Chapter IX: Sex Mores (2)

+376. Hindoo models and ideals.+ In the Mahabharata, the heroic poem of Brahminism dating from about the beginning of the Christian era, much attention is given to beauty and love. Many marriages are made for love, which is regarded as the best motive. A love relation needed the approval of the girl's parents, otherwise it ran down to the _gandharva_ form. A hero, who abducted a girl for his brother, released her when she pleaded that she loved another to whom she had given her promise, although her father did not yet know it. The favored lover renounced her on account of the abduction, but she said that she would never choose another. "Whether he lives long or only a short time, whether he is rich in virtue or poor, the husband is chosen once for all. When once the heart has decided and the word has been spoken, let the thing be done."[1205] These words are now regarded in Hindostan as the completest and noblest possible expression of marriage and the woman's attitude to it. A model wife in the heroic period was amiable to all, and made herself beloved by politeness and friendliness, and by her virtue and proper behavior. She gave great attention to her parents-in-law. She was reserved in speech and submissive, and she charmed her husband by her grace, wit, and tenderness.[1206] The Mahabharata contains episodes of strong devotion of men to their wives and of heroic self-sacrifice of wives for their husbands. In Hindostan now the relations of husband and wife are not mutual. The man's mother must always be the first to him. "This is in full accordance with the national sentiment which stigmatizes affection which asks for equal return as shop-keeping."[1207] "Who talks of vulgar equality," asks the Hindoo wife, "when she may instead have the unspeakable blessedness of offering worship."[1208]

+377. Slavonic sex mores.+ The southern Slavs and people of the Caucasus have allowed their sex mores to run into some extreme forms which to outsiders seem vicious. Young married women contract a very intimate relation to their bride attendants, of whom two attend a bride on her wedding day. She is but a girl, and is given to a man whom she never saw before, does not like, and never can like; she comes into a strange house where it is of the first importance for the rest of her life that she shall please her parents-in-law by the greatest humility and submission; she is forbidden by custom to approach her husband freely; she scarcely sees him during the day; yet she may freely converse with his brothers, who were her bride attendants. The elder one, if he is married, and if he is polite to her, becomes her best friend. An Albanian who has been away at work will not bring back a gift for his wife. He shows more attention to the wife of his elder brother. The Servian bride is ashamed of her marital relation, and thinks it indecent to address her husband in public, even after she has borne him children. He remains a stranger to her, and her relation to him is scarcely more than that of sex. Her brother she loves beyond any other. She will mourn for him with the deepest sorrow, but it would be a shame for a woman to mourn for her husband, much more for a bride to mourn for her bridegroom. In former times it was improper for a man to begin conjugal life immediately after marriage. The bride attendants, brothers of the groom, spent the first night by the side of the bride, and for the next three nights the mother or sister of the groom slept with the bride. The groom is reluctant. A Servian woman is derided if she has a child within a year after marriage. In some districts sex morality is very high, in others very low. In Carinthia it is worst. There, in the Gurkthal, the illegitimate births are twice as numerous as the legitimate, so that the marriage institution hardly exists. In Slavonic Croatia persons who marry are indifferent to each other's previous conduct with others. Amongst other southern Slavs, at a wedding, the groom must neither talk nor eat, out of shame, and the bride must weep while being dressed. It is reported from Bocca di Cattaro, in the Balkan peninsula, that public contempt is so severe against illicit acts by men before marriage that such acts are very rare amongst those who have any reputation or position to lose.[1209]

+378. Russian sex mores.+ A custom widely prevalent through parts of Great Russia and the adjacent Slavonic regions, until the nineteenth century, was that the father married his son, as a boy, to a marriageable young woman, whom the father then took as his own concubine. When the son grew up his wife was advanced in life and the mother of several children. He then did what his father had done. The large house and joint family offered temptation to this custom, and has generally been believed to be to blame for it. Rhamm contradicts that opinion.[1210] The same custom existed amongst the Bulgarians.[1211] Another motive for it is suggested, that the father wanted to increase the number of laborers in the big house. In 1623, in Poland, the death penalty was provided for a man who should so abuse his daughter-in-law. [1212] The same custom is reported from the Tamils of southeast India.[1213] In the mountains on the southwestern frontier of Russia there was, in the eighteenth century, an almost entire lack of sex mores. Amongst all the Slavonic peoples females are in a very inferior status and owe formal deference to males. In Bulgaria the wives are from five to ten years older than the husbands, because boys of fourteen begin to make love, but to adult marriageable women.[1214] All these facts make it a phenomenon worthy of special mention that the people of the Ukrain are very continent, cherish a high ideal of love between the sexes, and greatly dislike all improprieties in language and conversation.[1215] The popular Russian wedding songs are sad. The bride is addressed as a happy child, free in her father's house, with a sad future before her, of which she is blissfully ignorant.[1216] In Karelia "a bride radiant with happiness is an unknown sight. With the betrothal begins the time of tears, which lasts until the marriage feast in the house of the bridegroom. Even if she is happy and contented the mores require that she shall shed tears and affect sadness."[1217] The "wailer" is a functionary in a Russian village. She teaches the bride to bewail the loss of her "maiden freedom."[1218]

