*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78927 ***




                       LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 1436
                      Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

                        Strange Marriage Customs

                               Leo Markun

                      HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
                             GIRARD, KANSAS




                            Copyright, 1929,
                        Haldeman-Julius Company


                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




STRANGE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS




THE MATCHMAKER


Our young people seem to be fully capable of choosing their own
mates. At any rate, they feel that they are, and they deeply resent
interference on the part of others. Such a condition has not always
existed. It does not exist everywhere even now.

For one thing, parental authority means comparatively little in
twentieth-century America. Mothers and, to a lesser extent, fathers,
are honored chiefly by the singing of sentimental songs and the giving
of useless presents on certain days of the year. In China, the worship
of parents and ancestors is still important. In New England, not many
centuries ago, it was a serious and sometimes a capital offense to
rebel against authority. In some of the most highly civilized countries
of ancient times, the paterfamilias had the right of life and death
over his offspring. His authority might last until his death. It was
usually unimpaired until the child was married. Then the girl became
the subject (under some codes, virtually the slave) of her husband. The
boy became the head of a new family, though he owed respect and perhaps
certain duties of obedience to his own father.

With strong paternal or parental authority goes usually the privilege
of marrying off the children, whose tastes and inclinations may or may
not be consulted. Right now in the United States, in families of old
American stock, there are mothers strong-willed enough to impose their
notions of what constitutes a suitable husband upon their daughters.
“Mother knows best” in matrimonial as well as in other matters, and
is able to carry out her desires. Of course, the motives of the
domineering parent may be selfish or not. He or she may be unselfish
and still cause a calamitous marriage by bringing together young people
who are temperamentally unsuited for each other. On the other hand,
inexperienced boys and girls who are free to choose for themselves
often become the victims of an evanescent infatuation. From the point
of view of, say, Dorothy Dix, the moral is that parental experience
should generally be called upon for advice, though the absolute
veto, except as to children who are really too young to marry, is
hardly desirable. Granting this, it may still be argued that only the
companionate marriage offers a genuine solution to many problems of our
time.

Of the general evolution of marriage I have already written, and here I
shall consider for the most part matters not discussed in Little Blue
Book No. 83. With the companionate marriage and other allied questions,
a number of Little Blue Book authors have dealt. It may be well to say
here, though, that unfamiliar and consequently strange marriage customs
should be interesting to us not merely as stray curiosities, but
primarily because they throw light on our own manners and morals. Rice
is thrown at our weddings without any magical intent, but still because
the showering of grain upon bride and groom has been at other times and
is in other lands considered a means of promoting fertility. We see
little of the chaperon, and when we do see her we hardly realize that
she takes the place of the duenna, the eunuch at the seraglio door,
and other guards charged with the duty of seeing that persons of the
opposite sexes not married to one another shall be kept apart.

The matchmaker has his (or her) place in the economy of things when
young people eligible for marriage have insufficient opportunity to
meet each other socially, and especially when more or less complex
contracts dealing with economic goods, or with questions of precedence
and social status, are involved. Thus, the marriage of kings and
princes has often hinged upon delicate diplomatic negotiations. A
prince of Wales may dance with stenographers and flirt with actresses,
but is likely to marry a princess after consulting ministers of state.
He had better not fall in love with an Italian princess unless she can
be persuaded to become a Protestant or he is willing to renounce his
right to succeed to the throne. His limitation in this regard is set by
an act of Parliament.

Pecuniary considerations have often been primary problems in amateur
and professional matchmaking. The connection between love and money
is an old one, though not one which existed at the earliest stages
of human development. Money was first used in a comparatively recent
period, and the objects of capital which it represents are little known
to simple savages. Whatever the nature of the tie men formed with women
when human beings first appeared may have been, we may be sure that it
did not depend upon the accumulation of goods. The marriage for money
must, then, be considered a by-product of civilization.

So far as the matchmaker deals with money, he is an agent of a familiar
sort. For example, there are peoples among whom it is customary for
the father to think of his daughter as a piece of valuable property.
His whole interest is to receive as much as possible for her in cows
or weapons or silver. What his daughter will think of her husband is
for him a matter of no importance. The purchaser must be able to pay
for what he is getting, and he must be trustworthy if there are to be
deferred installments. The tribe or the community often limits the
circles from whom the husband may be drawn, but it may limit still more
the marketability of objects other than daughters.

