The Evolution of Marriage

82:4.1Mar­riage has al­ways been closely linked with both prop­erty and re­li­gion. Prop­erty has been the sta­bi­lizer of mar­riage; re­li­gion, the mor­al­izer.

82:4.2Prim­i­tive mar­riage was an in­vest­ment, an eco­nomic spec­u­la­tion; it was more a mat­ter of busi­ness than an af­fair of flir­ta­tion. The an­cients mar­ried for the ad­van­tage and wel­fare of the group; where­fore their mar­riages were planned and ar­ranged by the group, their par­ents and el­ders. And that the prop­erty mores were ef­fec­tive in sta­bi­liz­ing the mar­riage in­sti­tu­tion is borne out by the fact that mar­riage was more per­ma­nent among the early tribes than it is among many mod­ern peo­ples.

82:4.3As civ­i­liza­tion ad­vanced and pri­vate prop­erty gained fur­ther rec­og­ni­tion in the mores, steal­ing be­came the great crime. Adul­tery was rec­og­nized as a form of steal­ing, an in­fringe­ment of the hus­band’s prop­erty rights; it is not there­fore specif­i­cally men­tioned in the ear­lier codes and mores. Woman started out as the prop­erty of her fa­ther, who trans­ferred his ti­tle to her hus­band, and all le­gal­ized sex re­la­tions grew out of these pre-ex­is­tent prop­erty rights. The Old Tes­ta­ment deals with women as a form of prop­erty; the Ko­ran teaches their in­fe­ri­or­ity. Man had the right to lend his wife to a friend or guest, and this cus­tom still ob­tains among cer­tain peo­ples.

82:4.4Mod­ern sex jeal­ousy is not in­nate; it is a prod­uct of the evolv­ing mores. Prim­i­tive man was not jeal­ous of his wife; he was just guard­ing his prop­erty. The rea­son for hold­ing the wife to stricter sex ac­count than the hus­band was be­cause her mar­i­tal in­fi­delity in­volved de­scent and in­her­i­tance. Very early in the march of civ­i­liza­tion the il­le­git­i­mate child fell into dis­re­pute. At first only the woman was pun­ished for adul­tery; later on, the mores also de­creed the chas­tise­ment of her part­ner, and for long ages the of­fended hus­band or the pro­tec­tor fa­ther had the full right to kill the male tres­passer. Mod­ern peo­ples re­tain these mores, which al­low so-called crimes of honor un­der the un­writ­ten law.

82:4.5Since the chastity taboo had its ori­gin as a phase of the prop­erty mores, it ap­plied at first to mar­ried women but not to un­mar­ried girls. In later years, chastity was more de­manded by the fa­ther than by the suitor; a vir­gin was a com­mer­cial as­set to the fa­ther—she brought a higher price. As chastity came more into de­mand, it was the prac­tice to pay the fa­ther a bride fee in rec­og­ni­tion of the ser­vice of prop­erly rear­ing a chaste bride for the hus­band-to-be. When once started, this idea of fe­male chastity took such hold on the races that it be­came the prac­tice lit­er­ally to cage up girls, ac­tu­ally to im­prison them for years, in or­der to as­sure their vir­gin­ity. And so the more re­cent stan­dards and vir­gin­ity tests au­to­mat­i­cally gave ori­gin to the pro­fes­sional pros­ti­tute classes; they were the re­jected brides, those women who were found by the grooms’ moth­ers not to be vir­gins.