+379. Tribes of the Caucasus and Sahara.+ The Cherkess of the Caucasus live in big houses, in a joint family, under the authority of a patriarch. Wives were bought or captured in common, but so many as the men. Darinsky thinks that those who could, and wanted to, buy separate wives threatened the arrangement. Hence the men, in a body, opposed monogamic unions. Such unions were a crime against the crowd. Hence the customs arose which are now prevalent,--the concealment of all marital relations, the public ignoring of each other by the spouses, and the practical jokes and horseplay at weddings by boys and neighbors. It is a survival of old manifestations of opposition and disapproval.[1219] The men of the tribes in Sahara are often absent for days together. This gives the women liberty. The men begrudge this and punish the women for assumed infidelity. Some of the women are famous prostitutes.[1220]

+380. Mediæval sex mores.+ The mediæval sex mores were produced out of two opposite currents of thought,--that women were evil and dangerous and to be shunned, and that women were lovely and adorable, and worthy of reverence and worship. Both of these sets of ideas degenerated into folly and vice, and became modes of selfishness and luxury. Elaborate hypocrisy and insincerity became common. Technical definitions of terms were used to obscure their ethical significance. _Minne_ came to have a bad meaning and was used for erotic passion. _Courtoisie_ became a term for base solicitation.[1221] Gower, in the _Vox Clamantis_ (1382), tried to distinguish and specify sensual love. He inclines to the monkish view of women, but he describes good and noble women. Alanus ab Insulis ([Symbol: cross] 1203) in his _De Planctu Naturae_[1222] bewailed the vices of mankind and the vicious relations of men and women. His aim is to distinguish between good and evil love. He wrote at the height of the woman cult. In the _Romaunt de la Rose_ the thing discussed seems to be positive vice. It is said that the way to win women is by lavish gifts. The meretriciousness of women and their love of luxury are denounced. If a marriage turns out badly, the men say that God made it, but God is good, and evil is due to man.[1223] In the _Paston Letters_ (fifteenth century) marriage appears to be entirely mercenary.[1224] A girl tells her lover what her father will give with her. If he is not satisfied he must discontinue his suit.[1225] "My master asked mockingly if a man might not beat his own wife."[1226] The one love match in the book is that of Margaret Paston with a man who was a servant in the family. Margaret's mother, the most interesting person in the _Letters_, although she left £20 to her grandson by this marriage, left nothing to her daughter. Schultz[1227] thinks that marriages turned out as well in the Middle Ages as now, and that adultery was no more frequent; also that ecclesiastics were not then more licentious than now. He quotes freely from Geiler and Murner, who were leading moral preachers of the fifteenth century. Geiler preached in Strasburg Cathedral. Murner was a Franciscan. Geiler is incredibly coarse and outspoken. He pretended to state cases within his knowledge of men who made gain of their wives, and of wives who entered into arrangements with their husbands to make gain for both. He preached from these as illustrative cases and tried to dissuade both men and women from matrimony.[1228] Chateau life was monotonous and stupid, especially for women, who were moreover partly secluded in special apartments. The young men and women had very little chance to meet. The hope of happiness for women was in marriage.[1229] Although the woman's consent was necessary, she was controlled by her male relatives, even if a widow, but she had little individuality and generally welcomed a suitor at once.[1230] The jongleurs of the twelfth century were vulgar vagabonds. Love, in their conception, is sensual, and women are treated by them with great levity. The women, in their songs, woo the men. In the thirteenth century women are described as more dignified and self-respecting. Siegfried flogged his wife black and blue.[1231] Brunhild was also beaten by her husband. The women manifest great devotion to their husbands, especially in adversity, even fighting for them like men.[1232] We are constantly shocked at the bad taste of behavior. At Lubeck, if a young widow was married, the crowd made an uproar in front of the house and the bridegroom was forced to stand at show on a certain four-cornered stone in the midst of noisy music "in order to establish the good name of himself and wife."[1233] The carnival was an occasion of license for all the grossness and obscenity in the popular taste.[1234] The woman cult was a cult of free love and was hostile to honorable marriage. Even in the twelfth century there were complaints of corruption by bad literature. The nobles and knights degenerated in the crusades and in the Italian wars of the Hohenstaufen.[1235] "The doctrine of the church appeared to be a support of the family, but it was not such. On the contrary, the bonds of the family were more loosened than strengthened by the ascetic-hierarchical religiosity of the church."[1236] Dulaure[1237] quotes Gerson and Nicolas de Clemangis that convents in the fifteenth century were places of debauch. Geiler, in a sermon in Strasburg Cathedral, gave a shocking description of convents.[1238] A convent is described as a brothel for neighboring nobles.[1239] At the end of the fifteenth century the revolt and change in the mores which produced the Protestant schism caused the social confusion on which Janssen lays such stress in his seventh and eighth volumes. It was a case of revolution. The old mores broke down and new ones were not yet formed. The Protestants of the sixteenth century derided and denounced the Roman Catholics for the contradictions and falsehoods of celibacy, and the Catholics used against the Protestants the looseness as to marriage. Both were right.