This is the extreme form of the economic motive in arranging matches.
When the husband is “bought,” and in most instances when a bridal price
is paid, the person or persons receiving the money pays some attention
to the desirability of the marriage from the points of view other than
the pecuniary one. The matchmaker consequently becomes something more
than a business agent. In fact, he often officiates by virtue of his
position. That is, he may act because he is a chief or a priest. Or he
may be a relative charged with this delicate duty. Whether or not he
receives any compensation depends upon the usages of the community.

Newly married young women make up most of the matchmakers with us. To
be sure, cynics say that the sex as a whole is engaged in a conspiracy
to deprive bachelors of their freedom. When men who have just been
married talk to their friends who are still single about the advantages
of matrimony, it is sometimes assumed that they are motivated by
the desire to assuage their misery in accordance with the familiar
principle. However, the amateur matchmaker can derive no direct (at
least, no economic) benefit from his efforts in ordinary cases. Rather
he is confronted with the necessity of buying engagement and wedding
presents for the beneficiary (if you prefer, for the victim) of his
work.

The two chief enemies of marriage are the religious ideal that there
is something holy about celibacy and the economic state in which a
wife or wives and their offspring are expensive to maintain. Among the
early Hebrews, neither the one nor the other existed. It was considered
a divine duty to “increase and multiply,” and wives and children
were ordinarily put to work at agricultural tasks. The position of
bachelors and spinsters consequently became anomalous, and matchmaking
was considered a meritorious act. The medieval and modern Jews have
been for the most part an urban people. This fact and their living
to a large extent in predominantly Christian communities has meant
the decline of polygyny among them, but orthodox Judaism still favors
fruitfulness.

During the medieval period of oppression and massacres, it was all
but miraculous--some rabbis and ministers say it was only because
of the direct intervention of God--that the Jewish people survived.
Allowing amply for recruits from without, as of the Chazars, a Turkish
body living in what is now southern Russia, we must see that survival
depended upon fecundity. The personal hygiene of the Jews, it is true,
was better than that of their Christian neighbors; but we must not fail
to give due credit to the matchmaker.

Perhaps only one Jewish youth survived in a town after a particularly
bloody massacre, and the nearest family of his faith was a hundred
miles off. It was, then, considered a particularly meritorious act of
piety to find him a wife. Soon there arose a professional class of
_shadkans_ or _shadchans_, who enjoyed a legal status at least as early
as the twelfth century. In the early days, these men were mostly rabbis
and persons engaged in the study of Talmudic law and theology. It was
considered improper for them to derive pecuniary benefits directly from
their learning, but the matchmaking profession seemed a dignified way
for them to earn a livelihood. Old scrolls record the fact that some of
the most famous rabbis of the Middle Ages were _shadchanim_.

The matchmaker’s fee was usually a percentage of the dowry, which it
was to his interest to make as large as possible. After a time, the
haggling and indecorous competition which arose drove most of the
learned men out of the profession, which was no longer held to be so
honorable as in the earlier time.

The _shadchan_ has survived among Jews to this day, chiefly in the
Slavonic countries and elsewhere among immigrants from them. In
old-fashioned families, the girls are not permitted to mingle freely
with boys. Negotiations for their marriage are carried on by the
parents, usually with the assistance of common friends or a matchmaker.
In America, the _shadchanim_ are mostly located in the East Side of New
York. They advertise in the Yiddish newspapers, announcing their office
hours and setting forth their ability to provide professional men,
businessmen and honest workingmen for maidens and widows. A matrimonial
bureau has recently been opened in a magnificent apartment house on the
Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Others are found wherever there are large
Jewish communities.

The American-born Jew is not particularly likely to patronize the
professional matchmaker, since he can meet girls freely in dance
halls and in the homes of his friends, just as Gentiles can. There
are, indeed, young lawyers and physicians and dentists who appreciate
that their education entitles them to large dowries, and who feel
that they can find the best selection of beauty and the money that
goes with it by visiting a _shadchan_. There are more or less wealthy
Jewish merchants in small cities with daughters to marry off, but only
non-Jewish neighbors. It is the matchmaker who wages a vigorous war
against assimilation and for his commission.

The _shadchan_ has often appeared in fiction, and almost always as
a comic character. It is his business to convince the prospective
bridegroom’s family and friends that he is in touch with the most
beautiful and desirable of all womankind. If she is hunchbacked, her
hump is ignored or else set forth as a slight curve which is but an
added embellishment. A first-rate matchmaker can convince a hesitating
swain that a one-legged girl is more desirable than she would have been
if God had given her two.

