charms are bound on her wrists, spells are muttered over her, and, by a wise sanitary regulation, her husband is not allowed to cohabit with her from that time until she has finished nursing her child.”[3050] A woman in child-bed is very commonly considered unclean.[3051] In China, a man of the upper classes does not speak to his wife within the first month after the birth of a child, and no visitor will enter the house where she lives.[3052] According to early Aryan traditions, as v. Żmigrodzki remarks, a witch and a woman in child-bed are persons so intimately connected, that it is impossible to make any distinction between them.[3053]
One of the chief causes of polygyny is the attraction which female youth and beauty exercise upon man. Several instances have already been mentioned of a fresh wife being taken when the first wife grows old. Indeed, when a man, soon after he has attained manhood, marries a woman of similar age—not to speak of such countries as China and Corea, where the first wife is generally a woman from three to eight years older than her husband[3054]—he will still be a man in the prime of life, when the youthful beauty of his wife has passed away for ever. This is especially the case among peoples at the lower stages of civilization, among whom, as a rule, women get old much sooner than in more advanced communities.
Thus in California, according to Mr. Powers, women are rather handsome in their free and untoiling youth, but after twenty-five or thirty they break down under their heavy burdens and become ugly.[3055] Among the Mandans, the beauty of the women vanishes soon after marriage.[3056] The Kutchin women get “coarse and ugly as they grow old, owing to hard labour and bad treatment.”[3057] Patagonian women are said to lose their youth at a very early age, “from exposure and hard work;” and among the Warraus, according to Schomburgk, “when the woman has reached her twentieth year, the flower of her life is gone.”[3058] In New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, and other islands of the South Sea, the beauty of women soon decays—“the result,” says Mr. Angas, “of hard labour in some cases, and in others of early intercourse with the opposite sex, combined with their mode of living, which rapidly destroys their youthful appearance.”[3059]
“Women of fifty in Europe,” Stavorinus observes, “look younger and fresher than those of thirty in Batavia.”[3060] At two and twenty, Dyak beauty “has already begun to fade, and the subsequent decay is rapid.”[3061] Among the Manipuris and Garos, the women, pretty when young, soon become “hags”;[3062] and this is true also of the Aino women in Yesso, partly, it is said, because of the exposed life they lead as children, partly because of the early age at which they marry and become mothers, and partly because of the hard life they continue to lead afterwards.[3063]
In Africa female beauty fades quickly. The Egyptian women, from the age of about fourteen to that of eighteen or twenty, are generally models of loveliness in body and limbs, but, when they reach maturity, their attractions do not long survive.[3064] In Eastern Africa, according to Sir R. F. Burton, the beauty of women is less perishable than in India and Arabia; but even there charms are on the wane at thirty, and, when old age comes on, the women are no exceptions to “the hideous decrepitude of the East.”[3065] Arab girls in the Sahara preserve only till about their sixteenth year that youthful freshness which the women of the north still possess in the late spring of their life;[3066] and, among the Ba-kwileh, women have no trace of beauty after twenty-five.[3067] Speaking of the Wolofs, Mr. Reade remarks that the girls are very pretty with their soft and glossy black skin, but, “when the first jet of youth is passed, the skin turns to a dirty yellow and creases like old leather; their eyes sink into the skull, and the breasts hang down like the udder of a cow, or shrivel up like a bladder that has burst.”[3068] Among the Damaras, Ovambo, and Kafirs, women, soon after maturity, begin to wither, as we are told, on account of hard labour;[3069] and the Bushman women, it is said, soon become sterile from the same cause.[3070] Among the Fulah, it is rare for a woman older than twenty to become a mother; and in Unyoro Emin Pasha never saw a woman above twenty-five with babies.[3071]
Early intercourse with the opposite sex is adduced by several writers as the cause of the short prime of savage women. But I am disposed to think that physical exertion has a much greater influence. Even from a physiological point of view hard labour seems to shorten female youth. Statistics show that, among the poorer women of Berlin, menstruation ceases at a rather earlier age than among the well-off classes.[3072] It has been suggested that in hot countries women lose their beauty much sooner than in colder regions,[3073] whereas men are not affected in the same way by climate. But, so far as I know, we are still in want of exact information on this point.
A further cause of polygyny is man’s taste for variety. Merolla da Sorrento asserts that the Negroes of Angola, who used to exchange their wives with each other for a certain time, excused themselves, when reproved, on the ground that “they were not able to eat always of the same dish.”[3074] And in Egypt, according to Mr. Lane, “fickle passion is the most evident and common motive both to polygamy and repeated divorces.”[3075]
Motives due to man’s passions are not, however, the only causes of polygyny. We must also take into account his desire for offspring, wealth, and authority.
The barrenness of a wife is a very common reason for the choice of another partner. Among the Greenlanders, for instance, who considered it a great disgrace for a man to have no children, particularly no sons, a husband generally took a second wife, if the first one could not satisfy his desire for offspring.[3076] Among the Botis of Ladakh, says Lieutenant Cunningham, “should a wife prove barren, a second can be chosen, or should she have daughters only, a second can be chosen similarly.”[3077] In the Mutsa tribe of Indo-China, polygyny is allowed only if the wife is sterile;[3078] and, among the Patuah or Juanga, the Eskimo at Prince Regent’s Bay, and several other peoples, already referred to, a man scarcely ever takes a second wife if the first wife gives him children.[3079] Among the Tuski, “if a man’s wife bears only girls, he takes another until he obtains a boy, but no more.”[3080] In China and Tonquin, and among the Munda Kols of Chota Nagpore, it sometimes happens that the barren wife herself advises her husband to take a fresh partner,[3081] as Rachel gave Jacob Bilhah.[3082]