CHAPTER III: PRIMITIVE RELATIONS OF THE SEXES.

§ 278. Most readers will have thought it strange to begin an account of domestic institutions by surveying the most general phenomena of race-maintenance. But they may see the propriety of setting out with a purely natural-history view, on being shown that among low savages the relations of the sexes are substantially like those common among inferior creatures.

The males of gregarious mammals usually fight for possession of the females; and primitive men do not in this respect differ from other gregarious mammals. Hearne says of the Chippewayans that “it has ever been the custom among these people for the men to wrestle for any woman to whom they were attached.” According to Hooper, a Slave Indian, desiring another one’s wife, fights with her husband. Among the Bushmen, “the stronger man will sometimes take away the wife of the weaker.” Narcisse Peltier, who from twelve years of age up to twenty-nine was detained by a tribe of Queensland Australians, states that the men “not unfrequently fight with spears for the possession of a woman.” And summing up accounts of the Dogrib Indians, Sir John Lubbock says—“In fact, the men fight for the possession of the women, just like stags.”

Nor is it on the part of males only, that this practice exists. Peltier tells us that in the above-named tribe, the Edition: current; Page: [614] women, of whom from two to five commonly belong to each man, fight among themselves about him: “their weapons being heavy staves with which they beat one another about the head till the blood flows.” And the trait of feminine nature thus displayed, is congruous with one indicated by Mitchell, who says that after battle it frequently happens among the native tribes of Australia, that the wives of the vanquished, of their own free will, pass over to the victors: reminding us of a lioness which, quietly watching the fight between two lions, goes off with the conqueror.

We have thus to begin with a state in which the family, as we understand it, does not exist. In the loose groups of men first formed, there is no established order of any kind: everything is indefinite, unsettled. As the relations of men to one another are undetermined, so are the relations of men to women. In either case there are no guides save the passions of the moment, checked only by fears of consequences. Let us glance at the facts which show the relations of the sexes to have been originally unregulated by the institutions and ideas we commonly regard as natural.

§ 279. According to Sparrman, there is no form of union between Bushmen and Bushwomen save “the agreement of the parties and consummation.” Keating tells us that the Chippewas have no marriage ceremony. Hall says the same thing of the Esquimaux, Bancroft of the Aleuts, Brett of the Arawâks, Tennent of the Veddahs; and the Lower Californians, Bancroft says, “have no marriage ceremony, nor any word in their language to express marriage. Like birds or beasts, they pair off according to fancy.”

Even where a ceremony is found, it is often nothing more than either a forcible or a voluntary commencement of living together. Very generally there is a violent seizure of the woman by the man—a capture; and the marriage is concluded by the completion of this capture. In some cases the man and woman light a fire and sit by it; in some cases, as Edition: current; Page: [615] among the Todas, the union is established when the bride performs “some trifling household function;” in some cases, as among the Port Dory people of New Guinea, “the female gives her intended some tobacco and betel-leaf.” When the Navajos desire to marry, “they sit down on opposite sides of a basket, made to hold water, filled with atole or some other food, and partake of it. This simple proceeding makes them husband and wife.” Nay, we have the like in the old Roman form of confarreatio—marriage constituted by jointly eating cake. These indications that the earliest marriage-ceremony was merely a formal commencement of living together, imply a preceding time when the living together began informally.

Moreover, such domestic union as results is so loose, and often so transitory as scarcely to constitute an advance. In the Chippewayan tribes divorce “consists of neither more nor less than a good drubbing, and turning the woman out of doors.” The Pericúi (Lower Californian) “takes as many women as he pleases, makes them work for him as slaves, and when tired of any one of them turns her away.” Similarly, when one of the Tupis “was tired of a wife, he gave her away, and he took as many as he pleased.” For Tasmanians not to change their wives, was “novel to their habits, and at variance with their traditions.” Among the Kasias, “divorce is so frequent that their unions can hardly be honoured with the name of marriage.” Even peoples so advanced as the Malayo-Polynesians furnish kindred facts. In Thomson’s New Zealand we read that “men were considered to have divorced their wives when they turned them out of doors.” And in Tahiti “the marriage tie was dissolved whenever either of the parties desired it.” It may be added that this careless breaking of marital bonds is not peculiar to men. Where women have the power, as among the above-named Kasias, they cavalierly turn their husbands out of doors if they displease them; and the like happened with some of the ancient Nicaraguans.

These facts show us that the marital relations, like the Edition: current; Page: [616] political relations, have gradually evolved; and that there did not at first exist those ideas and feelings which among civilized nations give to marriage its sanctity.

§ 280. Absence of these ideas and feelings is further shown by the prevalence in rude societies of practices which are to us in the highest degree repugnant.

