368. Mother family and father family. The ultimate reasons for the mother family and for a change to the father family are in the life conditions, industrial arts, war, pressure of population, etc. In fact, our terms are only names for a group of mores which cover some set of interests, and we need to be on our guard against the category fallacy, that is, against arguing from the contents of the classification which we have made. The term "matriarchate" encouraged this fallacy and has gone out of use. By the mother family we mean the system in which descent and kin are reckoned through women, not through men. In that form of the family the relation of man and wife is one of contract. The woman must be thought of as at her home, with her kin, and the husband comes to her. She has great control of the terms on which he is accepted, and she and her kin can drive him away again, if they see fit. The children will be hers and will remain with her. The property will remain hers, while her husband must abandon his property when he comes to her. The next male friend of a woman will be her brother, not her husband, and the next male guardian of a child will be his mother's brother, not his father. Words of relationship, address, etc., must all conform to the fundamental notion which rules the family. Religion, political control, modes of warfare and alliance, and education are all constructed to fit the family-form. At puberty boys are taken into the political organization (tribe) to which the father belongs and get political status from that. By birth each one is a member of a blood-kin group (clan) on which depend blood revenge and other duties and by which marriage is regulated. All this grows up as a part of the folkways, instinctively, without plan or guidance of intelligent control. Yet it has been wrought out, along the same logical lines of custom and rule, all over the world by savage peoples. We meet with many variations of it in transitional forms, or in combination with later institutions, but they belong to the time when this arrangement is breaking down, and passing into the father family. The mother family system is definite and complete when flourishing and normal. By the totem device the mother family is made capable of indefinite extension, and a verification is provided for its essential facts. The status of women, in the mother family, was strong and independent. Often important societal functions were entrusted to them, and their influence was so high that it produced great results, like the conferring of glory on braves, and the election of war chiefs. In cases, as for instance the ancient Lycians, the men were treated with harshness and abuse. The distribution of social power between the sexes gave opportunity for this, and the opportunity was seized.[1161]
369. Change from mother family to father family. It may well be believed that the change from the mother family to the father family is the greatest and most revolutionary in the history of civilization. By changes in the life conditions it becomes possible for the man to get his wife to himself away from her kin, and to become the owner of his children. In the mother family those arrangements could only be suggested to him as modifications of his experience which would be eagerly to be desired, i.e. as objects of idealization. When the life conditions so changed that it became possible, the father family displaced the mother family. All the folkways followed the change. Family arrangements, kin, industry, war, political organization, property, rights, must all conform to the change. The wife is obtained by capture, purchase, or later by contract. By capture or purchase she passes under her husband's dominion, and she may not be a consenting party. She loses status by the change. In the earlier period the man might get a wife by capture. She would be either a work-wife or a love-wife. Now a real status-wife would be obtained by real or fictitious capture and get her status from that fact; that is, she becomes very much at the mercy of her husband. The same is true of a purchased wife. The relation of a wife to her husband is analogous to property. The same is true of the relation of children to their father. The husband gives, sells, or lends wife or daughters as he sees fit, although an interference with his dominion over them without his consent would be a thing to be earnestly resented. Loyalty and fidelity to husband became the highest duties of wives, which the husband enforced by physical penalties. Female honor, for wives, consisted in chastity, which meant self-submission to the limitations which men desired in wives and which the mores had approved, for the mores teach the women what conduct on their part is "right," and teach them that it is "right" that they should be taken as wives by capture or purchase. Female virtue and honor, therefore, acquire technical definitions out of the mores, which are not parallel to any definitions of virtue and honor as applied to males. In Deut. xxi. 10 the case of a man enamored of a captive woman is considered, and rules are set for it. The woman may not be sold for money after she has been "humbled." It is evident that the notions of right and wrong, and of rights in marriage and the family, are altogether contingent and relative. In the mores of any form of the family the ideas of rights, and of right and wrong, will conform to the theory of the institution, and they may offer us notions of moral things which are radically divergent or antagonistic.
