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The Political Elements of Civilization #2 | | |
I. THE ORIGINS OF GOVERNMENT #3 | | |
The unsocial instinct—Primitive anarchism—The clan and the tribe—The king—War #4 | | |
MAN is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world. If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous. #5 | | |
In the simplest societies there is hardly any government. Primitive hunters tend to accept regulation only when they join the hunting pack and prepare for action. The Bushmen usually live in solitary families; the Pygmies of Africa and the simplest natives of Australia admit only temporarily of political organization, and then scatter away to their family groups; the Tasmanians had no chiefs, no laws, no regular government; the Veddahs of Ceylon formed small circles according to family relationship, but had no government; the Kubus of Sumatra “live without men in authority,” every family governing itself; the Fuegians are seldom more than twelve together; the Tungus associate sparingly in groups of ten tents or so; the Australian “horde” is seldom larger than sixty souls.1 In such cases association and cooperation are for special purposes, like hunting; they do not rise to any permanent political order. #6 | | |
The earliest form of continuous social organization was the clan—a group of related families occupying a common tract of land, having the same totem, and governed by the same customs or laws. When a group of clans united under the same chief the tribe was formed, and became the second step on the way to the state. But this was a slow development; many groups had no chiefs at all,2 and many more seem to have tolerated them only in time of war.3 Instead of democracy being a wilted feather in the cap of our own age, it appears at its best in several primitive groups where such government as exists is merely the rule of the family-heads of the clan, and no arbitrary authority is allowed.4 The Iroquois and Delaware Indians recognized no laws or restraints beyond the natural order of the family and the clan; their chiefs had modest powers, which might at any time be ended by the elders of the tribe. The Omaha Indians were ruled by a Council of Seven, who deliberated until they came to a unanimous agreement; add this to the famous League of the Iroquois, by which many tribes bound themselves—and honored their pledge—to keep the peace, and one sees no great gap between these “savages” and the modern states that bind themselves revocably to peace in the League of Nations. #7 | | |
It is war that makes the chief, the king and the state, just as it is these that make war. In Samoa the chief had power during war, but at other times no one paid much attention to him. The Dyaks had no other government than that of each family by its head; in case of strife they chose their bravest warrior to lead them, and obeyed him strictly; but once the conflict was ended they literally sent him about his business.5 In the intervals of peace it was the priest, or head magician, who had most authority and influence; and when at last a permanent kingship developed as the usual mode of government among a majority of tribes, it combined—and derived from—the offices of warrior, father and priest. Societies are ruled by two powers: in peace by the word, in crises by the sword; force is used only when indoctrination fails. Law and myth have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries, cooperating or taking turns in the management of mankind; until our own day no state dared separate them, and perhaps tomorrow they will be united again. #8 | | |
How did war lead to the state? It is not that men were naturally inclined to war. Some lowly peoples are quite peaceful; and the Eskimos could not understand why Europeans of the same pacific faith should hunt one another like seals and steal one another’s land. “How well it is”—they apostrophized their soil—“that you are covered with ice and snow! How well it is that if in your rocks there are gold and silver, for which the Christians are so greedy, it is covered with so much snow that they cannot get at it! Your unfruitfulness makes us happy, and saves us from molestation.”6 Nevertheless, primitive life was incarnadined with intermittent war. Hunters fought for happy hunting grounds still rich in prey, herders fought for new pastures for their flocks, tillers fought for virgin soil; all of them, at times, fought to avenge a murder, or to harden and discipline their youth, or to interrupt the monotony of life, or for simple plunder and rape; very rarely for religion. There were institutions and customs for the limitation of slaughter, as among ourselves—certain hours, days, weeks or months during which no gentleman savage would kill; certain functionaries who were inviolable, certain roads neutralized, certain markets and asylums set aside for peace; and the League of the Iroquois maintained the “Great Peace” for three hundred years.7 But for the most part war was the favorite instrument of natural selection among primitive nations and groups. #9 | | |
