Part 5 (1/2)
Inspired by the thirst for further invasions, the male gradually acquired not only one, but many wives, which const.i.tuted his ”possessions,” from the fact that he had earned them by right of conquest, conquest being not only the savage but also the civilized idea of ”earning.”
Indeed, our modern marriages reveal a degree of savagery in this respect, which is not suspected by the casual observer. The almost general observance of what has come to be known in legal jurisprudence as ”the unwritten law,” which permits a man to go unpunished when he kills another man whom he believes to have been on terms of intimacy with his wife, is a tacit admission of a man's vested rights in his wife's person.
In innumerable instances, which have been given world-wide publicity within very recent times, the man who has been guilty of homicide under these circ.u.mstances has been exalted to the plane of a martyr-hero, and one woman writer, whose hysterical effusions are given considerable s.p.a.ce in the public print, defended a man who had taken advantage of this ”unwritten law” to shoot his rival, in the following words: ”You, Mister, would shoot a man whom you found prowling through your house with the intention of stealing your silver; your jewelry; your property of whatever kind or value. How much more, then, should you guard the honor of your wife, from these pestilential marauders?”
Of course we question the right of human beings to kill each other in defense of mere property; but that is not the point here. The inference here is obvious that this woman, who represents at least the average degree of intelligence, placed her s.e.x in the category of man's possessions, utterly ignoring the woman's right, or power of free-will.
Mention is here made of this incident to show how deeply rooted is the possessive idea of marriage, which had its origin in nothing more ideal than the animal instinct of the dog with the bone.
Nor would we give the impression that this one-sided idea of what const.i.tutes a monogamous marriage is confined to the male. The same idea of possession as of a piece of property, representing so much investment of time and money, and service of one kind or another, actuates the female also although the rights of the woman in the male are not so generally defended and she seldom resorts to such violent methods of defense or of revenge for loss of her property. Perhaps she has a keener sense of values. Necessity has subst.i.tuted ”support” for ”outraged honor,” and modern woman avenges the loss of her possessions through the safer channels of the law-courts.
The feeling of possession, so ingrained in human nature, and so much a part of our modern marriage relation, is not grounded upon a moral code, which has for its basic principle fidelity to one's partner.
This is proven by the fact that men have for some time abrogated to themselves the right of promiscuity, the main clause of their defense being that their conduct does not deprive their wife and family of satisfactory maintenance. Many a woman today, irreproachably respectable and church-going, will admit to herself if not to her neighbors, that she closes her eyes to her husband's laxity in s.e.xual matters, ”as long as he provides well for me.”
When we come, as we will later, to a consideration of what const.i.tutes morality, we will see that, like all our evolving ideals, it is governed by immediate conditions, both individual and social.
It is easy to see why polygamy has been practiced, as a necessary expedient, and why women have been held so cheaply, when we realize the centuries of devastating wars, both of conquest and of defense, which besmirch the path of Evolution.
Thus the tendency to aesthetic selection, always more p.r.o.nounced in the female than in the male, has been swallowed up in the false valuation put upon the male, because of his relative scarcity.
In America, in the early sixties, fear of the epithet ”old maid” drove many a woman to marriage with a man whom, personally, she did not like, but as he represented a more or less ”rara avis” and as her claim to attractiveness rested upon her success in trapping this rare bird, she permitted herself to become a victim of conditions; and we may safely conclude that no higher motive actuated the average woman of the last century than that of submission to conditions, for the ”virtues of fidelity and devotion to the home and fireside” which critics of present-day morals are fond of reminding us characterized our grandmothers.
Briefly, then, we may review the history of marriage and of mating, everywhere, and at all times, as variable, controlled by expediency; and always based on the egoistic idea of possession, expressed by the right of the parents to dispose of their children; the right by capture; the right by purchase; and the right by consent.
One or all of these customs have been tried in various parts of the world and at various times, and seldom has the condition of woman approached even so enviable a place as that of the female animal, except in the comparatively short periods when women have been the gens of the family.
These periods have become more and more infrequent, until the legal status of women has been, as it is now, no more than what the evolving consciousness of the male permitted to her.