370. Capture and purchase become ceremonies. As population increases and tribes are pushed closer together, capture loses violence and is modified by a compromise, with payment of money as a composition, and by treaty, until it becomes a ceremony. Then purchase degenerates into a ceremony, partly by idealization, i.e. the purchase ceremony is necessary, but the arrangement would seem more honorable if some other construction were put on it. The father, if he takes the customary bride price but is rich and loves his daughter, so that he wants to soften for her the lot of a wife as women generally find it, gives a dowry and by that binds her husband to stipulations as to the rights and treatment which she shall enjoy. In Homer's time, no man of rank and wealth gave his daughter without a dowry, although he took gifts for her, even, if she was in great demand, to a greater value.[1162] What the rich and great do sets the fashion which others follow as far as they can. In the laws of Manu we see purchase not yet obsolete, but already regarded as shameful, if it really is a sale, and so subjected to idealization; that is, they try to put another construction on it. The ceremonies of purchase and capture lasted for a very long time, because there was no other way to indicate the bond of wedlock until the promise came into use. That has never furnished a bond of equal reality to that of capture or purchase.
371. Feminine honor and virtue. Jealousy. As the old ceremonies become obsolete the property idea fades out of the marital relation, and the woman's exclusive devotion to her husband is no longer a rational inference from capture or purchase by him, but becomes a sentiment of sex. Idealization comes into play again and sets a standard of female honor and duty which rests on womanhood only, and therefore does not apply to men. It is the lot of every woman to stand beside some man, and to give her strength and life to help him in every way which circumstances offer opportunity for. Out of this relation come her ideas of her honor, duties, and virtue. Jealousy on the part of the husband also changes its sense. He thinks it an abomination to lend, sell, or give his wife. Jealousy is not now the sentiment of a property owner, but it is a masculine sex sentiment which corresponds to the woman's sex honor and duty. What she gives to him alone he accepts on the same basis of exclusiveness.
Darwin[1163] argued from the strength of jealousy amongst animals "as well as from the analogy of the lower animals, more particularly of those which come nearest to man," that promiscuity could not have prevailed shortly before man "attained his present rank in the zoölogical scale." Then he refers to the anthropoid apes, which are either monogamous, or pair off for a limited time, or are polygamous in separate families, or still again polygamous but living in a society. The jealousy of the males, and their special weapons for battling with their rivals, make promiscuity in a state of nature extremely improbable. "It does not seem possible for us to apprehend the emotion here called 'jealousy' when shown by an animal. Amongst uncivilized men the sentiment is that of the property holder. To lend or give a wife is consistent with that sentiment, not a violation of it. Hence it does not prove that jealousy does not exist."[1164] The Veddahs are very careful of their wives. They will not allow strangers in their villages, and do not even let their brothers approach their wives or offer them food.[1165] They have pure marital customs. Their neighbors, the Singhalese, have not pure marital customs and are not jealous.[1166] In the East Indies, not in all tribes but in many, betrothed persons are separated until their marriage.[1167] Kubary says that the jealousy of the Palau Islanders is less a sign of wounded feelings than of care for external propriety.[1168] An oa ape (a gibbon) showed jealousy whenever a little Malay girl, his playmate, was taken away from him.[1169] Wellhausen[1170] says that "the suspicious jealousy, not of the love of their wives, but of their own property rights, is a prominent characteristic of the Arabs, of which they are proud." The blood kin guard their property right in the maiden as jealously as the man guards his property right in his wife. A Papuan kills an adulterer, not on account of his own honor, but to punish an infringement of his property rights. The former idea is foreign to him. He does, however, show jealousy of a handsome young man who captivates the women.[1171] In 1898 a pair of wolves were kept as public pets in the Capitol at Rome. The male killed a cub, his own offspring, out of jealousy of the affection of the female for it. Then the female died of grief.[1172] These cases show very different forms of jealousy. The jealousy of husband and wife is similar, but not the same as any one of them, and it differs at different stages of civilization. It depends on the exclusiveness and intenseness of devotion which spouses are held to owe each other. Beasts do not manifest an emotion of jealousy so uniform or universal as Darwin assumes in his argument, nor any sentiment like that of a half-civilized man. The latter can always coerce the woman to himself, but jealousy arises when the woman is left free to dispose of her own devotion or attention, and she is supposed to direct it to her husband, out of affection and preference. It is the breach of this affection and preference which constitutes the gravamen.