Its results were endless. It acted as a ruthless eliminator of weak peoples, and raised the level of the race in courage, violence, cruelty, intelligence and skill. It stimulated invention, made weapons that became useful tools, and arts of war that became arts of peace. (How many railroads today begin in strategy and end in trade!) Above all, war dissolved primitive communism and anarchism, introduced organization and discipline, and led to the enslavement of prisoners, the subordination of classes, and the growth of government. Property was the mother, war was the father, of the state. #10 | | |
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As the organization of force—The village community—The psychological aides of the state #12 | | |
“A herd of blonde beasts of prey,” says Nietzsche, “a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organization and all its organizing power pounces with its terrible claws upon a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, . . . such is the origin of the state.”8 “The state as distinct from tribal organization,” says Lester Ward, “begins with the conquest of one race by another.”9 “Everywhere,” says Oppenheimer, “we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state.”10 “Violence,” says Ratzenhofer, “is the agent which has created the state.”11 The state, says Gumplowicz, is the result of conquest, the establishment of the victors as a ruling caste over the vanquished.12 “The state,” says Sumner, “is the product of force, and exists by force.”13 #13 | | |
This violent subjection is usually of a settled agricultural group by a tribe of hunters and herders.14 For agriculture teaches men pacific ways, inures them to a prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day’s toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of the chase, and hardly more perilous; when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with modern ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.I #14 | | |
The state is a late development, and hardly appears before the time of written history. For it presupposes a change in the very principle of social organization—from kinship to domination; and in primitive societies the former is the rule. Domination succeeds best where it binds diverse natural groups into an advantageous unity of order and trade. Even such conquest is seldom lasting except where the progress of invention has strengthened the strong by putting into their hands new tools and weapons for suppressing revolt. In permanent conquest the principle of domination tends to become concealed and almost unconscious; the French who rebelled in 1789 hardly realized, until Camille Desmoulins reminded them, that the aristocracy that had ruled them for a thousand years had come from Germany and had subjugated them by force. Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber’s grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property. Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag. #15 | | |
The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order. As trade unites clans and tribes, relations spring up that depend not on kinship but on contiguity, and therefore require an artificial principle of regulation. The village community may serve as an example: it displaced tribe and clan as the mode of local organization, and achieved a simple, almost democratic government of small areas through a concourse of family-heads; but the very existence and number of such communities created a need for some external force that could regulate their interrelations and weave them into a larger economic web. The state, ogre though it was in its origin, supplied this need; it became not merely an organized force, but an instrument for adjusting the interests of the thousand conflicting groups that constitute a complex society. It spread the tentacles of its power and law over wider and wider areas, and though it made external war more destructive than before, it extended and maintained internal peace; the state may be defined as internal peace for external war. Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all. What an interregnum meant to a society accustomed to government may be judged from the behavior of the Baganda, among whom, when the king died, every man had to arm himself; for the lawless ran riot, killing and plundering everywhere.15 “Without autocratic rule,” as Spencer said, “the evolution of society could not have commenced.”16 #16 | | |
A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect. Hence the state, in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of indoctrination—the family, the church, the school—to build in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand policemen, and prepared the public mind for that docile coherence which is indispensable in war. Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the “subject”II sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the State. #17 | | |
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Law-lessness—Law and custom—Revenge—Fines—Courts—Ordeal—The duel—Punishment—Primitive freedom #19 | | |