It is a question whether, under our pretended monogamy, which is, per se, a more ideal condition than polygamy, all women have been either better conditioned or more moral. The answer depends largely upon our idea of what const.i.tutes morality. Certainly, the condition of women in Christian countries has been, and is now, far from ideal; which would, judging from surface appearances, indicate that monogamy, as it has been practiced in the past, served only as an ideal, and at best has been of first aid to the male, primarily because of a question of personal health and cleanliness; secondly, as a means of developing in him the latent qualities of altruism, manifested selfishly enough at first in protecting his possessions; among which he egotistically conceded _his children at least_ first place; although the wife was hardly more than a convenience and an incubator.
Of the conditions that have prevailed under the monogamous custom and among the so-called superior races, Letourneau, in his _Evolution of the Family_, says: ”The Hebrews seem to have been alone, among the Semites, in adopting monogamy, at least in general practice. Doubtless the subjection of the Jewish woman was not extreme as it is in Kabyle; it was, however, very great. Her consent to marriage, it is true, was necessary when she had reached majority, but she was all the same sold to her husband. We find hardly more than the portrait of a laborious servant, busy and grasping. We shall see that the wife, though she might gain much money, which seems to have been the ideal of the Hebrew, according to the Proverbs, was repudiable at will, with no other reason than the caprice of the master who had bought her.
Finally, and this is much more severe, she was always obliged to be able to prove, _cloths in hand_, that she was a virgin at the moment of her marriage, and this under pain of being stoned.”
The same state of affairs or worse existed in India and in Persia, although in Persia there seems to have been an attempt to enjoin the same fidelity upon the husband as upon the wife, according to the Zend-Avesta; the only severe restriction to marriage being that neither should marry an infidel. In India, where there has been for centuries an alleged monogamy (except among the privileged cla.s.ses, where concubinage held sway), the ethical condition of the women has been, and still is, deplorable.
In ancient Greece and Rome the position of the woman was most inferior. She was generally purchased, or given for service. Her husband's word was law, and mothers were compelled to obey their male children as uncomplainingly as though they were slaves. The wife and mother was not permitted to attend festivities and neither was she allowed the selection of her friends, her husband deciding this choice for her.
This, of course, applied to the respectable, or so-called virtuous woman, which const.i.tuted the average. Then, as now, two cla.s.ses of women were to some extent exempt from this rigid custom. One cla.s.s was formed by those women whose wealth conferred upon them a degree of power, because the possessors of great wealth have always been a law unto themselves. The other cla.s.s was formed by the women who practiced prost.i.tution, and who, by reason of their mode of life, met men on terms of at least temporary social equality.
Thus it is evident that the path of the virtuous woman without the independence that accompanies the possession of her own money, was in ancient days much more th.o.r.n.y than that of the concubine or the prost.i.tute; and it is because of this fact that parental love, the most powerful of all levers employed by the Cosmic Law to lift love out of degradation, inst.i.tuted the custom of the ”dowry,” and although this, too, has at various times become a source of degradation, inspiring impoverished aristocrats to loveless marriages with so-called inferiors, yet it has after all been a factor in the evolution of women and the preservation of the races. It has served two purposes. It has made women, in theory at least, more independent; and it has resulted in an admixture of blood which has saved the aristocratic cla.s.s from extinction through decadence.
As might well be expected in those instances where women did enjoy a degree of liberty that was due to financial and social advantages, they took a mean delight in ruling it over their male relatives, and, as we may note in our own time, men who yielded to the seduction of wealth, and married women to whom they were forced to accord the freedom and the deference which wealth confers, complained bitterly of their lot; as witness the following complaint of a Roman husband: ”I have married a witch with a dowry; I took her to have her fields and houses, and that, O Apollo, is the worst of evils.”
One dominant idea controlled the status of marriage in early Greece and Rome--an idea in full accord with the materialistic phase of their civilization; this was the idea of procreation; an idea that logically was inevitable, since continuous warfare resulted in a population in which women predominated, and we are told that in the interest of procreation both childlessness and celibacy were severely punished.
Thus the situation of women was that best described by the phrase ”between the devil and the deep sea.”
Regarding the ”ideal of marital fidelity,” Plutarch is authority for the story that Cato loaned his wife to his friend Hortensius and took her back on the death of the latter, plus a rich inheritance from the transaction. However, should Martha have yielded herself voluntarily to Hortensius, from motives of affection, the chances are that she would have met death at the hands of her ”justly outraged” spouse.