372. Virginity. We have many examples of peoples amongst whom girls are entirely free until married, on the rational ground that they are under obligations to nobody. They are under no taboo, marriage being the first application of the sex taboo. Farnell[1173] says that the first sense of parthenos was not "virgin," but unmarried. The Oriental goddess of impure love was parthenos. Artemis was perhaps, at first, a goddess of people who had not yet settled marriage mores, but had the mother family, amongst whom women were powerful. In the development of the father family fathers restricted daughters in order to make them more valuable as wives. Here comes in the notion of virginity and pre-nuptial chastity. This is really a negative and exclusive notion. It is an appeal to masculine vanity, and is a singular extension of the monopoly principle. His wife is to be his from the cradle, when he did not know her. Here, then, is a new basis for the sex honor of women and the jealousy of men. Chastity for the unmarried meant—no one; for the married—none but the husband. The mores extended to take in this doctrine, and it has passed into the heart of the mores of all civilized peoples, to whom it seems axiomatic or "natural." It has often been declared absurd that sex honor, especially for women, should be made to depend on a negative. It seems to make an ascetic and arbitrary standard for everyday life. In fact, however, the negation is imposed by the nature of the sex passion and by the conditions of human life. The passion tends to excess. What is "natural" is therefore evil. Negation, restraint, renunciation, are imposed by expediency. Perhaps it is the only case in which man is driven to error and evil by a great force in his nature, and is thus forced, if he would live well, to find a discipline for himself in intelligent self-control and in arbitrary rules. This would justify the current usage of language in which "morals" refers especially to the sex relation.
373. Chastity for men. In modern times there is a new extension of idealization, by which it is attempted to extend to men the same standard of chastity and duty of chastity as to women. Two questions are here confused: (a) whether unmarried men and women are to be bound by the same obligation of chastity; (b) whether married men and women are to be bound by the same rule of exclusion. The Hindoo lawgivers demand the same fidelity from husband and wife.[1174] In the treatise on Economics which is ascribed to Aristotle,[1175] although there is no dogmatic statement of law or duty, all the prescriptions for the husband and wife are the same, and the man is said to injure the wife by infidelity. Aristotle[1176] propounds the rule of taboo on all sex relations except in marriage, which is the doctrine of pair marriage
(sec. 383). In the Economicus of Xenophon[1177] the relations of husband and wife are expounded at length in terms of great respect and esteem for a wife. The work seems to be rhetorical and dramatic, not actual, and it is represented as very exceptional and astonishing that such relations should exist between any man and his wife. In Plutarch's Morals the tract on "Conjugal Precepts" is written in an elevated tone. It is not specific and seems open to the suspicion of being a "pose." However, the doctrine is that of equal duty for husband and wife, and it may be taken to prove that that was the doctrine of the neostoics. Seneca wrote, "You know that it is a base thing that he who demands chastity of his wife should himself corrupt the wives of others."[1178] And again, "Let him know that it will be the worst kind of an injury to his wife for him to have a mistress."[1179] Augustine tells a story that Antoninus Pius granted a man a divorce for adultery of his wife, provided the man could show that he had, by his mode of life, maintained fidelity to his wife, and that the emperor added the dictum that "it would be unjust that a man should be able to exact a fidelity which he did not himself observe."[1180] Augustine himself maintained the full equality of spouses in rights and duties. Ulpian said that "it seems to be very unjust that a man demands chastity of his wife while he himself does not show an example of it." This dictum got into the Digest where the jurists of all succeeding ages could have it before their eyes.[1181] It did not often arrest their attention. These utterances, so far as they are sincere expressions of convictions, do not represent the conduct of any school, and perhaps not even that of the men who recorded them. They belong to a period of great corruption of the sex mores of the upper classes, and of rapid extension of such corruption to the lower classes. A character in Plautus's comedy of The Merchant[1182] complains of the difference in codes for unchaste husbands and unchaste wives. If every woman has to be content with one husband, why should not every man be forced to be content with one wife? Jerome made the most explicit statement of the Christian rule: "Amongst us [Christians] what is not permitted to women is not permitted to men. The same obligation is held to rest on equal conditions."[1183] This is the assertion of a celibate and an ascetic. Perhaps it may be held to apply to pre-marital duty, but it is doubtful whether he had that in mind. All the other statements quoted apply only to the mutuality of conjugal duty. Of all of them it must be said that they are isolated flights of moral enthusiasm, and by no means present the prevailing code or the mores of the time. They do not express the life rules which have ever yet been observed by any but selected and limited classes in any society. The writings of Chrysostom and Augustine show plainly that the Christians of Jerome's time did not practice the doctrine which he uttered. It has never yet been a part of the mores of any society that the same standards of chastity should be enforced against both sexes before marriage. "At the present day, although the standard of morals is far higher than in pagan Rome, it may be questioned whether the inequality of the censure which is bestowed on the two sexes is not as great as in the days of paganism."[1184] Conjugal affection has been the great cause of masculine fidelity in marriage. Laertes refused to take Eurykleia lest he should hurt his wife's feelings.[1185] Plutarch, in his tract on "Love," dwells upon its controlling power, its exclusiveness, and the devotion it cultivates. Observation and experience of this kind may have produced the modern conviction that a strong affection between spouses is the best guarantee of happiness and truth. This conviction, with the code which belongs with it, have spread further and further, through wider and wider classes, and it is now the accepted moral principle that there ought to be no sex gratification except inside of pair marriage. What that means is that no one could formulate and maintain in public discussion any other rule as more reasonable and expedient to be the guiding principle of the mores, although it has not yet become such. Also, "the fundamental truth that the same act can never be at once venial for a man to demand and infamous for a woman to accord, though nobly enforced by the early Christians, has not passed into the popular sentiment of Christendom."[1186] Passing by the assertion that the early Christians enforced any such rule, which may well be questioned, we ask: Why are these views not in the mores? Undoubtedly it is because they are dogmatic in form, invented and imposed by theological authority[1187] or philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience of life and cannot be verified by it. Woman bears an unequal share of the responsibilities and duties of sex and reproduction just as certainly and justly as man bears an unequal share of the responsibilities and duties of property, war, and politics. The reasons are in ultimate physiological facts by virtue of which one is a woman and the other is a man.
