The Marriage Institution

83:5.1In the early his­tory of mar­riage the un­mar­ried women be­longed to the men of the tribe. Later on, a woman had only one hus­band at a time. This prac­tice of one-man-at-a-time was the first step away from the promis­cu­ity of the herd. While a woman was al­lowed but one man, her hus­band could sever such tem­po­rary re­la­tion­ships at will. But these loosely reg­u­lated as­so­ci­a­tions were the first step to­ward liv­ing pair­wise in dis­tinc­tion to liv­ing herd­wise. In this stage of mar­riage de­vel­op­ment chil­dren usu­ally be­longed to the mother.

83:5.2The next step in mat­ing evo­lu­tion was the group mar­riage. This com­mu­nal phase of mar­riage had to in­ter­vene in the un­fold­ing of fam­ily life be­cause the mar­riage mores were not yet strong enough to make pair as­so­ci­a­tions per­ma­nent. The brother and sis­ter mar­riages be­longed to this group; five broth­ers of one fam­ily would marry five sis­ters of an­other. All over the world the looser forms of com­mu­nal mar­riage grad­u­ally evolved into var­i­ous types of group mar­riage. And these group as­so­ci­a­tions were largely reg­u­lated by the totem mores. Fam­ily life slowly and surely de­vel­oped be­cause sex and mar­riage reg­u­la­tion fa­vored the sur­vival of the tribe it­self by in­sur­ing the sur­vival of larger num­bers of chil­dren.

83:5.3Group mar­riages grad­u­ally gave way be­fore the emerg­ing prac­tices of polygamy—polyg­yny and polyandry—among the more ad­vanced tribes. But polyandry was never gen­eral, be­ing usu­ally lim­ited to queens and rich women; fur­ther­more, it was cus­tom­ar­ily a fam­ily af­fair, one wife for sev­eral broth­ers. Caste and eco­nomic re­stric­tions some­times made it nec­es­sary for sev­eral men to con­tent them­selves with one wife. Even then, the woman would marry only one, the oth­ers be­ing loosely tol­er­ated as “un­cles” of the joint progeny.

83:5.4The Jew­ish cus­tom re­quir­ing that a man con­sort with his de­ceased brother’s widow for the pur­pose of “rais­ing up seed for his brother,” was the cus­tom of more than half the an­cient world. This was a relic of the time when mar­riage was a fam­ily af­fair rather than an in­di­vid­ual as­so­ci­a­tion.

83:5.5The in­sti­tu­tion of polyg­yny rec­og­nized, at var­i­ous times, four sorts of wives:

83:5.61. The cer­e­mo­nial or le­gal wives.

83:5.72. Wives of af­fec­tion and per­mis­sion.

83:5.83. Con­cu­bines, con­trac­tual wives.

83:5.94. Slave wives.

83:5.10True polyg­yny, where all the wives are of equal sta­tus and all the chil­dren equal, has been very rare. Usu­ally, even with plu­ral mar­riages, the home was dom­i­nated by the head wife, the sta­tus com­pan­ion. She alone had the rit­ual wed­ding cer­e­mony, and only the chil­dren of such a pur­chased or dow­ered spouse could in­herit un­less by spe­cial ar­range­ment with the sta­tus wife.

83:5.11The sta­tus wife was not nec­es­sar­ily the love wife; in early times she usu­ally was not. The love wife, or sweet­heart, did not ap­pear un­til the races were con­sid­er­ably ad­vanced, more par­tic­u­larly af­ter the blend­ing of the evo­lu­tion­ary tribes with the Nod­ites and Adamites.

83:5.12The taboo wife—one wife of le­gal sta­tus—cre­ated the con­cu­bine mores. Un­der these mores a man might have only one wife, but he could main­tain sex re­la­tions with any num­ber of con­cu­bines. Con­cu­bi­nage was the step­ping­stone to mo­nog­amy, the first move away from frank polyg­yny. The con­cu­bines of the Jews, Ro­mans, and Chi­nese were very fre­quently the hand­maid­ens of the wife. Later on, as among the Jews, the le­gal wife was looked upon as the mother of all chil­dren born to the hus­band.

83:5.13The olden taboos on sex re­la­tions with a preg­nant or nurs­ing wife tended greatly to fos­ter polyg­yny. Prim­i­tive women aged very early be­cause of fre­quent child­bear­ing cou­pled with hard work. (Such over­bur­dened wives only man­aged to ex­ist by virtue of the fact that they were put in iso­la­tion one week out of each month when they were not heavy with child.) Such a wife of­ten grew tired of bear­ing chil­dren and would re­quest her hus­band to take a sec­ond and younger wife, one able to help with both child­bear­ing and the do­mes­tic work. The new wives were there­fore usu­ally hailed with de­light by the older spouses; there ex­isted noth­ing on the or­der of sex jeal­ousy.

83:5.14The num­ber of wives was only lim­ited by the abil­ity of the man to pro­vide for them. Wealthy and able men wanted large num­bers of chil­dren, and since the in­fant mor­tal­ity was very high, it re­quired an as­sem­bly of wives to re­cruit a large fam­ily. Many of these plu­ral wives were mere la­bor­ers, slave wives.

83:5.15Hu­man cus­toms evolve, but very slowly. The pur­pose of a harem was to build up a strong and nu­mer­ous body of blood kin for the sup­port of the throne. A cer­tain chief was once con­vinced that he should not have a harem, that he should be con­tented with one wife; so he promptly dis­missed his harem. The dis­sat­is­fied wives went to their homes, and their of­fended rel­a­tives swept down on the chief in wrath and did away with him then and there.