There is an anecdote about a matchmaker who finally brought a modest
youth to be inspected by a beautiful virgin’s parents. Whatever
the young man said about himself, the _shadchan_ made out to be a
ridiculous understatement. Thus, “Well, I manage to eke out a living”
was followed by an indignant, “Why, he’s a millionaire!” “I come of a
pretty good fam--” was interrupted by “I tell you all his relatives are
great scholars.” Then the youth was unlucky enough to sneeze, and he
apologetically explained, “I got a little cold.” “Pfui,” shouted the
matchmaker, “a little cold! Why, he’s got consumption.”

It would be unfair to suggest that all Jews look upon marriage as
a money-making venture, or that only Jews take such an attitude in
the countries of European culture. After all, matrimonial papers and
correspondence bureaus do flourish in the land of the kleagle, the
evangelist, and the holy King James Bible. The rich widow is held out
as a bait for the yokel’s ten cents in stamps, and sometimes for all
the money he has in the bank as well.

In higher circles of society, Americans often purchase titles for
their daughters. I do not doubt that the heart of a baron or a marquis
can palpitate in honest and passionate love for a sugar or an asbestos
princess. It is convenient, though, that the _vons_ and _des_ do not
become similarly enamoured of vivacious Yankee misses whose pas do not
cut coupons and whose mas do not patronize the opera.

It is hardly necessary for me to inquire into the morality of
marrying money. _Mores_ depend upon time and place. In Germany and
Austria-Hungary, before the Great War, it was expected that military
officers who were not independently wealthy should choose brides who
were. According to Bloch, the _Geldehe_ or marriage for money was
common also in the higher middle class and in the aristocracies of
noble birth and finance. The impoverishment of the nobility in several
European countries since the war and the rise of profiteers and
successful speculators anxious to win social prestige have operated in
many instances to make pecuniary considerations primary in marriage.
With the French, the _dot_ or dowry has been and still is very
important.

Travelers have found matchmakers at work in Korea and Siam as well as
(among non-Jews) in a number of European countries. The go-between in
Mohammedan lands is usually an old woman. Westermarck lists a number of
peoples at low levels of culture who employ matchmakers. They include
a variety of Indian tribes in the two Americas, Philippine Islanders,
Formosans, Africans, and natives of the mountains in the north of India.

It is a widespread custom, too, for the young man in love, even if he
is free to choose for himself, to ask his parents or other relatives
to do his wooing for him. A Koryak youth is expected to do this, but
he may declare his own intentions if the match he intends to make is
disapproved by his parents. In such case, he is not supposed to say
anything. Instead, he proposes by entering the house of his prospective
father-in-law and doing such of the housework as becomes a man in his
part of the world. It is good etiquette for the host to remain as
silent as he.

Clearly, genuine or conventional bashfulness is at the bottom of
such a custom. Sexual modesty is, in fact, at least as common with
savages and barbarians as it is with civilized people, although the
manifestations of it are not entirely the same. Therefore, a matchmaker
may be required to bring together shy young people even if the economic
aspects of matrimony are simple.




CHILD MARRIAGES


In recent years, much publicity has been given to the prevalence of
infant and child marriages in India. This particular indiscretion of
Mother India is, at any rate, not very new. The Law of Manu, which was
established perhaps three thousand years ago, provides that a father
may marry his eight-year-old daughter to a man of twenty-four and his
daughter of twelve to a man of thirty. But, in truth, the usual age of
marriage for females has gone down in modern times, though it is now
tending to go up somewhat.

It is the general opinion in the Orient that every able-bodied adult
should be married, and girls are held to be adult when they have
reached the age of puberty. The people of India, especially the Hindus,
feel that it is a disgrace for a girl to remain single after she is
twelve or thirteen. Of the unmarried females among them, only a very
small proportion are over the age of fifteen. A great many Hindu
girls become wives before reaching the age of five. While the average
marriage age for males is somewhat higher than that for females, it is
by no means unusual for infant boys to become husbands.

The marriage of infants is not general everywhere in India, certain
regions in the center of the empire bringing up the average for the
country as a whole. It is confined almost entirely to the Mohammedans
and the Hindus, especially the latter. When we come to consider
children, girls over the age of twelve and boys over fifteen, the
matter is somewhat different. The Christians and the Animists of India
regard them as entirely ripe for matrimony. Child marriage is least
common among the Buddhists.

When very young boys and girls are married, they do not ordinarily
proceed at once to live together as husband and wife. In this respect,
however, usage varies throughout the country, and there is no doubt
that cohabitation sometimes occurs before the wife has menstruated.

Obviously, children who are married off long before reaching years
of discretion, sometimes before they have learned simple measures
of self-control, do not choose their husbands or their wives for
themselves. It may be that the desire of the parents to preserve
their authority in so important a matter is chiefly responsible
for maintaining the custom. There are other factors, some of them
historical. India was for many centuries the seat of devastating wars.
Now one and now another conqueror came into the land, and attractive
virgins made up an important part of the spoils. Married women were
less attractive and therefore more secure.