374. Love marriage. Conjugal affection. "Wife." It must be assumed that even in the lowest form of society a man may have preferred one woman to others, but love between a man and a woman is not a phenomenon of uncivilized society. It begins with wealth and luxury. Love stories can be found in very early folklore, legends, and poetry, but they belong to idealization, to romance and unreality. Realistic love stories are now hardly a century old. It is evident that they lead idealization. They put cases and solve them, and every reader forms a judgment whether the case has actuality and whether the solution is correct. Love in half-civilization and in antiquity was erotic only. The Greeks conceived of it as a madness by which a person was afflicted through the caprice or malevolence of some god or goddess. Such a passion is necessarily evanescent. The ancient peoples in general, and the Semites in particular, did not think this passion an honorable or trustworthy basis of marriage. The Kaffirs think that a Christian wife, married for love, is shameful. They compare her to a cat, the only animal which, amongst them, has no value, but is obtained as a gift.[1188] The gandharva marriage of the Hindoos was a love marriage, and was not honorable. It was free love and became, in practice, an entirely informal union without institutional guarantees.[1189] This would be, at best, a conscience marriage, to which a man would adhere from a sense of duty, the strength of which would depend on personal character only.
In all these cases the views entertained were justified, if love meant only erotic passion. On the other hand, we have seen (sec. 362) that conjugal love controls the will by the highest motives. It is based on esteem, confidence, and habit. It presents all varieties and degrees, from exploitation on one side and servility on the other, to good-fellowship on both sides. It depends on the way in which each pair arranges its affairs, develops its sentiments, and forms its habits. Conjugal affection makes great demands on the good sense, spirit of accommodation, and good nature of each. These are very great pre-conditions. It is no wonder that they often fail. In no primitive or half-civilization does the word "wife" bear the connotations which it bears to us. In Levit. xxi. 1 a case may be seen in which a man's blood kin takes precedence of his wife. Arabs, in the time of Mohammed, did not think that the conjugal tie could be as serious and strong as the kin tie, because the former is institutional only; that is, it is a product of convention and contract.[1190] Public demonstrations of love they thought offensive and insulting to the woman. People of rank often admitted no suitors for their daughters. It was thought a disgrace to give a daughter into the power of an outsider. They killed female infants, not, like the poor, because they could not afford to rear them, but from fear of incurring disgrace from them.[1191] By veiling the women are excluded from all social intercourse with men and from any share in intellectual interests.[1192] They cannot win conjugal affection—certainly not from educated men. Erotic passion fills Mohammedan poetry and is cultivated at home. The few cultivated women of the higher classes emancipate themselves from moral restraints, often without concealment.[1193] In Mohammed's last sermon he said: "You have rights against your wives and they have rights against you. They are bound not to violate marital fidelity and to commit no act of public wrong. If they do so, you have the power to beat them, yet without danger to their lives."[1194] Islam is not a field in which conjugal affection could be expected to develop.[1195] "A Japanese who should leave his father and mother for his wife would be looked upon as an outcast." Therefore the Bible "is regarded as irreligious and immoral."[1196] The notion that a man's wife is the nearest person in the world to him is a relatively modern notion, and one which is restricted to a comparatively small part of the human race.