The Sexes in Science and History / An inquiry into the dogma of woman's inferiority to man

by Eliza Burt Gamble

Although with McLennan, Lubbock recognizes the prevalence of wife-capture and the principle of exogamy, yet, according to the theory of the former, marriage by capture arose from exogamy, while, according to the latter, exogamy arose from marriage by capture.

Lubbock accounts for wife-capture by the following theory: As under the communal system, women of the tribe were the “common property” of the men of the group, no individual male among them would have attempted to appropriate one of these women to himself, for the reason that such appropriation would have been regarded as an infringement on the rights of the remaining males in the community. A warrior, however, upon capturing a woman from a hostile people, might claim her as his rightful possession, and hold her as against all the other members of the tribe. Since the women of the group were so emphatically the common property of the men, the exclusive right to one of them in progressive tribes which had reached a state of friendliness would involve a symbol of capture to make valid such a claim. This symbol, according to Lubbock, has no reference to those from whom the woman has been stolen, but is intended to bar the rights of other members of the tribe into which she is brought. He thinks that “the exclusive possession of a wife could only be legally acquired by a temporary recognition of the pre-existing communal rights,” and cites the account given by Herodotus of the custom existing in Babylonia, where every woman once during her lifetime must present herself at the temple, there to accept the proposals of the first man who requests her to follow him.

Although Lubbock declares that the symbol of violence in marriage ceremonies “can only be explained by the hypothesis that the capture of wives was once a stern reality,” he claims not to believe that the early conditions under which men were compelled to capture their wives by violence, or do without them, were in any degree the result of feminine will in the matter.

In referring to the fallacious theory of Mr. McLennan, that the capture of women for wives arose from the practice of female infanticide, which, by producing a scarcity of women, created a necessity for marriage without the limits of the tribe, Sir John Lubbock, although seemingly unable to recognize the actual force which was in operation to prevent the “appropriation” of women by men, has nevertheless shown himself able to perceive the reason why foreign women were captured, and what the tendency in males was which demanded their presence.

After referring to the fact that no male could appropriate to himself a female belonging to the tribe, he says:

Women taken in war were, on the contrary, in a different position. The tribe, as a tribe, had no right to them, and men surely would reserve to themselves exclusively their own prizes. These captives then would naturally become wives in our own sense of the term.

Foreign women would become dependents, their captors having the undisputed right to the control of their persons.

At the outset, Sir John Lubbock finds himself confronted with the fact that a system of reckoning descent through women once prevailed over the habitable globe. According to his own reasoning, this system presupposes a condition of society under which property rights and all rights of succession were traced through women, still we find him offering the following belief concerning the matter. “I believe, however, that communities in which women have exercised the supreme power are rare and exceptional, if, indeed, they ever existed at all.”

Were we not already acquainted with the prejudices of most of the writers who have thus far dealt with this subject, in view of the facts everywhere represented going to prove that a system of gynecocracy once prevailed over the entire earth, this “belief” of Mr. Lubbock would be truly remarkable, especially when we learn the reason given by him for his conclusion. He says:

We do not find in history, as a matter of fact, that women do assert their rights, and savage women would, I think, be peculiarly unlikely to uphold their dignity in the manner supposed.[144]