Hypergamy, too, has probably played an important part in the
development of extremely early marriage. This requires girls to marry
into a higher sub-caste than their own, or at least forbids them to
marry into a lower sub-caste. By greatly narrowing the circle of lawful
bridegrooms, it stimulates foresight on the part of parents. The
fathers and the mothers of female children who disregard the rule are
themselves reduced in status. While boys and men are not allowed to
marry outside the caste, they may take girls from subdivisions lower
than their own without penalty.

It naturally arouses pity in the hearts of Europeans and Americans to
see child brides of six or eight put through ceremonies of which they
do not understand the import and led into ways of living for which they
are evidently far too young. We are told about little girls nearly
fainting for lack of air while the wedding guests gather about to have
a good look. Still, the accustomed is seldom the horrible, and it is
improbable that the women of India resent the custom half so much as
the benevolent ladies from abroad do.

To the imperialists who use child marriage as an argument in favor
of the maintenance of British rule in India, it may be apposite to
point out that the English have themselves practiced it even in what
we are wont to think of as modern times. From the thirteenth to the
seventeenth centuries, it was fairly common in the higher social ranks.
In 1564, a three-year-old boy was married to a girl of two. Neither
could do much talking, and the witnesses in whose arms they were held
during the ceremony made most of the responses for them. In Scotland,
it was not until 1600 that the age limit was set at fourteen for males
and twelve for females. It is at these points that the law of Great
Britain now sets the age of puberty, though a change is impending.

When the diplomacy of Europe was chiefly a matter of negotiation
between monarchs, young princes and princesses were often used as
pawns. It sometimes happened that children were betrothed at two
or three to cement alliances or to consolidate realms. History has
carried down to us the tears of at least one young princess whose
mother flogged her for declaring that she did not like the man who had
been chosen as her husband and that she would not go to him under any
consideration.

The age of consent in Great Britain and in most parts of the United
States was quite low until the second half of the nineteenth century.
This situation encouraged, if not child marriage, the exploitation
of girls by unscrupulous parents. Many children were prostitutes or
concubines. In the 1850’s, two thousand New York prostitutes were
asked, “How old will you be next birthday?” The answers ranged all the
way up to 77 years, but the most frequent answer was 20; 268 girls said
they were nineteen years old, 258 were or professed to be eighteen, 143
said they were seventeen, 62 gave their age as sixteen, seventeen as
fifteen, and two as fourteen. It is highly probable that many of the
younger girls added to their actual years. Some decades later, there
were brothels in New York in which most of the prostitutes were only
ten or eleven. In the year of Our Lord in which I write, a reverend
gentleman resident in one of these United States has been sent to the
penitentiary for marrying a child of ten though already possessing a
wife several times as old.

The average marriage age advances as we move from south to north. It
is higher in the city than in the country and among the educated than
among those who have little schooling. Puberty generally sets the lower
limit, for the marriage of children who have not yet reached it is
almost always treated as a mere betrothal. Perhaps we may set up the
generalization that the age of marriage tends to vary inversely with
the value attached to chastity and the fear that unmarried girls will
be unduly tempted. It is said that child marriage became commoner in
India after the Dravidians came in, bringing the custom of premarital
promiscuity with them. There is another factor, the value attached
by religion and current morality to sexual indulgence. The Israelites
glorified fecundity, the Mohammedans and the Hindus have attached
sanctity to acts that Christian preachers denounce as sinful. During
the Middle Ages, a pretty large part of the Christian population was
sworn to celibacy, while the men of Islam were marrying early and
often. Of course, there were many illegitimate births in western
Europe. Who knows, this fact may be responsible for the fact that
Christian civilization was not supplanted by the barbarous bathhouses
and libraries and laboratories of the dread worshipers of Allah.

In medieval Europe, the apprentices had to defer marrying. The students
too helped to swell the ranks of the unmarried. However, the great bulk
of the population consisted of farm laborers, who could provide for
their wives about as well at sixteen as at twenty-six. Among the Jews
there were many students, but special provision was made for them. It
was usual for them to live at the expense of their fathers-in-law for
some time after the marriage. This custom was important a generation or
two ago, and no doubt it still survives in some Polish communities.