Various of the uncivilized and semi-civilized display hospitality by furnishing guests with temporary wives. Herrera tells us of the Cumana people, that “the great men kept as many women as they pleased, and gave the beautifullest of them to any stranger they entertained.” Savages habitually thus give their wives and daughters. Among such Sir John Lubbock enumerates the Esquimaux, North and South American Indians, Polynesians, Australians, Berbers, Eastern and Western Negroes, Arabs, Abyssinians, Kaffirs, Mongols, Tutski, etc. Of the Bushman’s wife Lichtenstein tells us that when the husband gives her permission, she may associate with any other man. Of the Greenland Esquimaux, Egede states that “those are reputed the best and noblest tempered who, without any pain or reluctancy, will lend their friends their wives.”

Akin is the feeling shown by placing little or no value on chastity in the young. In Benguela (Congo) poor maidens are led about before marriage, in order to acquire money by prostitution. The Mexicans had an identical custom: “parents used when the maidens were marriageable, to send them to earn their portions, and accordingly they ranged about the country in a shameful manner till they had got enough to marry them off.” The ancient people of the Isthmus of Darian thought “prostitution was not infamous; noble ladies held as a maxim, that it was plebeian to deny anything asked of them”—an idea like that of the Andamanese, among whom “any woman who attempted to resist the marital privileges claimed by any member of the tribe was liable to severe punishment.” Equally strange are Edition: current; Page: [617] the marital sentiments displayed by certain peoples, both extant and extinct. Of the Hassanyeh Arabs, whose marriages are for so many days in the week, usually four, Petherick says that during a preliminary negotiation the bride’s mother protests against “binding her daughter to a due observance of that chastity which matrimony is expected to command, for more than two days in the week;” and there exists on the part of the men an adapted sentiment. The husband, allowing the wife to disregard all marital obligations during the off days, even considers an intrigue with some other man as a compliment to his own taste. Some of the Chibchas betrayed a kindred feeling. Not simply were they indifferent to virginity in their brides, but if their brides were virgins “thought them unfortunate and without luck, as they had not inspired affection in men: accordingly they disliked them as miserable women.”

While lacking the ideas and feelings which regulate the relations of the sexes among advanced peoples, savages often exhibit ideas and feelings no less strong, but of quite contrary characters. The Columbian Indians hold that “to give away a wife without a price is in the highest degree disgraceful to her family;” and by the Modocs of California “the children of a wife who has cost her husband nothing are considered no better than bastards, and are treated by society with contumely.” In Burton’s Abeokuta, we read that “those familiar with modes of thought in the East well know the horror and loathing with which the people generally look upon the one-wife system”—a statement we might hesitate to receive were it not verified by that of Livingstone concerning the negro women on the Zambesi, who were shocked on hearing that in England a man had only one wife, and by that of Bailey, who describes the disgust of a Kandyan chief when commenting on the monogamy of the Veddahs.

§ 281. Still more are we shown that regular relations of Edition: current; Page: [618] the sexes are results of evolution, and that the sentiments upholding them have been gradually established, on finding how little regard is paid by many uncivilized and semi-civilized peoples to those limitations which blood-relationships dictate to the civilized.

Among savages, connexions which we condemn as in the highest degree criminal, are not infrequent. The Chippewayans “cohabit occasionally with their own mothers, and frequently espouse their sisters and daughters;” and Langsdorff asserts the like of the Kadiaks. So, too, among the Karens of Tenasserim, “matrimonial alliances between brother and sister, or father and daughter, are not uncommon.” To these cases from America and Asia may be added a case from Africa. To keep the royal blood pure, the kings of Cape Gonzalves and Gaboon are accustomed to marry their grown-up daughters, and the queens marry the eldest sons.

Incest of the kind that is a degree less shocking is exemplified by more numerous peoples. Marriage between brother and sister was not prohibited by the “barbarous Chechemecas” and “the Panuchese.” The people of Cali, “married their nieces, and some of the lords their sisters.” “In the district of New Spain four or five cases . . . of marriage with sisters were found.” In Peru, the “Yncas from the first established it as a very stringent law and custom that the heir to the kingdom should marry his eldest sister, legitimate both on the side of the father and the mother.” So is it in Polynesia. Among the Sandwich Islanders, near consanguineous marriages are frequent in the royal family—brothers and sisters sometimes marrying; and among the Malagasy, “the nearest of kin marry, even brother and sister, if they have not the same mother.” Nor do ancient peoples of the old world fail to furnish instances. That the restriction, prohibiting marriage with a uterine sister, was not observed in Egypt, we have sufficient evidence “from the sculptures of Thebes” agreeing “with the accounts Edition: current; Page: [619] of ancient Greek and Roman writers in proving that some of the Ptolomies adopted this ancient custom.” Even our own Scandinavian kinsmen allowed incest of this kind. It is stated in the Ynglinga Saga that Niord took his own sister in marriage, “for that was allowed by” the Vanaland law.

It may be said that certain of these unions are with half-sisters (like the union of Abraham and Sarah); that such occurred among the Canaanites, Arabians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians; and that they go along with non-recognition of kinship in the male line. But admitting this to be true in some of the cases, though clearly not in others, we are still shown how little warrant exists for ascribing to primitive instinct the negations of unions between those nearly related; for the very words forbidding marriage to a half-sister having the same mother, though not to one having the same father, clearly imply that the male parenthood is habitually known though disregarded.

