The prevalence of wife-capture and the extent to which the symbol of force in marriage ceremonies appears among tribes and races in the various stages of development, have given rise to numerous speculations and theories relative to the origin of these “singular phenomena.” Notable among the works dealing with this subject are Primitive Marriage, by Mr. J.?F. McLennan, and the Origin of Civilization, by Sir John Lubbock, both of which works followed closely the publication of Das Mutter-recht by Herr Bachofen.
As at the time these works were published the fact of man’s descent from the lower orders of life had not been established, and as nothing was then known of the origin and development of organized society it is not remarkable that theories concerning the early relations of the sexes should prove worthless except perhaps to show the extent to which established prejudices may warp the judgment and dwarf the intellectual faculties even of those who are honestly seeking after truth.
The avowed object of Mr. McLennan’s volume216 was to trace the origin of wife-capture which is found to exist either as a legal symbol in marriage ceremonies, or as a stern reality among peoples which have not yet reached civilized conditions. This writer declares: “In the whole range of legal symbolism there is no symbol more remarkable than that of capture in marriage ceremonies.”
After setting forth numerous examples to prove the prevalence of wife-capture among uncivilized tribes and races, and after denouncing as absurd the theories relative to the symbol of force entering into the marriage ceremonies in Sparta and in Rome, Mr. McLennan observes:
The question now arises, what is the meaning and what the origin of a ceremony so widely spread that already on the threshold of our inquiry the reader must be prepared to find it connected with some universal tendency of mankind?
Mr. McLennan’s answer to his own query is as follows:
We believe the restriction on marriage to be connected with the practice in early times of female infanticide which rendering women scarce led at once to polyandry within the tribe and the capture of women from without.
In another portion of this work it has been shown that although marriage was restricted within the gens, the earliest form of organized society, this restriction did not extend to the217 tribe. Marriage was forbidden among closely related groups. The gentes coalesced to form the tribe. Although a man might not marry within his own gens, he was not forbidden to marry within the tribe.
In Mr. Morgan’s work on Primitive Society, published in 1871, are to be found the systems of consanguinity and affinity of 139 tribes and races representing, numerically, four-fifths of the entire human family. These systems show conclusively that the restrictions on marriage observed in the gens did not extend to the tribe. The author of Primitive Marriage has evidently mistaken a rule of the gens for a binding tribal decree.
Mr. McLennan’s theory relative to female infanticide is found to be equally fallacious. Noting the numerical difference in the two sexes among lower races, he says that as subsistence was scarce, and as war was the natural and constant condition of primitive groups, only those of their members would be spared who could contribute to the defence of the tribe, or who would be able to aid in the supply of subsistence. Males were possessed of strength, they were by organization and inclination adapted to war and the chase, and could therefore be depended upon to assist in defending the tribe against the assaults of its enemies and in securing the necessary food for its requirements. On the other hand, women being worthless in war and in the chase were regarded as useless appendages, and as they constituted a218 source of weakness to the tribe, large numbers of them were destroyed at birth. Through this practice the balance of the sexes was greatly disturbed, and wives could be obtained only by means of stealth or a resort to force. Thus in process of time, the stealing of women became a legitimate practice, and each warrior depended on his skill in this particular direction to provide himself with a wife.
Finally the children of these alien women began to intermarry and thus the necessity for wife-capture no longer existed, and the practice of stealing women for wives was superseded by a system through which wives from other tribes were habitually obtained either by gift or sale. Thereafter the symbol of wife-capture was retained in marriage ceremonies.
With a better understanding of peoples in a less developed state of society, it is found that infanticide has been less prevalent among them than was formerly supposed; that when through scarcity of food it has been practised it has not been confined to females, neither has it been carried on by tribes in the lowest stages of barbarism.
Regarding this custom in Arabia, Prof. W. R. Smith says that our authorities “seem to represent the practice of infanticide as having taken a new development not very long before the time of Mohammed.” This writer declares that the chief motive for infanticide was219 “scarcity of food which must always have been felt in the desert.”
Much has been written in the attempt to explain the practice of infanticide which to some extent seems to have prevailed during a certain stage of human development; but with the exception of those cases in which children of both sexes were slain because of scarcity of food, the one cause, namely, the dread of capture, is sufficient to explain this unnatural practice.