The Industrial Revolution has raised the usual age at which Europeans
marry, and also it has increased the proportion of unmarried adults.
The average age of men and women marrying for the first time in England
and Wales between 1876 and 1885 was respectively 25.9 and 24.4, while
for 1906-1910 the averages were 27.2 and 25.6. However, the tendency
in Great Britain and in the United States is not toward a constantly
upward movement in these figures. Conditions which enable young people
to earn good wages bring them down. In the “upper” classes, marriages
are usually more retarded than in the “lower” ones. The higher
standards of living maintained by the former probably account for part
of the difference, although there is a counterbalancing element in
hereditary wealth: the rich man’s son seldom needs to worry about how
he is to support a wife, at least, if his father is satisfied with
his choice. On the other hand, he may wait until he has inherited the
family fortune before marrying the woman he wants. It may be that the
poor, who are generally accused of being improvident, prove the truth
of the charge by getting married while they are quite young.

Schmoller has estimated that, under normal circumstances, about half
the population of a country would consist of married people, widows,
and widowers. This does not hold true of either Europe or the United
States, because many live and die single. Wherever law or custom fixes
monogamy as the only form of marriage, it is, indeed, inevitable
that there shall be either bachelors or spinsters, for the number of
marriageable males is never exactly equal to that of marriageable
females. The excess of females amounts, in Europe, to about three per
cent. Special conditions such as arise out of a great war make the
difference in numbers still greater.

But there are bachelors as well as spinsters in Europe. There are monks
as well as nuns, unmarried rakes as well as prostitutes. In short,
what some are pleased to consider normal conditions do not exist.
According to the figures given by Iwan Bloch, the percentage of people
who have reached the age of fifty without marrying is 3 in Hungary,
9 in Germany, 13 in Austria, and 17 in Switzerland. For the period
1886-1890, the official statistics of England and Wales show that 60
out of every 100 inhabitants over the age of fifteen were or had been
married. The number in Belgium was 56, the lowest in Europe. It was
61 in Germany, 62 in the United States, 64 in France, 76 in Hungary.
Of these, from eight to ten had been widowed. The variations from one
country to another point chiefly to economic factors.

Feminism, or, wider than this, a general tendency arising out of the
constantly growing freedom and power of women, seems to be advancing
the marriage age and adding to the proportion of celibates in almost
all the civilized countries of the world. It is this, without much
doubt, which will put an end to the infant marriages of India. From one
point of view, feminism is a moral movement. More important, it depends
upon the economic changes of the last few centuries. The Christian
churches, both Catholic and Protestant, until quite recently, strove to
maintain women in an inferior position. The orthodox Jew still gives
thanks to God for making him something better than a woman, while the
Jewess meekly praises him for making her what he thought it right that
she should be. In the Middle Ages, when these prayers were written
and seemed perfectly natural, the position of women among Jews seems
to have been considerably higher than it was among Christians and
Mohammedans. It was the Renaissance, which was essentially a revolt
against medieval other worldliness, that gave women something much
better than chivalric glorification, the right to develop freely, to
study, to live for themselves.

The Renaissance grew out of the beginnings of the Commercial
Revolution. That the time was not altogether ripe for it is shown by
the coincident and essentially opposite movement of the Reformation
or Protestant Revolution. The Renaissance was choked, but it did not
die, and it rose up once more in the Enlightenment. Again there was a
development of feminism, frowned upon by the leaders of the religious
revival that spread through Europe after the downfall of Napoleon and
flickered out as the prudery of the Victorian age.

If marriage for money must be considered a by-product of civilization,
it is possible to contend that it belongs only to the upper savage and
the barbarous stages. That is to say, it is characteristic neither of
the lowest (simplest) peoples nor of the most highly civilized. With
both these classes, the position of women is comparatively advantageous.

In early days, however, it is highly probable that the women had no
objection to “child marriage.” I put these words within quotation
marks for two reasons. First, though most anthropologists have been
coming over to Westermarck’s views that primordial man was accustomed
to live in families not essentially different from our own, this still
remains unproved. Secondly, young people who have reached the age of
puberty are considered adults in savage and barbarous communities.
They are circumcised or submitted to other initiation rites and then
admitted to the full privileges of men and women.

Now, in such countries as the United States and Great Britain, we feel
differently about girls of thirteen. We consider them immature, and we
believe that they should play and go to school. Our changed attitude is
largely the result of conditions brought about by the machine age. As
to the hygienic advantages and disadvantages of marriage or its sexual
equivalent for such young girls, I suppose there is room for difference
of opinion. We hear that the women grow old quickly in those countries
where marriage takes place early, but probably this is because the
ripening is naturally advanced in most of them. Other interesting
questions arise in this connection. For example, are the children of a
fourteen-year-old and of a fifteen-year-old mother inferior mentally
and physically to those born of older women? The matter is not easily
solved. Even if scientists were more free than they are to experiment
with human beings, they could not easily establish the equality of
“other things” necessary in bringing about valid results.

