Marriage and Family Life

84:4.1Gen­er­ally speak­ing, dur­ing any age woman’s sta­tus is a fair cri­te­rion of the evo­lu­tion­ary prog­ress of mar­riage as a so­cial in­sti­tu­tion, while the prog­ress of mar­riage it­self is a rea­son­ably ac­cu­rate gauge reg­is­ter­ing the ad­vances of hu­man civ­i­liza­tion.

84:4.2Woman’s sta­tus has al­ways been a so­cial para­dox; she has al­ways been a shrewd man­ager of men; she has al­ways cap­i­tal­ized man’s stronger sex urge for her own in­ter­ests and to her own ad­vance­ment. By trad­ing sub­tly upon her sex charms, she has of­ten been able to ex­er­cise dom­i­nant power over man, even when held by him in ab­ject slav­ery.

84:4.3Early woman was not to man a friend, sweet­heart, lover, and part­ner but rather a piece of prop­erty, a ser­vant or slave and, later on, an eco­nomic part­ner, play­thing, and child­bearer. Nonethe­less, proper and sat­is­fac­tory sex re­la­tions have al­ways in­volved the el­e­ment of choice and co-op­er­a­tion by woman, and this has al­ways given in­tel­li­gent women con­sid­er­able in­flu­ence over their im­me­di­ate and per­sonal stand­ing, re­gard­less of their so­cial po­si­tion as a sex. But man’s dis­trust and sus­pi­cion were not helped by the fact that women were all along com­pelled to re­sort to shrewd­ness in the ef­fort to al­le­vi­ate their bond­age.

84:4.4The sexes have had great dif­fi­culty in un­der­stand­ing each other. Man found it hard to un­der­stand woman, re­gard­ing her with a strange mix­ture of ig­no­rant mis­trust and fear­ful fas­ci­na­tion, if not with sus­pi­cion and con­tempt. Many tribal and racial tra­di­tions rel­e­gate trou­ble to Eve, Pan­dora, or some other rep­re­sen­ta­tive of wom­ankind. These nar­ra­tives were al­ways dis­torted so as to make it ap­pear that the woman brought evil upon man; and all this in­di­cates the one­time uni­ver­sal dis­trust of woman. Among the rea­sons cited in sup­port of a celi­bate priest­hood, the chief was the base­ness of woman. The fact that most sup­posed witches were women did not im­prove the olden rep­u­ta­tion of the sex.

84:4.5Men have long re­garded women as pe­cu­liar, even ab­nor­mal. They have even be­lieved that women did not have souls; there­fore were they de­nied names. Dur­ing early times there ex­isted great fear of the first sex re­la­tion with a woman; hence it be­came the cus­tom for a priest to have ini­tial in­ter­course with a vir­gin. Even a woman’s shadow was thought to be dan­ger­ous.

84:4.6Child­bear­ing was once gen­er­ally looked upon as ren­der­ing a woman dan­ger­ous and un­clean. And many tribal mores de­creed that a mother must un­dergo ex­ten­sive pu­rifi­ca­tion cer­e­monies sub­se­quent to the birth of a child. Ex­cept among those groups where the hus­band par­tic­i­pated in the ly­ing-in, the ex­pec­tant mother was shunned, left alone. The an­cients even avoided hav­ing a child born in the house. Fi­nally, the old women were per­mit­ted to at­tend the mother dur­ing la­bor, and this prac­tice gave ori­gin to the pro­fes­sion of mid­wifery. Dur­ing la­bor, scores of fool­ish things were said and done in an ef­fort to fa­cil­i­tate de­liv­ery. It was the cus­tom to sprin­kle the new­born with holy wa­ter to pre­vent ghost in­ter­fer­ence.

84:4.7Among the un­mixed tribes, child­birth was com­par­a­tively easy, oc­cu­py­ing only two or three hours; it is sel­dom so easy among the mixed races. If a woman died in child­birth, es­pe­cially dur­ing the de­liv­ery of twins, she was be­lieved to have been guilty of spirit adul­tery. Later on, the higher tribes looked upon death in child­birth as the will of heaven; such moth­ers were re­garded as hav­ing per­ished in a no­ble cause.

84:4.8The so-called mod­esty of women re­spect­ing their cloth­ing and the ex­po­sure of the per­son grew out of the deadly fear of be­ing ob­served at the time of a men­strual pe­riod. To be thus de­tected was a griev­ous sin, the vi­o­la­tion of a taboo. Un­der the mores of olden times, ev­ery woman, from ado­les­cence to the end of the child­bear­ing pe­riod, was sub­jected to com­plete fam­ily and so­cial quar­an­tine one full week each month. Ev­ery­thing she might touch, sit upon, or lie upon was “de­filed.” It was for long the cus­tom to bru­tally beat a girl af­ter each monthly pe­riod in an ef­fort to drive the evil spirit out of her body. But when a woman passed be­yond the child­bear­ing age, she was usu­ally treated more con­sid­er­ately, be­ing ac­corded more rights and priv­i­leges. In view of all this it was not strange that women were looked down upon. Even the Greeks held the men­stru­at­ing woman as one of the three great causes of de­file­ment, the other two be­ing pork and gar­lic.

84:4.9How­ever fool­ish these olden no­tions were, they did some good since they gave over­worked fe­males, at least when young, one week each month for wel­come rest and prof­itable med­i­ta­tion. Thus could they sharpen their wits for deal­ing with their male as­so­ciates the rest of the time. This quar­an­tine of women also pro­tected men from over-sex in­dul­gence, thereby in­di­rectly con­tribut­ing to the re­stric­tion of pop­u­la­tion and to the en­hance­ment of self-con­trol.

84:4.10A great ad­vance was made when a man was de­nied the right to kill his wife at will. Like­wise, it was a for­ward step when a woman could own the wed­ding gifts. Later, she gained the le­gal right to own, con­trol, and even dis­pose of prop­erty, but she was long de­prived of the right to hold of­fice in ei­ther church or state. Woman has al­ways been treated more or less as prop­erty, right up to and in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury af­ter Christ. She has not yet gained world-wide free­dom from seclu­sion un­der man’s con­trol. Even among ad­vanced peo­ples, man’s at­tempt to pro­tect woman has al­ways been a tacit as­ser­tion of su­pe­ri­or­ity.

84:4.11But prim­i­tive women did not pity them­selves as their more re­cently lib­er­ated sis­ters are wont to do. They were, af­ter all, fairly happy and con­tented; they did not dare to en­vi­sion a bet­ter or dif­fer­ent mode of ex­is­tence.