The Australian woman discharges the duties of a wife and a mother, and besides, to some extent, the work that among other peoples falls to the share of the slave; therefore she is not a slave. If she were, her place, in a slave-keeping society, [[25]]would be entirely occupied by the slave; but no one will doubt whether in any such society there are wives. In an evolutionary sense the slave and the Australian wife differ in this: the Australian wife is a not-yet-differentiated organ, performing two functions, which at a later stage of development will be incumbent on two quite distinct organs: the peculiar function of a wife, and the labour of a slave. This reasoning is not an assertion a priori, by a biological parallelism, of a development that must actually have taken place; it is only intended to show the fundamental difference existing between wives, however abject their condition, and slaves[29].
We may even go farther and say: Slavery proper does not exist, when there are none but female slaves. For when females only are enslaved, the reason probably is, that they are valued as women, not only as labourers; otherwise males would be enslaved too. So, according to Meyer[30], in the early stages of ancient history, most of the slaves were women and their chief function was a sexual one. And even where such women are not, all of them, actually treated as wives or concubines, but only kept as labourers, there is no slavery in the true sense of the word. In such cases, the husband keeps his wife or wives subjected; this leads to the keeping of numerous subjected females, who are scarcely to be called wives. But it is always women, as the weaker sex, who are subjected to the men; subjection of labourers, only in their quality of labourers, does not exist. The labourers have the name, if not the state, of wives; this proves that the subjection of labourers as such, i.e. slavery, is not yet developed.
We have dwelt at considerable length on this distinction between slaves and subjected wives. There are some more distinctions to be made between slavery and kindred phenomena; but these will not occupy so much space and time. [[26]]
§ 5. Distinction of slavery from kindred phenomena.
II. Children subjected to the head of the family.
There was a time, the time of the good old patriarchal theory, when the condition of children in the early stages of social life was thought to be one of complete subjection to the head of the family, the pater familias, who had over them an unlimited power, extending to the power of life and death. Carey, among others, holds this view, and very plainly expresses it. “By nothing is the progress of mankind in population and wealth made more manifest than by the change in the relation of parent and child. In the infancy of cultivation the one is a tyrant and the other a slave”[31].
The adherents of the matriarchal theory have assigned to the Roman-like agnatic family its place as a later product of history; but to the question as to how children were treated in an ante-patriarchal state of culture they have not given much attention.
It is to Professor S. R. Steinmetz that we are indebted for the first exact inquiry into the early history of the treatment of children. His conclusions, based upon a large amount of ethnographical materials, are these:
With most savages rational education is out of the question, the children soon growing independent, and when young being either neglected or much petted and spoiled[32]; a lesser number of savage tribes show some slight beginnings of education without or nearly without bodily castigation; in a few cases the children are under strict discipline. In this last set of cases there is to some extent a subjection of the children. “With the power over the mother the father gradually acquired the power over the children.” “The patriarch became master of his children and, whenever circumstances required and allowed it, introduced a strict discipline over them”[33]. [[27]]We may therefore suppose, that there will be instances of children being treated in a somewhat slave-like manner. We shall presently see that there are a few such cases on record in Steinmetz’s book.