Law comes with property, marriage and government; the lowest societies manage to get along without it. “I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East,” said Alfred Russel Wallace, “who have no law or law-courts but the public opinion of the village freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellows, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a community all are nearly equal.”17 Herman Melville writes similarly of the Marquesas Islanders: “During the time I have lived among the Typees no one was ever put upon his trial for any violence to the public. Everything went on in the valley with a harmony and smoothness unparalleled, I will venture to assert, in the most select, refined, and pious associations of mortals in Christendom.”18 The old Russian Government established courts of law in the Aleutian Islands, but in fifty years those courts found no employment. “Crime and offenses,” reports Brinton, “were so infrequent under the social system of the Iroquois that they can scarcely be said to have had a penal code.”19 Such are the ideal—perhaps the idealized—conditions for whose return the anarchist perennially pines. #20 | | |
Certain amendments must be made to these descriptions. Natural societies are comparatively free from law first because they are ruled by customs as rigid and inviolable as any law; and secondly because crimes of violence, in the beginning, are considered to be private matters, and are left to bloody personal revenge. #21 | | |
Underneath all the phenomena of society is the great terra firma of custom, that bedrock of time-hallowed modes of thought and action which provides a society with some measure of steadiness and order through all absence, changes, and interruptions of law. Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual. It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy. A law of economy works in instinct and habit, in custom and convention: the most convenient mode of response to repeated stimuli or traditional situations is automatic response. Thought and innovation are disturbances of regularity, and are tolerated only for indispensable readaptations, or promised gold. #22 | | |
When to this natural basis of custom a supernatural sanction is added by religion, and the ways of one’s ancestors are also the will of the gods, then custom becomes stronger than law, and subtracts substantially from primitive freedom. To violate law is to win the admiration of half the populace, who secretly envy anyone who can outwit this ancient enemy; to violate custom is to incur almost universal hostility. For custom rises out of the people, whereas law is forced upon them from above; law is usually a decree of the master, but custom is the natural selection of those modes of action that have been found most convenient in the experience of the group. Law partly replaces custom when the state replaces the natural order of the family, the clan, the tribe, and the village community; it more fully replaces custom when writing appears, and laws graduate from a code carried down in the memory of elders and priests into a system of legislation proclaimed in written tables. But the replacement is never complete; in the determination and judgment of human conduct custom remains to the end the force behind the law, the power behind the throne, the last “magistrate of men’s lives.” #23 | | |
The first stage in the evolution of law is personal revenge. “Vengeance is mine,” says the primitive individual; “I will repay.” Among the Indian tribes of Lower California every man was his own policeman, and administered justice in the form of such vengeance as he was strong enough to take. So in many early societies the murder of A by B led to the murder of B by A’s son or friend C, the murder of C by B’s son or friend D, and so on perhaps to the end of the alphabet; we may find examples among the purest-blooded American families of today. This principle of revenge persists throughout the history of law: it appears in the Lex TalionisIII—or Law of Retaliation—embodied in Roman Law; it plays a large rôle in the Code of Hammurabi, and in the “Mosaic” demand of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”; and it lurks behind most legal punishments even in our day. #24 | | |
The second step toward law and civilization in the treatment of crime was the substitution of damages for revenge. Very often the chief, to maintain internal harmony, used his power or influence to have the revengeful family content itself with gold or goods instead of blood. Soon a regular tariff arose, determining how much must be paid for an eye, a tooth, an arm, or a life; Hammurabi legislated extensively in such terms. The Abyssinians were so meticulous in this regard that when a boy fell from a tree upon his companion and killed him, the judges decided that the bereaved mother should send another of her sons into the tree to fall upon the culprit’s neck.20 The penalties assessed in cases of composition might vary with the sex, age and rank of the offender and the injured; among the Fijians, for example, petty larceny by a common man was considered a more heinous crime than murder by a chief.21 Throughout the history of law the magnitude of the crime has been lessened by the magnitude of the criminal.IV Since these fines or compositions, paid to avert revenge, required some adjudication of offenses and damages, a third step towards law was taken by the formation of courts; the chief or the elders or the priests sat in judgment to settle the conflicts of their people. Such courts were not always judgment seats; often they were boards of voluntary conciliation, which arranged some amicable settlement of the dispute.V For many centuries, and among many peoples, resort to courts remained optional; and where the offended party was dissatisfied with the judgment rendered, he was still free to seek personal revenge.22 #25 | | |