+381. The standard of the "good wife." Pair marriage.+ It is safe to believe that if any woman ever entered into a marriage which was not repugnant to her she entered it with a determination to be a "good wife." Her education under the mores of the society around her gave her the notion and standard of a good wife. The modern sentiments of love and conjugal affection have been produced in the middle class. They probably have their roots in the mores of the bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages and in those of the lowest class of free people in the Greco-Roman empire. This middle class is the class which has taken control of modern society, and whose interests are most favored by modern economic developments. They have set aside the old ideas of male dominion and of ascetic purity. In the middle of the nineteenth century the poems of Coventry Patmore and the novels of Anthony Trollope perhaps best expressed the notions of conjugal affection which English-speaking people entertained at that time. It seems that now those notions are thought to be philistine, and there is a reaction towards the old aristocratic standards. The "good husband," as correlative to the good wife, belongs to modern pair marriage. The erotic element has been refined and suppressed, or at least disavowed. The ideals which have been accepted and favored have disciplined and concentrated masculine waywardness, and they have made the sex sentiments more durable. All this has integrated the family more firmly, and the family mores have cultivated and preserved the sentiments. We have seen many cases in which, out of the unconscious and unpremeditated action of the mores, results have been produced which have been most important for the weal or woe of men, but it is one of the most marvelous of these cases that conjugal affection, perhaps the noblest of all sentiments, should have been developed out of the monopolistic tyranny of men over women, and out of the ascetic negation of sex, the common element in which is a prurient and unhealthy sensuality.

+382. "One flesh."+ The notion or figure of "one flesh" is not peculiar to the Jewish or Christian religion. In the Old Testament it clearly refers to carnal union. It has been used to express the ideal that marriage should be the fusion of two lives and interests. It is instructive to notice, in all the discussions of marriage which are to be found in all ages, how few and commonplace are the things which have been said, and how largely refuge has been taken in figures of speech. "One flesh," if not carnal, is only ritual, but ritual conceptions are only conventional conceptions,--good amongst those who agree to repeat the formulas and perform the ritual acts. They are not realities. The problem of marriage is that two human beings try to live together. They are two and not one. Since they are two, their tastes, desires, characters, and wills are two. Ethical philosophers or jurists may be able to define the "one-flesh" idea by translating it into rights and duties, but no state authority can enforce such a definition. Therefore it is nugatory. The idea belongs in an arena beyond state or family, where two make a world. It is beyond the mores also, except so far as the mores have educated the man and woman to a sense of the conduct which is necessary to marital harmony, by the judgments which are current on the hundreds of cases, real or imaginary, which come up for discussion. How then shall two wills be one will? The old way was that one will (the woman's) always was bound to yield. Since that no longer seems right, the modern way is endless discussion, a defeat for one, and all the inevitable consequences in daily experience and effect on character.