In the First Book of Kings, there is revealed one reason for child
marriage that has been of some importance. “Now King David,” the story
goes, “was old and stricken in years; and he was covered with clothes,
but he did not get warm. Therefore his servants said to him, ‘Let
there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin, and let her stand
before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom,
that my lord the king may get heat.’ So they sought for a fair damsel
throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite,
and brought her to the king. And the damsel was very fair, and she
cherished the king and ministered to him; but the king knew her not.”

This is rather puzzling to the modern reader. Why was it necessary
to warm the aged monarch with a virgin, especially since we are
told explicitly that there was no sexual intercourse? Why would the
ancient equivalent of our modern hot-water bottle not have served
the purpose just as well? We have here a magic practice or a bit of
superstition. King David’s advisers believed that close propinquity
between a young and vigorous person and an old and feeble one would
bring about a transfer of energy from the former to the latter. A
chaste maiden was held to be particularly desirable as the subject.
Late in the eighteenth century, a well-known German physician, J. P.
Frank, remarked that there might be something in the old belief. When
Henry James wrote _The Sacred Fount_, he made the flow of beauty and of
wisdom between people much exposed to each other an important element
in his story.

Belief in the special sacredness of virginity is still widespread. It
takes some curious forms, as in parts of Jugoslavia, where the peasants
think that venereal disease can be cured by intercourse with a maiden.
In primitive communities, when the magical effects supposed to be
derived from virgins is sought, very young girls are usually chosen.
Ploss-Bartels has called it a regular symptom of simple culture that
undeveloped females are married or exploited. This is an exaggeration;
but, so far as the statement is true, it largely reflects the King
David superstition.

The Guatos of Brazil are said to sell their daughters between the ages
of five and eight or nine. A traveler asked one of the Indians how he
could treat such a child as his wife, and the answer was, “She only
sleeps at my side because she is my property, and I will not cohabit
with her until she is twice as large.” However, he later learned that
this was not the case. Similar cases have been reported from widely
separated parts of the world. In Celebes, it is said that Europeans
sometimes conform to the native practice sufficiently to lease girls of
twelve or thirteen. In the New Britain Islands, girls of ten or twelve
are married to men of twenty-five or thirty.

In some of the islands of the Pacific, it is common for fathers to
betroth their unborn children. The Fijians and the Samoans used
occasionally to arrange marriages between infant girls and middle-aged
or elderly men. More often, the Pacific islanders affiance children to
each other. In one region, it is customary for the engaged boy to be
taken into the care of his future wife’s family at the same time that
his own parents take care of the engaged girl. Elsewhere, the betrothed
female child is taken to her future husband’s home even though the
rule may be that he is not to have any social intercourse with her
whatsoever, as much as a passing word being forbidden.

While the girls (except in the instances where some of them serve as
celibate priestesses or as prostitutes) marry young among practically
all simple peoples, this is not always the case with the boys. For
example, there is a part of Dutch New Guinea where the young men live
together in a communal house, their erotic life being homosexual.
Wherever it is common for the older and wealthier men to have large
seraglios, the younger and poorer ones may be compelled to do without
wives.

While most American Indians married young, there were a few tribes
in which it was considered proper for men to wait until they were
twenty-five or thereabouts. Moreover, many savage and barbarous
communities require young men to undergo certain tests before they can
join the ranks of the married. They may have to show that they are good
fishermen or hunters or that they are skilled in certain handicrafts or
that they are courageous and skilled in war.

There are Australian tribes in which men under thirty, if they are
determined to marry, must take old women. The young girls go to the
elders of the community. It is said that gray hairs in the beard are
prerequisite to marriage among the Arunta and the Loritja. There
are some simple communities where sexual indulgence is easy outside
of marriage, and here there are more likely to be large classes of
bachelors over the age of twenty. But it is usually desirable to have a
home and children, who support the father in his old age and feed his
ghost or pray for the repose of his soul after he dies.

There is a fairly widespread belief among the simpler peoples that
chastity is requisite to the fullest exercise of magical and physical
powers. Accordingly, the men may have to sleep apart from their wives
for a certain period before leaving on an expedition of hunting or war.
But if the soldiers of the village or tribe must be constantly on the
alert, it is sometimes held necessary for them to remain unmarried.
This does not always imply their entire abstinence from sexual
relations. However, the soldiers are usually discharged from active
service at thirty or thirty-five. For a long period in Roman history,
military men were required to remain unmarried. Most of them seem to
have had concubines, in some instances the same women who had been
their wives before their entrance into the army.