As further proving that sentiments such as those which among ourselves restrain the sexual instincts, are not innate, I may add the strange fact which Bailey tells us concerning the Veddahs. Their custom “sanctions the marriage of a man with his younger sister. To marry an elder sister or aunt would, in their estimation, be incestuous, a connexion in every respect as revolting to them as it would be to us—as much out of the question and inadmissible as the marriage with the younger sister was proper and natural. It was, in fact, the proper marriage.”

§ 282. While the facts show us the general association between the rudest forms of social existence and the most degraded relations of the sexes, they do not show us that social progress and progress towards a higher type of family life, are uniformly connected. Various anomalies meet us.

Unenduring unions characterize many of the lowest races; and yet the miserable Veddahs, lower than most in their Edition: current; Page: [620] social state, form very enduring unions. Bailey writes—“Divorce is unknown among them. . . . I have heard a Veddah say, ‘Death alone separates husband and wife’ ”: a trait in which their Kandyan neighbours, otherwise superior, differ from them widely.

Nor does the diminution of incestuous connexions preserve a constant ratio to social evolution. Those extreme forms of them which we have noted among some of the most degraded races of North America, are paralleled among royal families in African kingdoms of considerable size; while forms of them a degree less repulsive are common to savage and semi-civilized.

Though that type of family-life in which one wife has several husbands is said to occur among some of the lowest tribes, as the Fuegians, yet it is by no means common among the lowest; while we meet with it among relatively-advanced peoples, in Ceylon, in Malabar, and in Thibet. And the converse arrangement, of many wives to one husband, almost universally allowed and practised by savages, not only survives in semi-civilized societies but has held its ground in societies of considerably-developed types, past and present.

Neither are there connexions so clear as might have been expected, between sexual laxity and general debasement, moral or social; and conversely. The relations between the men and women in the Aleutian Islands are among the most degraded. Nevertheless these islanders are described by Cook as “the most peaceful, inoffensive people I ever met with. And, as to honesty, they might serve as a pattern to the most civilized nation upon earth.” On the other hand, while the Thlinkeet men are said to “treat their wives and children with much affection,” and the women to show “reserve, modesty, and conjugal fidelity,” they are described as thievish, lying, and extremely cruel: maiming their prisoners out of pure wantonness and killing their slaves. Similarly, though the Bachapins (Bechuanas) are reprobated Edition: current; Page: [621] as lamentably debased, having a universal disregard to truth and indifference to murder, yet the women are modest and “almost universally faithful wives.” A kindred anomaly meets us on contrasting societies in higher stages. We have but to read Cook’s account of the Tahitians, who were not only advanced in arts and social arrangements, but displayed the kindlier feelings in unusual degrees, to be astonished at their extreme disregard of restraints on the sexual instincts. Conversely, those treacherous, bloodthirsty cannibals the Fijians, whose atrocities Williams said he dared not record, are superior to most in their sexual relations. Erskine states of them that “female virtue may be rated at a high standard for a barbarous people.”

Moreover, contrary to what we should expect, we find great sexual laxity in some directions joined with rigidity in others. Among the Koniagas “a young unmarried woman may live uncensured in the freest intercourse with the men; though, as soon as she belongs to one man, it is her duty to be true to him.” In Cumana “the maidens . . . made little account of their virginity. The married women . . . lived chaste.” And Pedro Pizarro says of the Peruvians that “the wives of the common people were faithful to their husbands. . . . Before their marriage, their fathers did not care about their being either good or bad, nor was it a disgrace with them” to have loose habits. Even of those Chibcha husbands above referred to as so strangely indifferent, or less than indifferent, to feminine chastity before marriage, it is said that “nevertheless, they were very sensitive to infidelity.”

The evidence, then, does not allow us to infer, as we should naturally have done, that advance in the forms of the sexual relations and advance in social evolution, are constantly and uniformly connected.

§ 283. Nevertheless, on contemplating the facts in their ensemble, we see that progress towards higher social types is Edition: current; Page: [622] joined with progress towards higher types of domestic institutions. Comparison of the extremes make this unquestionable. The lowest groups of primitive men, without political organization, are also without anything worthy to be called family organization: the relations between the sexes and the relations between parents and offspring are scarcely above those of brutes. Contrariwise, all civilized nations, characterized by definite, coherent, orderly social arrangements, are also characterized by definite, coherent, orderly domestic arrangements. Hence we cannot doubt that, spite of irregularities, the developments of the two are associated in a general way.

Leaving here this preliminary survey, we have now to trace, so far as we can, the successively higher forms of family structure. We may expect to find the genesis of each depending on the circumstances of the society: conduciveness to social self-preservation under the conditions of the case, being the determining cause. Setting out with wholly-unregulated relations of the sexes, the first customs established must have been those which most favoured social survival; not because this was seen, but because the societies that had customs less fit, disappeared.

But before considering the several kinds of sexual relations, we must consider a previous question—Whence come the united persons?—Are they of the same tribe or of different tribes? or are they sometimes one and sometimes the other?