+383. Pair marriage.+ Pair marriage is the union of one man and one woman in which all the rights, duties, powers, and privileges are equal and alike for both, the relationship being mutual and reciprocal in all points. It therefore produces a complete fusion of two lives and interests. Pair marriage and all its attendant mores are products of monopoly. Herodotus[1240] says of the Agathyrsi that they practiced communalism of women in order that they might all be brethren, without envy or enmity to each other. That is one solution. In it peace and harmony are given a higher place than sex interests. Pair marriage aims at the highest satisfaction of sex interests by monopoly. It sacrifices peace and harmony. Any monopoly exists for the benefit of those who are embraced in it. Its evil effects are to be found by turning to those who fail to get entrance to it. While our mores now require that a man and woman shall come together through love, and therefore make a selection of the most special and exclusive kind, we have no apparatus or intelligent method for making such a selection. The notion that such a selection is necessary, therefore, adds a new difficulty and obstacle. Pair marriage also, partly on account of the intenser sentiment of parenthood and the more integrated family institution, increases expense, and makes the economic conditions of marriage more severe. Pair marriage forces a large fraction of the population to celibacy, and it is they who are the excluded who suffer by that arrangement. This bears chiefly on women. Everything which violates the taboo in the mores is vice, and is disastrous to all who participate in it. The more real pair marriage is, the more disastrous is every illicit relation. The harm is infinitely greater for women than for men. Within the taboo, unmarried women lead aimless existences, or they are absorbed in an effort to earn a living which is harassed by especial obstacles and difficulties. This is the price which has to be paid for all the gain which women get from pair marriage as compared with any other form of sex relation. It assumes that every man and woman can find a mate, which is not true. Very little serious attention is paid to this offset to the advantages of pair marriage. The mores teach unmarried women that it is "right" that things should be so, and that any other arrangement would contain abominations which are not to be thought of. Probably the unmarried women rarely think of themselves as victims of the arrangement by which their married sisters profit. They accept a life career which is destitute of self-realization, except for those few who are so gifted that they can make independent careers in the struggle for existence. Nearly all our discussions of our own social order run upon questions of property. It is under the sex relation that all the great problems really present themselves.

+384. Marriage in modern mores.+ It is very remarkable that marriage amongst us has become the most distinct example there is, and the most widespread, of ritual (what is said in the marriage ceremony, in its rational sense, is of little importance, and people rarely notice it. What force attaches to "obey"?), of religious intervention in private affairs, and of the importance attached to a ceremony. If two people cohabit, the question of right and wrong depends on whether they have passed through a certain ceremony together or not. That determines whether they are "married" or not. The reason is, because if they have passed through the ceremony together, no matter what was said or done, they have expressed their will to come into the status of wedlock, as the mores make it and as the state enforces it, at the time and place. The woman wants to "feel that she is married." Very many women would not feel so in a civil marriage; others want a "fully choral" ceremony; others want the communion with the wedding ceremony. Perhaps the daughter of a great nobleman might not feel married without a marriage settlement. Thus the active effect of the mores may be observed in contemporary custom, and it is seen how completely the notion of being duly married is produced by the mores of the society, or of a class or sect in it.

+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]

+394. Pair marriage and divorce.+ With the rise of pair marriage came divorce for the woman, upon due reason, as much as for the man. Hence freer divorce goes with pair marriage. Such must inevitably be the case, if it be admitted that any due reason for divorce ever can exist. The more poetical and elevated the ideas are which are clustered around marriage, the more probable it is that experience will produce disappointment. If one spouse enters wedlock with the belief that the other is the most superlative man or woman living, the cases must be very few in which disappointment and disillusion will not result. Moreover, pair marriage, by its exclusiveness, risks the happiness of the parties on a very narrow and specific condition of life. The coercion of this arrangement for many persons must become intolerable.