FORBIDDEN MARRIAGES


With us, just as with savages and barbarians, there is an inner circle
of relatives with whom we may not mate, an outer circle beyond which
we may not go. Thus, in modern civilized countries, brothers do not
marry sisters, mothers do not marry sons. There are jurisdictions in
which the marriage of first cousins is forbidden. As to the outer
circle, it sometimes engirdles the whole of humanity. We are, however,
familiar with narrower limits, since we have in the United States laws
forbidding white people to marry Negroes and sometimes members of
other races as well. Besides, lines are drawn by custom and religion.
Catholics seldom marry Protestants, pious Jews practically never marry
Gentiles. There was a time when orthodox Quakers did not allow their
children to woo Hicksites. Even in America, there are important class
distinctions. A millionaire’s daughter may elope with the chauffeur,
but her father and his friends are not likely to be pleased about it.
The son of a first family is not expected to marry a girl from the
wrong side of the gasworks.

We may define endogamy as the requirement of marrying within a certain
group. The laws and customs which forbid “mixed marriages” are
endogamous. Exogamy is the rule prohibiting the marriage of those who
are considered too closely related. The crime forbidden by exogamy we
call incest. In most civilized countries, there are comparatively few
degrees of relationship which are considered incestuous. In primitive
communities, very distant cousins and persons whose blood ties are
imaginary may be forbidden to marry.

The most general rule of incest forbids a father to marry his daughter,
a mother to marry her son. It seems to be “universally prevalent in
mankind,” according to Westermarck. Rivers says, “We know of no people
who allow marriage between mother and son.” He thinks that matrimony
between father and daughter is sometimes legal. The authorities do not
deny that there are cases of mother-son as well as father-daughter
cohabitation. In fact, they exist in Europe and the United States.
The debatable matter is whether or not they are ever recognized and
approved by custom.

We have a number of accounts, from various parts of the American
continents, of Indian tribes in which our rules of incest do not hold.
Thus, a traveler in Ecuador tells us that Pioje widows often take their
sons as second husbands, and that widowers take their daughters. Some
of the Tinne Indians marry sisters and daughters. And similar cases are
reported from Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world. If these are
incestuous, at least incest is treated as a very mild offense in the
communities where they occur. And we know that there was a time when
the priests of Persia advocated marriage between near relatives as a
religious duty. In short, the comparative study of exogamy confirms
the general rule that there is absolutely no moral principle upon
which all mankind agrees. There are, indeed, some fairly well defined
ethical principles; and it may be true that the human repugnance
toward intimate relations with a father or mother, with sons or with
daughters, which is widespread though not universal, arose originally
out of an animal instinct.

Marriage between brother and sister is not a great deal commoner.
It has perhaps occurred most commonly in the case of monarchs. The
Pharaohs and the Ptolemies of Egypt seem to have believed that they
could find women sufficiently exalted to be their queens only in the
daughters of their own fathers and mothers. The chieftains of Hawaii
had similar ideas. Among the Incas of Peru, the Singhalese, the
Persians, and a few other peoples, the kings were privileged to marry
full sisters.

In some of these countries, persons of lower rank are also reported
to have contracted such matrimonial alliances. Much more frequent are
weddings between half-brothers and half-sisters. In our own century,
a king of Siam has had two queens, both his half-sisters. Usually the
relationship in such marriages is through the fathers, perhaps because
paternity is more difficult to prove than maternity. In ancient Athens,
it was legally permissible to marry a half-sister. According to some
authorities, she might not be the child of the same mother. There are
several stories in the Bible about unions between half-brother and
half-sister. Abraham says of Sarah, “And yet she is my sister; she is
the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she
became my wife.”

The propriety of marriage between cousins, between uncle and niece, and
between aunt and nephew, varies greatly from one country to another
and sometimes within the community according to religious belief and
social rank. The Jewish code permits an uncle to marry his niece, but
treats a union between aunt and nephew as incestuous. There is a tribe
in the Caucasus where a mother’s sister, but not a father’s sister, may
be married. Marriage with a first cousin is by some peoples considered
highly meritorious. By others it is strictly forbidden. It is against
the law in a few European countries and in some of our states, but is
usually possible with some little extra trouble. The objection to it
seems to be derived chiefly from the old law of the Christian church,
although it may be eugenically unsound in certain instances. The
prohibition against marrying a nephew or a niece is commoner than that
against the marriage of cousins german. There does not seem to be any
civilized country where remoter cousins are forbidden to marry, except
a few influenced by the Eastern church.