In many cases disputes were settled by a public contest between the parties, varying in bloodiness from a harmless boxing-match—as among the wise Eskimos—to a duel to the death. Frequently the primitive mind resorted to an ordeal not so much on the medieval theory that a deity would reveal the culprit as in the hope that the ordeal, however unjust, would end a feud that might otherwise embroil the tribe for generations. Sometimes accuser and accused were asked to choose between two bowls of food of which one was poisoned; the wrong party might be poisoned (usually not beyond redemption), but then the dispute was ended, since both parties ordinarily believed in the righteousness of the ordeal. Among some tribes it was the custom for a native who acknowledged his guilt to hold out his leg and permit the injured party to pierce it with a spear. Or the accused submitted to having spears thrown at him by his accusers; if they all missed him he was declared innocent; if he was hit, even by one, he was adjudged guilty, and the affair was closed.23 From such early forms the ordeal persisted through the laws of Moses and Hammurabi and down into the Middle Ages; the duel, which is one form of the ordeal, and which historians thought dead, is being revived in our own day. So brief and narrow, in some respects, is the span between primitive and modern man; so short is the history of civilization. #26 | | |
The fourth advance in the growth of law was the assumption, by the chief or the state, of the obligation to prevent and punish wrongs. It is but a step from settling disputes and punishing offenses to making some effort to prevent them. So the chief becomes not merely a judge but a lawgiver; and to the general body of “common law” derived from the customs of the group is added a body of “positive law,” derived from the decrees of the government; in the one case the laws grow up, in the other they are handed down. In either case the laws carry with them the mark of their ancestry, and reek with the vengeance which they tried to replace. Primitive punishments are cruel,24 because primitive society feels insecure; as social organization becomes more stable, punishments become less severe. #27 | | |
In general the individual has fewer “rights” in natural society than under civilization. Everywhere man is born in chains: the chains of heredity, of environment, of custom, and of law. The primitive individual moves always within a web of regulations incredibly stringent and detailed; a thousand tabus restrict his action, a thousand terrors limit his will. The natives of New Zealand were apparently without laws, but in actual fact rigid custom ruled every aspect of their lives. Unchangeable and unquestionable conventions determined the sitting and the rising, the standing and the walking, the eating, drinking and sleeping of the natives of Bengal. The individual was hardly recognized as a separate entity in natural society; what existed was the family and the clan, the tribe and the village community; it was these that owned land and exercised power. Only with the coming of private property, which gave him economic authority, and of the state, which gave him a legal status and defined rights, did the individual begin to stand out as a distinct reality.25 Rights do not come to us from nature, which knows no rights except cunning and strength; they are privileges assured to individuals by the community as advantageous to the common good. Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization. #28 | | |
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Its function in civilization—The clan vs. the family—Growth of parental care—Unimportance of the father—Separation of the sexes—Mother-right—Status of woman—Her occupations—Her economic achievements—The patriarchate—The subjection of woman #30 | | |
As the basic needs of man are hunger and love, so the fundamental functions of social organization are economic provision and biological maintenance; a stream of children is as vital as a continuity of food. To institutions which seek material welfare and political order, society always adds institutions for the perpetuation of the race. Until the state—towards the dawn of the historic civilizations—becomes the central and permanent source of social order, the clan undertakes the delicate task of regulating the relations between the sexes and between the generations; and even after the state has been established, the essential government of mankind remains in that most deep-rooted of all historic institutions, the family. #31 | | |