In the ancient German law there was absolute freedom of divorce by agreement. The pair could end the relation just as they formed it. In the laws of the German nations there was little provision for divorce upon the complaint of the woman. The law of the Langobards allowed it to her for serious bodily injury.[1260]

+395. Divorce in the Middle Ages.+ It is pretended that the mediæval church allowed no divorce. This is utterly untrue. Under the influence of asceticism the church put marriage under more and more arbitrary restrictions, going far beyond any rules to be found in the Scriptures, or in the usages of the early church. Divorce was made more and more difficult. These two tendencies contradicted each other, for the greater the restrictions on marriage, the greater the probability that any marriage would be found to have violated one of them, and therefore to be _ab initio_ void. This set it aside more absolutely than any divorce _a vinculo_ could undo it. Also, when there was an ample apparatus of dispensation by which the rich and great could have their marriages dissolved, by the use of money or political power, the "law of the church" was no law. Still further, the mediæval church, while it had a doctrine of perfection and ideality for marriage, had also a practical system of concession to human weakness, by which it could meet cases of unhappy marriage. In the canon law, divorce and remarriage of the innocent party has been allowed to the man, in case of adultery, physical incapacity, leprosy, desertion, captivity, disappearance, and conspiracy to murder the husband, on the part of the wife; and to the wife, when the husband's misconduct rendered living with him impossible. However, a dispensation from the ecclesiastical authority was required.[1261]

+396.+ The point of this is that no society ever has existed or ever can exist in which no divorce is allowed. In all stages of the father family it has been possible for a man to turn his wife out of doors, and for a wife to run away from her husband. They divorce themselves when they have determined that they want to do so. It would be an easy solution of marriage problems to assert that the society will use its force to compel all spouses who disagree, or for whom the marriage relation has become impossible through the course of events, nevertheless to continue to live in wedlock. Such a rule would produce endless misery, shame, and sin. There are reasons for divorce. Adultery is recognized as such a reason in the New Testament. It is a rational reason, especially under pair marriage. There are other rational reasons. Some of them are modern forms of the reasons allowed in the canon law, as above cited. The exegesis of the New Testament is not simple. It does not produce a simple and consistent doctrine, and therefore inference and deduction have been applied to it. 2 Cor. vi. 14 contradicts 1 Cor. vii. 12. The mores decide at last what causes shall be sufficient. The laws in the United States once went very far in an attempt to satisfy complaining married people. They were no better satisfied at last than at first. Scandalous cases produced a conviction that "we have gone too far," and the present tendency is to revoke certain concessions. The fact that a divorce has been legally obtained does not satisfy some former friends of the divorced so that they will continue social intimacy. A code grows up to fit the facts. Sects help to make such codes. Perhaps they make a code which is too stringent. The members of the sect do not live by it. They seek remarriage in other, less scrupulous sects, or by civil authority, or they change domicile in order to get a divorce. Thus the mores control. When the law of the state or of ecclesiastical bodies goes with the mores it prevails; when it departs from the mores it fails. The mores are also sure to act in regard to a matter which presents itself in a large class of cases, and which calls for social and ethical judgments. At last, comprehensive popular judgments will be formed and they will get into legislation. They will adjust interests so that people can pursue self-realization with success and satisfaction, under social judgments as to the rules necessary to preserve the institutions of wedlock and the family. The pursuit of happiness, either in the acquisition of property or in the enjoyment of family life, is only possible in submission to laws which define social order, rights, and duties, and against which the individual must react at every point. It is the mores which constantly revise and readjust the laws of social order, and so define the social conditions within which self-realization must go on.

+397. Refusal of remarriage.+ The laws of every State in the United States, except South Carolina, allow marriage by a minister of religion or by magistrates. This does not mean that the legislatures meant to endow ministers of religion with authority to say who may marry and who may not. Ministers who agree not to marry divorced persons assume authority which does not belong to them. In England, with an established church, the fact has recently been ascertained that a clergyman cannot refuse to marry persons who may marry by the civil law as it stands. With us the number of sects and denominations is such that no hardship arises if one sect chooses to adopt stricter laws for the sake of making a demonstration or exercising educational influence, and decides to run the risk of driving its own members to other sects. What the next result of such action will be remains to be learned.

