385. Pair marriage; its technical definition. Polyandry passed over into polygamy when sufficient property was at command.[1241] There was a neutral middle point where one man had one wife. It follows that monogamy is not a specific term. It might be monogamy if one man had one wife but also concubines and slaves, or he might have but one wife in fact, although free to have more if he chose. The term "pair marriage" is needed as a technical term for the form of marriage which is as exclusive and permanent for the man as for the woman, which one enters on the same plane of free agreement as the other, and in which all the rights and duties are mutual. In such a union there may be a complete fusion of two lives and interests. In no other form of union is such a fusion possible. This pair marriage is the ideal which guides the marital usages of our time and civilization, gives them their spirit and sense, and furnishes standards for all our discussions, although it is far from being universally realized. The ideal is made an object of "pathos"[1242] in our popular literature. Whence did it come? In truth, we can hardly learn. It existed, by necessity of poverty and humble social status, in the classes amongst whom Christianity took root. It found expression in the canon law. It resisted, in the lower classes, the attempt of the church to suppress it in order to aggrandize the corporation. It resisted, in the same classes, the corruption of the Renaissance. It has risen with those classes to wealth and civil power. In modern times "moral" has been used technically for what conforms to the code of pair marriage.
386. Ethics of pair marriage. Pair marriage has excluded every other form of sex relation. To modern people it is hard to understand how different forms of sex relation could exist side by side and all be right. The explanation is in the mores. A concubine may be a woman who has a defined and legally guaranteed relation to one man, if the mores have so determined. Her circumstances have not opened to her the first rank, that of a wife, but she has another which is recognized in the society as honorable. The same may be said of a slave woman, or of a morganatic wife. Amongst the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans of the empire concubines were a recognized class. A concubine was not a woman who had cast off her own honor until after the thirteenth century,[1243] and although her position became doubtful, it was not disreputable for two or three centuries more. Morganatic marriages for princes have continued down to our own time. Whatever is defined and provided for in the mores as a way of solving the problem of life interests is never wrong. Hence the cases of sacral harlotry, of temporary marriage (as in China, Korea, Japan, and ancient Arabia), of royal concubines (since the king was forced to accept a status wife of prescribed rank, etc.), and all the other peculiar arrangements which have existed in history are accounted for. Pair marriage, however, has swept all other forms away. It is the system of the urban-middle-capitalist class. It has gained strength in all the new countries where all men and women were equal within a small margin and the women bore their share of the struggle for existence. The environment, in the new countries, favored the mores of the class from which the emigrants came. In the old countries the mores of the middle class have come into conflict with the mores of peasants and nobles. The former have steadily won. The movement has been the same everywhere, although the dates of the steps in it have been different. As to women, the countries which are at the rear of the modern movement keep the old mores; those which are at the head of it have emancipated women most, and have swept away from their legislation all toleration for anything but pair marriage. Vice, of course, still affects facts, and the growth of wealth and luxurious habits seems to be developing a tendency to take up again some old customs which bear an aristocratic color. It must be expected that when the economic facts which now favor the lower middle classes pass away and new conditions arise the marriage mores will change again. Democracy and pair marriage are now produced by the conditions. Both are contingent and transitory. In aristocratic society a man's family arrangements are his own prerogative. When life becomes harder it will become aristocratic, and concubinage may be expected to arise again.
It seems clear that pair marriage has finally set aside the notion which, in the past, has been so persistently held,—that women are bad by nature, so that one half of the human race is permanently dragging down the other half. The opposite notion seems now to be gaining currency,—that all women are good, and can be permanently employed to raise up the men. These fluctuations only show how each sway of conditions and interests produces its own fallacies.
387. Pair marriage is monopolistic. It has been shown that pair marriage is monopolistic. It produces an exclusive family, and nourishes family pride and ambition. It is interwoven with capital, and we have hardly yet reached the point where we can see what it will become with great wealth, and under the treatment of a plutocratic class. From what has been said it is evidently most important that man and wife should have been educated in the same mores. Pair marriage is also individualistic. It is the barrier against which all socialism breaks into dust. As the cost of a family increases, the connection between family and capital becomes more close and vital. Every socialist who can think is forced to go on to a war on marriage and the family, because he finds that in marriage and the family lie the strongholds of the "individualistic vices" which he cannot overcome. He has to mask this battery, however, because he dare not openly put it forward.