It is highly improbable that the first human beings lived in isolated families, even in the hunting stage; for the inferiority of man in physiological organs of defense would have left such families a prey to marauding beasts. Usually, in nature, those organisms that are poorly equipped for individual defense live in groups, and find in united action a means of survival in a world bristling with tusks and claws and impenetrable hides. Presumably it was so with man; he saved himself by solidarity in the hunting-pack and the clan. When economic relations and political mastery replaced kinship as the principle of social organization, the clan lost its position as the substructure of society; at the bottom it was supplanted by the family, at the top it was superseded by the state. Government took over the problem of maintaining order, while the family assumed the tasks of reorganizing industry and carrying on the race. #32 | | |
Among the lower animals there is no care of progeny; consequently eggs are spawned in great number, and some survive and develop while the great majority are eaten or destroyed. Most fish lay a million eggs per year; a few species of fish show a modest solicitude for their offspring, and find half a hundred eggs per year sufficient for their purposes. Birds care better for their young, and hatch from five to twelve eggs yearly; mammals, whose very name suggests parental care, master the earth with an average of three young per female per year.26 Throughout the animal world fertility and destruction decrease as parental care increases; throughout the human world the birth rate and the death rate fall together as civilization rises. Better family care makes possible a longer adolescence, in which the young receive fuller training and development before they are flung upon their own resources; and the lowered birth rate releases human energy for other activities than reproduction. #33 | | |
Since it was the mother who fulfilled most of the parental functions, the family was at first (so far as we can pierce the mists of history) organized on the assumption that the position of the man in the family was superficial and incidental, while that of the woman was fundamental and supreme. In some existing tribes, and probably in the earliest human groups the physiological rôle of the male in reproduction appears to have escaped notice quite as completely as among animals, who rut and mate and breed with happy unconsciousness of cause and effect. The Trobriand Islanders attribute pregnancy not to any commerce of the sexes, but to the entrance of a baloma, or ghost, into the woman. Usually the ghost enters while the woman is bathing; “a fish has bitten me,” the girl reports. “When,” says Malinowski, “I asked who was the father of an illegitimate child, there was only one answer—that there was no father, since the girl was unmarried. If, then, I asked, in quite plain terms, who was the physiological father, the question was not understood. . . . The answer would be: ‘It is a baloma who gave her this child.’” These islanders had a strange belief that the baloma would more readily enter a girl given to loose relations with men; nevertheless, in choosing precautions against pregnancy, the girls preferred to avoid bathing at high tide rather than to forego relations with men.27 It is a delightful story, which must have proved a great convenience in the embarrassing aftermath of generosity; it would be still more delightful if it had been invented for anthropologists as well as for husbands. #34 | | |
In Melanesia intercourse was recognized as the cause of pregnancy, but unmarried girls insisted on blaming some article in their diet.28 Even where the function of the male was understood, sex relationships were so irregular that it was never a simple matter to determine the father. Consequently the quite primitive mother seldom bothered to inquire into the paternity of her child; it belonged to her, and she belonged not to a husband but to her father—or her brother—and the clan; it was with these that she remained, and these were the only male relatives whom her child would know.29 The bonds of affection between brother and sister were usually stronger than between husband and wife. The husband, in many cases, remained in the family and clan of his mother, and saw his wife only as a clandestine visitor. Even in classical civilization the brother was dearer than the husband: it was her brother, not her husband, that the wife of Intaphernes saved from the wrath of Darius; it was for her brother, not for her husband, that Antigone sacrificed herself.30 “The notion that a man’s wife is the nearest person in the world to him is a relatively modern notion, and one which is restricted to a comparatively small part of the human race.”31 #35 | | |
So slight is the relation between father and children in primitive society that in a great number of tribes the sexes live apart. In Australia and British New Guinea, in Africa and Micronesia, in Assam and Burma, among the Aleuts, Eskimos and Samoyeds, and here and there over the earth, tribes may still be found in which there is no visible family life; the men live apart from the women, and visit them only now and then; even the meals are taken separately. In northern Papua it is not considered right for a man to be seen associating socially with a woman, even if she is the mother of his children. In Tahiti “family life is quite unknown.” Out of this segregation of the sexes come those secret fraternities—usually of males—which appear everywhere among primitive races, and serve most often as a refuge against women.32 They resemble our modern fraternities in another point—their hierarchical organization. #36 | | |
