[200] Maine, op. cit. p. 159.
Christianity enjoins a husband to love his wife as his own body,[201] to do honour unto her as unto the weaker vessel.[202] However, “man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head.”[203] The husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church; hence, “as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.”[204] It is difficult to exaggerate the influence exercised by a doctrine, so agreeable to the selfishness of men, and so readily lending itself to be used as a sacred weapon against almost any attempt to extend the rights of married women, as was this dictum of St. Paul’s. In an essay on the position of women among the early Christians Principal Donaldson writes, “In the first three centuries I have not been able to see that Christianity had any favourable effect on the position of women, but, on the contrary, that it tended to lower their character and contract the range of their activity.”[205] And in more modern times Christian orthodoxy has constantly been opposed to the doctrine which once sprang up in pagan Rome and is nowadays supported by a steadily growing number of enlightened men and women, that marriage should be a contract on the footing of perfect equality between husband and wife.
[201] Ephesians, v. 28.
[202] 1 Peter, iii. 7.
[203] 1 Corinthians, xi. 8 sqq. Cf. Timothy, ii. 11 sqq.
[204] Ephesians, v. 23 sq.
[205] Donaldson, ‘Position of Women among the Early Christians,’ in Contemporary Review, lvi. 433.
The position of married women among the various peoples on earth depends on such a variety of circumstances that it would be impossible to enumerate them all. We shall here consider only the most important.
A few words must first be said about the hypothesis that the social status of women is connected with the system of tracing descent. Dr. Steinmetz has tried to show that the husband’s authority over his wife is, broadly speaking, greater among those peoples who reckon kinship through the father than among those who reckon kinship through the mother only.[206] The cases examined by Dr. Steinmetz, however, are too few to allow of any general conclusions, and the statements concerning the husband’s rights are commonly so indefinite and so incomplete that I think the evidence would be difficult to produce, even if the investigation were based on a larger number of facts. Besides, the paternal and maternal systems of descent are often so interwoven with each other among one and the same people, that it may equally well be referred to the one class as to the other[207]—a difficulty which Dr. Steinmetz must surely have felt in his attempt to treat the subject statistically. There is, moreover, the weak point of the statistical method generally, the question of selecting ethnographical units, which I have discussed in another place.[208] How, for instance, are we to deal with the various tribes of Australia? They can certainly not, all in a lump, be counted as one single unit; among some of them the maternal system prevails, among others the paternal. But then, shall we reckon each tribe as one unit by itself, or, if not, into how many groups shall we divide them? When I compare with each other peoples of the same race, at the same stage of culture, living in the same neighbourhood, under similar conditions of life, but differing from one another in their method of reckoning kinship, I do not find that the prevalence of the one or the other line of descent conspicuously affects the husband’s authority. Nothing of the kind has been noticed in Australia, nor, so far as I know, in India, where the paternal system among many of the aboriginal tribes is combined with great, or even extraordinary, rights on the part of the wife. Among the West African Negroes the position of women is, to all appearance, no less honourable in tribes like the Ibos, among whom inheritance runs through males, than in tribes which admit inheritance through females only;[209] and of the Fulah, among whom succession goes from father to son,[210] Mr. Winwood Reade observes that their women are “the most tyrannical wives in Africa,” knowing “how to make their husbands kneel before their charms, and how to place their little feet upon them.”[211] But we have reason to believe that when the man, on marrying, quits his home and goes to live with his wife in the house or community of her father, his authority over his wife is commonly more or less impaired by the presence of her father or kinsfolk.[212] In Sumatra, in the mode of marriage called ambel anak, he lives with his father-in-law in a state between that of a son and that of a debtor.[213] But it should be noticed that neither his living with the family of his wife, nor even his dependence on her father, necessarily implies a total absence of marital power. Among the Californian Yokuts, though the husband takes up his abode in his wife’s or father-in-law’s house, he is expressly stated to have the power of life and death over her.[214] So, also, in the Western islands of Torres Straits, though a man after marriage usually left his own people and went to live with those of his wife, he had complete control over her. “In spite of the wife having asked her husband to marry her, he could kill her should she cause trouble in the house, and that without any penal consequence to himself. The payment of a husband to his wife’s father gave him all rights over her, and at the same time annulled those of her father or her family.”[215]
[206] Steinmetz, Ethnologische Studien zur ersten Entwicklung der Strafe, ii. ch. 7.