In the simpler communities, exogamy often has reference to a large
class, such as a phratry or sub-tribe or clan. Whether the members of
these subdivisions are what we should call close relatives or not,
marriage between them is forbidden. Some of the Iroquois Indians had a
complicated system of clans, of which half were in one group and half
in another. It used to be forbidden to marry any person within the
group to which one belonged; that is to say, about half the tribe was
ineligible. More recently, exogamy has been confined to the clan alone,
or to about one-eighth of the tribe. Other Indians have had similar
laws, varying greatly in detail.

There are regions in various parts of the world where known relatives,
no matter of what degree, are unable to marry legally. The old penal
law of China provided that anybody marrying a person bearing the same
name as himself should be severely beaten, and the marriage declared
invalid. Elsewhere, cousins of seven degrees or less are held to
be within the incest circle. Clan exogamy is found in most of the
Australian tribes, with complications which we might otherwise believe
to be beyond the capacity of the natives; and violations have until
recent times been usually punishable with death.

In the early days of Rome, marriages within the sixth degree were
treated as incestuous. The degrees were computed by counting back to
the common ancestor and then down again. Thus, second cousins were
related in the sixth degree; parent, grandparent, great-grandparent,
grandparent, parent, and the cousin. In the Eastern or Orthodox branch
of the Christian church, second cousins were forbidden to marry, only
the seventh degree being considered sufficiently removed. In the
Western or Roman Catholic church, the prohibition extended at one
time to sixth cousins. It no longer exists beyond the degree of third
cousins, and dispensations for those who are more closely related are
common.

Adoption and the spiritual relationship existing between godfather and
godchild (sometimes also between close relatives of the two) have
been at various times and in many places barriers to marriage. In
Great Britain, it was not made possible until 1907 for a man to wed
his deceased wife’s sister. Such a wedding is also forbidden by the
Catholic canon law.

However, the levirate (from the Latin _levir_, brother-in-law), which
is a custom according to which a dead man’s brother must inevitably
under certain circumstances marry his widow, has been very widespread.
Among the Hindus and some others, the obligation arises if the dead man
has left no children behind. The Bible has two laws on the subject.
In Leviticus: “And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an
unclean thing: he has uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall
be childless.” In Deuteronomy: “If brethren dwell together, and one
of them die, leaving no child, the dead man’s wife shall not marry a
stranger; her husband’s brother shall go unto her, and take her as
his wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her. And the
firstborn that she bears shall succeed in the name of his brother who
is dead, that his name shall not disappear in Israel.”

It is sometimes said that the law of Leviticus sets up a general rule,
to which an exception is made in Deuteronomy. More likely, there was
an actual change in custom. Later still, the rabbis frowned upon
levirate marriage even in cases of childless death. The exposure to
shame provided for brothers-in-law who fail to marry as directed in
Deuteronomy has become a merely formal ceremony among orthodox Jews.
The widow loosens her brother-in-law’s shoe (this and his foot must be
clean, according to rabbinic law) and spits on the ground before him.
The levirate often encourages polygamy, for the duty of marrying a dead
brother’s sister may exist even when one already has a wife or two.

Among various peoples, marriage between cousins has been especially
stimulated. Sometimes it is possible to get a cousin as a wife without
charge, while others must be paid for. Or, as among the desert Bedouin,
the first cousin has an option to purchase at a reduced rate. In
certain Hindu communities, a man is supposed to marry his sister’s
daughter, even if she happens to be older than himself.

The caste system of India greatly limits the circle from which a wife
or a husband may be chosen. There are sub-castes, and under certain
circumstances bride and groom may have to belong to the same one.
Sometimes hypergamy, which has already been explained, makes the matter
still more complicated.

In general, caste or class as a matter of endogamy is of importance not
only in India. In parts of Africa, the blacksmiths never intermarry
with the rest of the population, taking only smiths’ daughters as their
wives. Free men have often been forbidden to marry slaves, though not
necessarily to cohabit with them. Medieval knights were not accustomed
to make the daughters of serfs their wedded wives. Modern noblemen
marry untitled women only for especially good reasons. Monarchs are
expected to enter into full matrimony with persons of royal or princely
rank.




Transcriber’s Note:

- Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

- Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

- Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice.

- Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following
changes:

  Page 8: “to earn a livilihood” to “to earn a livelihood”
  Page 12: “for the young men” to “for the young man”
  Page 15: “it may be opposite” to “it may be apposite”
  Page 28: “could find women sufficently” to “could find women
  sufficiently”
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