+398. Child marriage.+ Child marriage illustrates a number of points in regard to the mores, especially the possibility of perversity and aberration. Wilutzky[1262] thinks that child marriage amongst savages began in the desire of a man to get a wife to himself (monandry) out of the primitive communalism, without violating the customs of ancestors. Girls of ten or twelve years are married to men of twenty-five or thirty on the New Britain Islands. The missionary says, "The result of such an early union, for the girl, has been dreadful."[1263] On Malekula girls are married at six or eight.[1264] Similar cases are reported from Central and South America where girls of ten are mothers.[1265] Rohlfs reports mothers of ten or twelve at Fesan.[1266] The Eskimo practice child betrothal, so that wedlock begins at once at puberty.[1267] Schwaner reports,[1268] from the Barito Valley, that children are often betrothed and married by the fathers when the latter are intoxicated. The motives of the match are birth, kinship, property, and social position, and the marriage is hastened, lest the parents should see their plans to satisfy these motives frustrated by the children if they should delay. The intimacy of the children is left to chance. Wilken says that child marriage seems to be, in the Dutch East Indies, an exercise of absolute paternal authority, especially seeing that they have marriage by capture. The father wants to secure, in time, the realization of plans which he has made. Especially, the purpose is to make the man take the status-wife appointed for him by the marriage rule,--his mother's brother's daughter. Wilken also explains child betrothal and marriage by the fact that girls have entire liberty until betrothed, and the future husband wants to put an end to this. Girls are often betrothed at birth and married at six, although they remain with their parents. In some parts of the East Indies the custom is declining; in others it is extinct. In some places it continues, although marriage by capture is extinct. Where marriage by capture exists, the reason for child marriage is the fear that the girl may be stolen by another than the desired husband.[1269]

+399. Child marriage in Hindostan.+ By the laws of Manu[1270] a man may give his daughter in marriage before she is eight years old to a man of twenty-four, or a girl of twelve to a man of thirty, and he loses his dominion over her if he has not found a husband for her by the time that she might be a mother; yet intercourse before puberty is especially forbidden.[1271] The Hindoos, including Mohammedans, practice child marriage and cling to it, in spite of the efforts of the English to dissuade them from it, and in spite of the opinion of their own most enlightened men that it is a harmful custom. It is deeply rooted in their mores. The modern Hindoo father or brother considers it one of the gravest faults he can commit to allow a daughter or sister to arrive at puberty (generally eight years) before a husband has been found for her. It is a disgrace for a family to have in it an unmarried marriageable girl. What is proper is that, from five to sixteen days after puberty, the previously married husband shall beget with her a child in a solemn ceremonial which is one of the twelve (or sixteen) sacraments of Hindoo life.[1272] The idea of child marriage was that the woman should be already married to her chosen husband, so that she might be given to him at the proper time.[1273] Moreover, "marriage completes, for the man, the regenerating ceremonies, expiatory, as is believed, of the sinful taint which every child is supposed to contract in the mother's womb; and being, for sudras and for women, the only [ceremony for this purpose] which is allowed, its obligatoriness is, as to the latter, one of the ordinances of the Veda."[1274]

+400.+ The wife of the missionary Gehring was present at the marriage of a girl of ten to an adult man amongst the Tamil Mohammedans. The story of the child's shrinking terror is very pathetic. When her veil was withdrawn she fainted from nervousness and excitement. Those present showed no pity for her, but crowded around to enjoy the opportunity of gazing at her. They saw no reason why she was to be pitied.[1275]

+401.+ If a girl has had no husband provided for her by her responsible male relative, she may act for herself, but then she forfeits her share in the family property. She may be abducted with impunity. In Manu[1276] it is said that three years must elapse before she gets the right of self-disposition. The right is long since a dead letter. The "Law of Manu" can lose its authority where it is favorable to women! or when it runs counter to the mores, for Hindoo women have no training to take up self-disposition, if the case occurs.[1277] Female virtue is rated low, and must be secured by marriage. Independent action by a boy and girl is against the mores and could only lead to inferior forms of marriage, by love or capture.[1278] Finally, religion bears its share in furnishing motives for child marriage. The souls of ancestors cannot stay in heaven unless there are male descendants to keep up the sacrifices. It is, therefore, impossible to provide male descendants too soon. Among the Tamil-speaking Malaialis of the Kollimallais hills a man takes an adult wife for his little son, and with her he begets a son who will perform this religious duty for himself and his son. This goes on from generation to generation.[1279]

+402.+ Nevertheless, it is held to be proved that in ancient India child marriages were unknown and that women were often far beyond puberty before they were married. The human husband was also held to be the fourth. Three gods had preceded him in each case.[1280] The custom of child marriage has now spread to the lowest classes, and in the lowlands of the Ganges cohabitation follows at once upon child marriage, with very evil results on the physique of the population.[1281]

There was child marriage in Chaldea 2200 years B.C.[1282]