Although to a considerable extent, men had come to depend on foreign tribes for their wives, they nevertheless found little pleasure in furnishing their quota of women in return, and as mothers doubtless preferred the death of their female children to the degradation and suffering which was inevitable in case of capture, female infanticide no doubt seemed the wisest and in fact the only expedient.
The blood-tie of ancient society which bound together all those born of the women of the group irrespective of their fathers, must have emphasized the influence of mothers in the matter of infanticide. It is not reasonable to suppose that the law of sympathy which had united the members of a clan by a bond stronger than that which binds together the members of a modern family was reversed without some deeper cause than has thus far been assigned for it. It is indeed difficult to believe, in opposition to all the facts before us, that a practice which involved the destruction220 of the female members of the group would have gained the sanction of the tribe to such an extent that it would have become an established rule among them.
Regarding the destruction of female infants among early races, Mr. Darwin remarks:
They would not at that period have lost one of the strongest of all instincts common to all lower animals, namely the love of their young offspring, and consequently they would not have practised female infanticide.143
Another reason why female infanticide could not have prevailed to any considerable extent is seen in the fact that any diminution in the number of females, would have involved a scarcity of warriors, thus weakening their means of defence. From available facts it is quite evident that the practice of female infanticide throws no light on wife-capture.
Mr. McLennan declares that women among rude tribes are usually depraved and inured to scenes of depravity from their earliest infancy; hence when property began to amass in the hands of men, in order to assure paternity, it became necessary, that women be brought under subjection.
As the female, when free, is unwilling to pair with individuals for whom she feels no affection, and as under earlier conditions of human society women chose their mates, and so long as they221 remained together were true to them, it is reasonable to suppose that paternity was known, or at least that it might have been readily determined.
Mr. Morgan informs us that the “Turanian, Ganowánian, and Malayan systems of consanguinity show conclusively that kinship through males was recognized as constantly as kinship through females,” that a man had brothers and sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers traced through males as well as through females. Although under gentile institutions descent and all rights of succession were traced through mothers, kinship through fathers was easily ascertained.
Hence it is plain that Mr. McLennan’s assumption that women were enslaved in order to assure paternity, that they became subject to the dominion and control of men so that fathers might not be compelled to support children not their own, is not supported by the evidence at hand.
That it was through capture, the forcible carrying away of women at first singly and later in groups to foreign tribes, in which as aliens and dependents they were shorn of their right to the soil, that males were first enabled to arrogate to themselves the individual right to property is a fact which has been overlooked by Mr. McLennan.
From the facts at hand relative to the earliest social regulation of mankind, that into classes on the basis of sex, it is evident that it was inaugurated for no other purpose than the restriction of the marital relation—a restriction to prevent the222 pairing of near relations. Yet Mr. McLennan would have us believe that “the law compelling marriage outside the recognized limit of near relationship originated in no innate or primary feeling against marriage with kinsfolk.”
The repugnance of females among the lower orders of life to pairing with those individuals which were distasteful to them, or for which they felt no genuine affection, has already been referred to in these pages. At the earliest dawn of human life there probably existed within woman a naturally acquired aversion to pairing with near relations, yet doubtless many ages elapsed before an idea of kinship sufficiently definite to be incorporated into an arbitrary law for the government of the group was formulated; but in due course of time, with the further development of the higher characters, the idea of relationship began to take shape, whereupon was inaugurated a movement which doubtless represents one of the most important steps ever taken toward human advancement.
As the female among all the orders of life, when free, is unwilling to pair with individuals for which she feels no affection, and as the sex-instinct has ever been restricted or held in abeyance by her, and as according to the savants, it was through the efforts of women that from time to time during the earlier ages of human existence the range of conjugal rights was abridged, it is reasonable to suppose that it was woman who first objected to the pairing with near relations.
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The statement of Mr. McLennan that the women of primitive races were depraved, that they were inured to scenes of depravity from their earliest infancy is not borne out by facts. It has been shown in another portion of this work that the most trustworthy writers, those who have personally investigated tribes and races in the various stages of development, agree that chastity was an unvarying rule among them, that before they were corrupted by civilization, a condition of morals existed nowhere to be found among the so-called higher races.