388. The future of marriage. It is idle to imagine that our mores about marriage have reached their final stage. Since marriage is free and individualistic as it exists in our mores, there is little care or pity for those who cannot adapt themselves to it, or it to their circumstances. They are allowed divorce, but not without some feeling of annoyance with them if they use it. It is also idle to imagine that those who are now satisfied will alone control the changes which the future will bring in the mores. It is not difficult to make marriage such that men will refuse it. Women have revolted against it in the past.[1244] It is not beyond imagination that they might do so again.
389. Normal type of sex union. It may be, as Lecky says,[1245] that "we have ample grounds for maintaining that the lifelong union of one man and one woman should be the normal or dominant type of intercourse between the sexes. We can prove that it is, on the whole, most conducive to the happiness, and also to the moral elevation, of all parties. But beyond this point it would, I conceive, be impossible to advance, except by the assistance of a special revelation. It by no means follows that because this should be the dominant type, it should be the only one, or that the interests of society demand that all connections should be forced into the same die."
390. Divorce. In the mother family the woman could dismiss her husband. This she could also do in all the transition forms in which the husband went to live with the wife at her childhood home. In the father family the wife, obtained by capture or purchase, belonged to her husband on the analogy of property. The husband could reject or throw away his property if he saw fit. It is clear that the physical facts attendant on the two customs—one that the man went to live with his wife, the other that he took her to his home—made a great difference in the status of the woman. In the latter case she fell into dependence and subjection to the dominion of her husband. She could not divorce him.
391. In Chaldea a man could divorce his wife by saying, "Thou art not my wife," by repaying her dowry, and giving her a letter to her father. If she said to him, "Thou art not my husband," she was drowned. An adulterous woman was driven into the street clothed only in a loin cloth, at the mercy of the passers.[1246] In this view, which ran through the Jewish system and came down into that of Mohammed, a wife has duties, to which her husband has no correlative obligations. She must do her duty or be thrust out. There is no adultery for a man and no divorce for a woman. The most complete negation of divorce is in Hindostan, where a woman (perhaps a child of five or six), if married to a man, is his only, for time and eternity, no matter what may happen. He is hers until she dies, but then he can have another wife. Romulus allowed divorce to the man, if the woman poisoned infants, drank strong wine, falsified keys, or committed adultery.[1247] By a law of Numa a man who had as many children as he wanted could cede his wife, temporarily or finally, to another.[1248] These laws seem to have been forgotten. If they ever really existed they did not control early Roman society. By the later law a sentence for crime which produced civil death set free the other spouse. In the last century B.C. divorce became very easy and customary. The mores gradually relaxed to allow it. Augustus compelled the husband of Livia to divorce her because he wanted her himself. She was about to become a mother.[1249] Cato the younger gave his wife to his friend Hortensius, and took her back after Hortensius's death.[1250] Sempronius Sophus divorced his wife because she went to the games without his consent.[1251] Women also divorced their husbands in the first century of the Christian era. Juvenal mentions a woman who had eight husbands in five years.[1252] Tertullian, writing from the standpoint of a Christian ascetic, said that "divorce is the product of marriage."[1253] Jerome knew of a woman who had married her twenty-third husband, she being his twenty-first wife.[1254] Seneca said that the women reckoned the years by their husbands, not by the consuls.[1255] The women got equality by leveling downwards. "The new woman of Juvenal boldly claims a vicious freedom equal to her husband's."[1256] These cases belong to the degeneration of the mores at the period. As they are astonishing, we are in danger of giving them too much force in the notion we form of the mores of that time. All the writers repeat them. "In the Agricola, and in Seneca's letters to Marcia and Helvia, we can see that, even at the darkest hour, there were homes with an atmosphere of old Roman self-restraint and sobriety, where good women wielded a powerful influence over their husbands and sons, and where the examples of the old republic were used, as Biblical characters with us, to fortify virtue."[1257]
392. Rabbis on divorce. The school of the Rabbi Shammai said, "A man must not repudiate his wife unless he find in her actual immodesty." Rabbi Jochanan said, "Repudiation is an odious thing." Rabbi Eliezer said, "When a first wife is put away the very altar sheds tears."[1258]
393. The early Roman mores about marriage were very rigid and pitiless. It was in the family, and therefore under the control of the head of the family. No law forbade divorce, because such a law would have been an invasion of the authority of the male head of the family, but the censors, in the name of public opinion, long prevented any frivolous dissolution of marriage. Few divorces occurred, and then only for weighty reason, after the family council had found them sufficient. There was some stain attaching to a second marriage, after the death of the first spouse. Even men were subject to this stain.[1259]