+403. Child marriage in Europe.+ The marriage of children was not in the mores of the ancient Germans. The mediæval church allowed child marriage for princes, etc. The motive was political alliance, or family or property interest.[1283] The fable was that Joseph was an old man and the Virgin Mary only a girl. This story was invented to make the notion of a virgin wife and mother easier. The marriage was only a child marriage. In England, from the end of the thirteenth to late in the seventeenth century, cases of child marriage occurred, at first in the highest classes, later in all classes, and finally most frequently in the highest and lowest classes. In Scotland premature marriages were so common that, in 1600, they were forbidden, the limits being set at fourteen and twelve years for males and females respectively. The chief motive was to avoid feudal dues on the part of tenants in chief of the crown, if the father should die and leave infants who would become wards liable to forced marriages or to mulcts to avoid the same.[1284]

+404.+ Child marriage is due, then, to the predominance of worldly considerations in marriage, especially when the interests considered are those of the parents, not of the children; also to abuse of parental authority through vanity and self-will; also to superstitious notions about the other world and the interests of the dead there; also to attempts, in the interest of the children, to avoid the evil consequences of other bad social arrangements.

+405. Cloistering.+ The custom of cloistering women has spread, within historic times, from some point in central Asia. The laws of Hammurabi show that, 2200 years B.C., men and women, in the Euphrates Valley, consorted freely and equally in life. Later, in the Euphrates Valley, we find the custom of cloistering amongst the highest classes. It became more and more vigorous amongst the Persians and spread to the common people. It was not an original custom of the Arabs and was not introduced by the Mohammedan religion. It was learned and assumed from the Persians.[1285] Seclusion of women, to a greater or less degree, has prevailed in the mores of many nations. In fact, there is only a question of degree between an excessive harem system and our own code of propriety which lays restraints on women to which men are not subject. The most probable explanation of the customs of veiling and cloistering is that they are due to the superstition of the evil eye. Pretty women attracted admiration, which was dangerous, as all prosperity, glory, and preëminence were dangerous under that notion. When _pretty_ women were veiled or secluded, the custom was sure to spread to others. The wives and daughters of the rich and great were secluded in order to shield them from easy approach, and to pet and protect them. This set the fashion which lesser people imitated so far as they could. The tyranny of husbands and fathers also came into play, and another force acting in the same direction was the seduction exerted on women themselves by the flattering sense of being cared for and petted. Lane[1286] tells us that "an Egyptian wife who is attached to her husband is apt to think, if he allows her unusual liberty, that he neglects her, and does not sufficiently love her; and to envy those wives who are kept and watched with greater strictness." "They look on the restraint [imposed by husbands] with a degree of pride, as evincing the husband's care for them, and value themselves on being hidden as treasures." Women who earn their own living have to go into the streets and the market and to come in contact with much from which other classes of women are protected. The protected position is aristocratic, and it is consonant with especial feminine tastes. The willingness to fall into it has always greatly affected the status of women.

+406. Second marriages. Widows.+ Second marriages affect very few people beyond those immediately concerned, and they are not connected with any social principle or institution so as to create what is sometimes called a "societal interest," unless there is current in the society some special notion about ghosts and the other world. Nevertheless, the bystanders have, until very recent times, pretended to a right to pass judgment and exert an influence on the remarriage of widows, and less frequently of widowers. The story of the status of widows is one of the saddest in the history of civilization. In uncivilized society a widow is considered dangerous because the ghost of her husband is supposed to cleave to her. Under marriage by capture or purchase she is the property of her husband, and, like his other property, ought to accompany him to the other world. When she is spared she has no rational place in the society; therefore widows were a problem which the mores had to solve. In no other case have societies shown so much indifference to misfortune and innocent misery. If a widow has value for any purpose, she falls to the heir and he may exploit her. On the Fiji Islands a wife was strangled on her husband's grave and buried with him. A god lies in wait on the road to the other world who is implacable to the unmarried. Therefore a man's ghost must be attended by a woman's ghost to pass in safety.[1287] Mongol widows could find no second husbands, because they would have to serve their first husbands in the next world. The youngest son inherited the household and was bound to provide for his father's widows. He could take to wife any of them except his own mother, and he did so because he was willing that they should go to his father in the next world.[1288] In the laws of Hammurabi the widow was secured a share in her husband's property and was protected against the selfishness of her sons. If she gave up to her sons what she had received from her husband, she could keep what her father gave her and could marry again. In later Chaldea annuities were provided for widows by payments to temples.[1289] In the Mahabharata the morning salutation to a woman is, "May you not undergo the lot of a widow."[1290]