After referring to a state of advanced social existence in which every person knowing what is right would feel an irresistible impulse toward right-living, Mr. Wallace remarks that among peoples low in the scale of development “we find some approaches to such a perfect social state.” He observes: “It is not too much to say that the mass of our population have not at all advanced beyond the savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it.”
Most of the reports which come to us regarding the immorality of lower races are brought by missionaries, who, although unacquainted with the language, customs, and habits of thought of the peoples whose countries they visit, nevertheless feel called upon to furnish lengthy reports of those benighted races which are “utterly destitute of Christian training.”
As the restrictions on marriage among early224 peoples were limited to closely related groups, it is evident that the capture of wives was not carried on because of any established law of exogamy, neither was it practised because of the scarcity of women resulting from female infanticide nor because of a desire for recognized paternity. Wife-capture arose from a demand for foreign women, aliens, who, torn from their homes and deprived of the protection of their own kinsfolk, had no alternative but sexual slavery. These women were much more desirable than the free-born women of a man’s own tribe.
After having created a false and wholly unwarrantable hypothesis, an hypothesis in which exogamy and endogamy, two principles which as applied to tribes never existed, play a conspicuous part, Mr. McLennan has thrust nearly all the facts which he has observed relative to primitive society into false positions and forced them to do duty in bolstering up his thoroughly imaginative theory to account for the origin of wife-capture. It is perhaps needless to say that the whole subject, so far as his contribution is concerned, is as much a mystery as before he attempted a solution of the problem.
Sir John Lubbock, like J.?F. McLennan, assumes that the earliest organization of society was that of the tribe, and that a man was first regarded as belonging only to a group. Subsequently, as the maternal bond is stronger than that which225 unites a father to his offspring, kinship with his mother and her relations was established. In course of time he was accounted as a descendant of his father only, and lastly he became equally related to both parents.
Numerous illustrations are cited by this writer, going to show that among certain peoples descent is still reckoned in the female line, and that all the rights of succession, both as regards property and tribal honours, are traced through women.
In his Origin of Civilization the fact is noted that in Guinea, when a wealthy man dies, his property passes by inheritance, not to his sons, but to the children of his sister. He quotes also from Pinkerton’s Voyages to show that the town of Loango is governed by four chiefs who are sons of the king’s sisters, and from Caillie who observes that in Central Africa the sovereignty remains always in the same family, but that the son never succeeds to his father’s position. These and numerous other instances, similar in character, are cited from various parts of the world, going to prove that a system of descent and inheritance through women was once general throughout the races of mankind.
With Herr Bachofen and Mr. McLennan, Sir John Lubbock is of the opinion that the earliest conjugal unions of the human race were communal. Communal marriage was founded on the supremacy of males, or, was based on the undisputed right of men to the control of women. According to226 this writer, communal marriage was succeeded by individual marriage through capture.
Although Lubbock coincides with McLennan in the belief that under certain circumstances infanticide has been practised by the lower races, he does not agree with him as to the extent to which it has prevailed among them; neither is he of the opinion that it was confined to the female sex. On the contrary, he cites trustworthy authority to prove that boys were as frequently disposed of as were girls.
Although with McLennan, Lubbock recognizes the prevalence of wife-capture and the principle of exogamy, yet, according to the theory of the former, marriage by capture arose from exogamy, while, according to the latter, exogamy arose from marriage by capture.
Lubbock accounts for wife-capture by the following theory: As under the communal system, women of the tribe were the “common property” of the men of the group, no individual male among them would have attempted to appropriate one of these women to himself, for the reason that such appropriation would have been regarded as an infringement on the rights of the remaining males in the community. A warrior, however, upon capturing a woman from a hostile people, might claim her as his rightful possession, and hold her as against all the other members of the tribe. Since the women of the group were so emphatically the common property of the men, the exclu227sive right to one of them in progressive tribes which had reached a state of friendliness would involve a symbol of capture to make valid such a claim. This symbol, according to Lubbock, has no reference to those from whom the woman has been stolen, but is intended to bar the rights of other members of the tribe into which she is brought. He thinks that “the exclusive possession of a wife could only be legally acquired by a temporary recognition of the pre-existing c............