The simplest form of the family, then, was the woman and her children, living with her mother or her brother in the clan; such an arrangement was a natural outgrowth of the animal family of the mother and her litter, and of the biological ignorance of primitive man. An alternative early form was “matrilocal marriage”: the husband left his clan and went to live with the clan and family of his wife, laboring for her or with her in the service of her parents. Descent, in such cases, was traced through the female line, and inheritance was through the mother; sometimes even the kingship passed down through her rather than through the male.33 This “mother-right” was not a “matriarchate”—it did not imply the rule of women over men.34 Even when property was transmitted through the woman she had little power over it; she was used as a means of tracing relationships which, through primitive laxity or freedom, were otherwise obscure.35 It-is true that in any system of society the woman exercises a certain authority, rising naturally out of her importance in the home, out of her function as the dispenser of food, and out of the need that the male has of her, and her power to refuse him. It is also true that there have been, occasionally, women rulers among some South African tribes; that in the Pelew Islands the chief did nothing of consequence without the advice of a council of elder women; that among the Iroquois the squaws had an equal right, with the men, of speaking and voting in the tribal council;36 and that among the Seneca Indians women held great power, even to the selection of the chief. But these are rare and exceptional cases. All in all the position of woman in early societies was one of subjection verging upon slavery. Her periodic disability, her unfamiliarity with weapons, the biological absorption of her strength in carrying, nursing and rearing children, handicapped her in the war of the sexes, and doomed her to a subordinate status in all but the very lowest and the very highest societies. Nor was her position necessarily to rise with the development of civilization; it was destined to be lower in Periclean Greece than among the North American Indians; it was to rise and fall with her strategic importance rather than with the culture and morals of men. #37 | | |
In the hunting stage she did almost all the work except the actual capture of the game. In return for exposing himself to the hardships and risks of the chase, the male rested magnificently for the greater part of the year. The woman bore her children abundantly, reared them, kept the hut or home in repair, gathered food in woods and fields, cooked, cleaned, and made the clothing and the boots.37 Because the men, when the tribe moved, had to be ready at any moment to fight off attack, they carried nothing but their weapons; the women carried all the rest. Bush-women were used as servants and beasts of burden; if they proved too weak to keep up with the march, they were abandoned.38 When the natives of the Lower Murray saw pack oxen they thought that these were the wives of the whites.39 The differences in strength which now divide the sexes hardly existed in those days, and are now environmental rather than innate: woman, apart from her biological disabilities, was almost the equal of man in stature, endurance, resourcefulness and courage; she was not yet an ornament, a thing of beauty, or a sexual toy; she was a robust animal, able to perform arduous work for long hours, and, if necessary, to fight to the death for her children or her clan. “Women,” said a chieftain of the Chippewas, “are created for work. One of them can draw or carry as much as two men. They also pitch our tents, make our clothes, mend them, and keep us warm at night. . . . We absolutely cannot get along without them on a journey. They do everything and cost only a little; for since they must be forever cooking, they can be satisfied in lean times by licking their fingers.”40 #38 | | |
Most economic advances, in early society, were made by the woman rather than the man. While for centuries he clung to his ancient ways of hunting and herding, she developed agriculture near the camp, and those busy arts of the home which were to become the most important industries of later days. From the “wool-bearing tree,” as the Greeks called the cotton plant, the primitive woman rolled thread and made cotton cloth.41 It was she, apparently, who developed sewing, weaving, basketry, pottery, woodworking, and building; and in many cases it was she who carried on primitive trade.42 It was she who developed the home, slowly adding man to the list of her domesticated animals, and training him in those social dispositions and amenities which are the psychological basis and cement of civilization. #39 | | |
