These practices are of the greatest significance in a consideration of the modern institutional taboos which surround the family. Students agree that our own mores are in large part derived from those of the lowest class of freedmen in Rome at the time when Christianity took over the control which had fallen from the hands of the Roman emperors. These mores were inherited by the Bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages, and were passed on by them as they acquired economic supremacy. Thus these practices have come down to us unchanged in spirit even if somewhat modified in form, to fit the changed environment of our times.
The standardization of the family with its foundations embedded in a series of institutional taboos, added its weight to the formulation of the Model Woman type referred to at the close of the preceding chapter. The model wife appears in the earliest literature. In The Trojan Women, Hecuba tells how she behaved in wedlock. She stayed at home and did not gossip. She was modest and silent before her husband. The patient Penelope was another ideal wife. To her, her son Telemachus says:
"Your widowed hours apart, with female toil, And various labours of the loom, beguile, There rule, from palace cares remote and free, That care to man belongs, and most to me."
The wifely type of the Hebrews is set forth in Proverbs xxxi, 10-31. Her virtues consisted in rising while it was yet night, and not eating the bread of idleness. In her relation to her husband, she must never surprise him by unusual conduct, and must see that he was well fed.
The Romans, Hindus, and Mohammedans demanded similar virtues in their wives and mothers. The wives of the medieval period were to remain little girls, most admired for their passive obedience. Gautier puts into the mouth of a dutiful wife of the Age of Chivalry the following soliloquy:
"I will love no one but my husband. Even if he loves me no longer, I will love him always. I will be humble and as a servitor. I will call him my sire, or my baron, or domine..."[[6]]
The modern feminine ideal combines the traits demanded by the worship of the madonna and the virtues imposed by the institutional taboos which surround the family. She is the virgin pure and undefiled before marriage. She is the protecting mother and the obedient, faithful wife afterward. In spite of various disrupting influences which are tending to break down this concept, and which will presently be discussed, this is still the ideal which governs the life of womankind. The average mother educates her daughter to conform to this ideal woman type which is the synthesized product of ages of taboo and religious mysticism. Home training and social pressure unite to force woman into the mould wrought out in the ages when she has been the object of superstitious fear to man and also a part of his property to utilize as he willed. Being thus the product of wholly irrational forces, it is little wonder that only in recent years has she had any opportunity to show what she in her inmost soul desired, and what capabilities were latent within her personality.
In sharp contrast to the woman who conforms to the standards thus created for her, is the prostitute, who is the product of forces as ancient as those which have shaped the family institution. In the struggle between man's instinctive needs and his mystical ideal of womanhood, there has come about a division of women into two classes—the good and the bad. It is a demarcation as sharp as that involved in the primitive taboos which set women apart as sacred or unclean. In building up the Madonna concept and requiring the women of his family to approximate this mother-goddess ideal, man made them into beings too spiritual to satisfy his earthly needs. The wife and mother must be pure, as he conceived purity, else she could not be respected. The religious forces which had set up the worship of maternity had condemned the sex relationship and caused a dissociation of two elements of human nature which normally are in complete and intimate harmony. One result of this divorce of two biologically concomitant functions was the institution of prostitution.
Prostitution is designed to furnish and regulate a supply of women outside the mores of the family whose sex shall be for sale, not for purposes of procreation but for purposes of indulgence. In the ancient world, temple prostitution was common, the proceeds going to the god or goddess; but the sense of pollution in the sex relation which came to be so potent an element in the control of family life drove the prostitute from the sanctuary to the stews and the brothel, where she lives to-day. She has become the woman shunned, while the wife and mother who is the centre of the family with its institutional taboos is the sacred woman, loved and revered by men who condemn the prostitute for the very act for which they seek her company. Such is the irrational situation which has come to us as a heritage from the past.
Among the chief causes which have impelled women into prostitution rather than into family life are the following: (1) Slavery; (2) poverty; (3) inclination. These causes have been expanded and re-grouped by specialists, but the only addition which the writer sees as necessary in consequence of the study of taboo is the fact that the way of the woman transgressor is peculiarly hard because of the sex taboo, the ignorance and narrowness of good women, and the economic limitations of all women. Ignorance of the results of entrance into a life which usually means abandonment of hope may be a contributing cause. Boredom with the narrowness of family life and desire for adventure are also influences.