But as agriculture became more complex and brought larger rewards, the stronger sex took more and more of it into its own hands.43 The growth of cattle-breeding gave the man a new source of wealth, stability and power; even agriculture, which must have seemed so prosaic to the mighty Nimrods of antiquity, was at last accepted by the wandering male, and the economic leadership which tillage had for a time given to women was wrested from them by the men. The application to agriculture of those very animals that woman had first domesticated led to her replacement by the male in the control of the fields; the advance from the hoe to the plough put a premium upon physical strength, and enabled the man to assert his supremacy. The growth of transmissible property in cattle and in the products of the soil led to the sexual subordination of woman, for the male now demanded from her that fidelity which he thought would enable him to pass on his accumulations to children presumably his own. Gradually the man had his way: fatherhood became recognized, and property began to descend through the male; mother-right yielded to father-right; and the patriarchal family, with the oldest male at its head, became the economic, legal, political and moral unit of society. The gods, who had been mostly feminine, became great bearded patriarchs, with such harems as ambitious men dreamed of in their solitude. #40 | | |
This passage to the patriarchal—father-ruled—family was fatal to the position of woman. In all essential aspects she and her children became the property first of her father or oldest brother, then of her husband. She was bought in marriage precisely as a slave was bought in the market. She was bequeathed as property when her husband died; and in some places (New Guinea, the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, India, etc.) she was strangled and buried with her dead husband, or was expected to commit suicide, in order to attend upon him in the other world.44 The father had now the right to treat, give, sell or lend his wives and daughters very much as he pleased, subject only to the social condemnation of other fathers exercising the same rights. While the male reserved the privilege of extending his sexual favors beyond his home, the woman—under patriarchal institutions—was vowed to complete chastity before marriage, and complete fidelity after it. The double standard was born. #41 | | |
The general subjection of woman which had existed in the hunting stage, and had persisted, in diminished form, through the period of mother-right, became now more pronounced and merciless than before. In ancient Russia, on the marriage of a daughter, the father struck her gently with a whip, and then presented the whip to the bridegroom.45 as a sign that her beatings were now to come from a rejuvenated hand. Even the American Indians, among whom mother-right survived indefinitely, treated their women harshly, consigned to them all drudgery, and often called them dogs.46 Everywhere the life of a woman was considered cheaper than that of a man; and when girls were born there was none of the rejoicing that marked the coming of a male. Mothers sometimes destroyed their female children to keep them from misery. In Fiji wives might be sold at pleasure, and the usual price was a musket.47 Among some tribes man and wife did not sleep together, lest the breath of the woman should enfeeble the man; in Fiji it was not thought proper for a man to sleep regularly at home; in New Caledonia the wife slept in a shed, while the man slept in the house. In Fiji dogs were allowed in some of the temples, but women were excluded from all;48 such exclusion of women from religious services survives in Islam to this day. Doubtless woman enjoyed at all times the mastery that comes of long-continued speech; the men might be rebuffed, harangued, even—now and then—beaten.49 But all in all the man was lord, the woman was servant. The Kaffir bought women like slaves, as a form of life-income insurance; when he had a sufficient number of wives he could rest for the remainder of his days; they would do all the work for him. Some tribes of ancient India reckoned the women of a family as part of the property inheritance, along with the domestic animals;50 nor did the last commandment of Moses distinguish very clearly in this matter. Throughout negro Africa women hardly differed from slaves, except that they were expected to provide sexual as well as economic satisfaction. Marriage began as a form of the law of property, as a part of the institution of slavery.51 #42 | | |
I It is a law that holds only for early societies, since under more complex conditions a variety of other factors—greater wealth, better weapons, higher intelligence—contribute to determine the issue. So Egypt was conquered not only by Hyksos, Ethiopian, Arab and Turkish nomads, but also by the settled civilizations of Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome and England—though not until these nations had become hunters and nomads on an imperialistic scale. #43 | | |
II Note how this word betrays the origin of the state. #44 | | |
III A phrase apparently invented by Cicero. #45 | | |
IV Perhaps an exception should be made in the case of the Brahmans, who, by the Code of Manu (VIII, 336-8), were called upon to bear greater punishments for the same crime than members of lower castes; but this regulation was well honored in the breach. #46 | | |
V Some of our most modern cities are trying to revive this ancient time-saving institution. #47 | | |
