372. Virginity. We have many examples of peoples amongst whom girls are entirely free until married, on the rational ground that they are under obligations to nobody. They are under no taboo, marriage being the first application of the sex taboo. Farnell1173 says that the first sense of parthenos was not "virgin," but unmarried. The Oriental goddess of impure love was parthenos. Artemis was perhaps, at first, a goddess of people who had not yet settled marriage mores, but had the mother family, amongst whom women were powerful. In the development of the father family fathers restricted daughters in order to make them more valuable as wives. Here comes in the notion of virginity and pre-nuptial chastity. This is really a negative and exclusive notion. It is an appeal to masculine vanity, and is a singular extension of the monopoly principle. His wife is to be his from the cradle, when he did not know her. Here, then, is a new basis for the sex honor of women and the jealousy of men. Chastity for the unmarried meant—no one; for the married—none but the husband. The mores extended to take in this doctrine, and it has passed into the heart of the mores of all civilized peoples, to whom it seems axiomatic or "natural." It has often been declared absurd that sex honor, especially for women, should be made to depend on a negative. It seems to make an ascetic and arbitrary standard for everyday life. In fact, however, the negation is imposed by the nature of the sex passion and by the conditions of human life. The passion tends to excess. What is "natural" is therefore evil. Negation, restraint, renunciation, are imposed by expediency. Perhaps it is the only case in which man is driven to error and evil by a great force in his nature, and is thus forced, if he would live well, to find a discipline for himself in intelligent self-control and in arbitrary rules. This would justify the current usage of language in which "morals" refers especially to the sex relation.

373. Chastity for men. In modern times there is a new extension of idealization, by which it is attempted to extend to men the same standard of chastity and duty of chastity as to women. Two questions are here confused: (a) whether unmarried men and women are to be bound by the same obligation of chastity; (b) whether married men and women are to be bound by the same rule of exclusion. The Hindoo lawgivers demand the same fidelity from husband and wife.1174 In the treatise on Economics which is ascribed to Aristotle,1175 although there is no dogmatic statement of law or duty, all the prescriptions for the husband and wife are the same, and the man is said to injure the wife by infidelity. Aristotle1176 propounds the rule of taboo on all sex relations except in marriage, which is the doctrine of pair marriage

(sec. 383). In the Economicus of Xenophon1177 the relations of husband and wife are expounded at length in terms of great respect and esteem for a wife. The work seems to be rhetorical and dramatic, not actual, and it is represented as very exceptional and astonishing that such relations should exist between any man and his wife. In Plutarch's Morals the tract on "Conjugal Precepts" is written in an elevated tone. It is not specific and seems open to the suspicion of being a "pose." However, the doctrine is that of equal duty for husband and wife, and it may be taken to prove that that was the doctrine of the neostoics. Seneca wrote, "You know that it is a base thing that he who demands chastity of his wife should himself corrupt the wives of others."1178 And again, "Let him know that it will be the worst kind of an injury to his wife for him to have a mistress."1179 Augustine tells a story that Antoninus Pius granted a man a divorce for adultery of his wife, provided the man could show that he had, by his mode of life, maintained fidelity to his wife, and that the emperor added the dictum that "it would be unjust that a man should be able to exact a fidelity which he did not himself observe."1180 Augustine himself maintained the full equality of spouses in rights and duties. Ulpian said that "it seems to be very unjust that a man demands chastity of his wife while he himself does not show an example of it." This dictum got into the Digest where the jurists of all succeeding ages could have it before their eyes.1181 It did not often arrest their attention. These utterances, so far as they are sincere expressions of convictions, do not represent the conduct of any school, and perhaps not even that of the men who recorded them. They belong to a period of great corruption of the sex mores of the upper classes, and of rapid extension of such corruption to the lower classes. A character in Plautus's comedy of The Merchant1182 complains of the difference in codes for unchaste husbands and unchaste wives. If every woman has to be content with one husband, why should not every man be forced to be content with one wife? Jerome made the most explicit statement of the Christian rule: "Amongst us [Christians] what is not permitted to women is not permitted to men. The same obligation is held to rest on equal conditions."1183 This is the assertion of a celibate and an ascetic. Perhaps it may be held to apply to pre-marital duty, but it is doubtful whether he had that in mind. All the other statements quoted apply only to the mutuality of conjugal duty. Of all of them it must be said that they are isolated flights of moral enthusiasm, and by no means present the prevailing code or the mores of the time. They do not express the life rules which have ever yet been observed by any but selected and limited classes in any society. The writings of Chrysostom and Augustine show plainly that the Christians of Jerome's time did not practice the doctrine which he uttered. It has never yet been a part of the mores of any society that the same standards of chastity should be enforced against both sexes before marriage. "At the present day, although the standard of morals is far higher than in pagan Rome, it may be questioned whether the inequality of the censure which is bestowed on the two sexes is not as great as in the days of paganism."1184 Conjugal affection has been the great cause of masculine fidelity in marriage. Laertes refused to take Eurykleia lest he should hurt his wife's feelings.1185 Plutarch, in his tract on "Love," dwells upon its controlling power, its exclusiveness, and the devotion it cultivates. Observation and experience of this kind may have produced the modern conviction that a strong affection between spouses is the best guarantee of happiness and truth. This conviction, with the code which belongs with it, have spread further and further, through wider and wider classes, and it is now the accepted moral principle that there ought to be no sex gratification except inside of pair marriage. What that means is that no one could formulate and maintain in public discussion any other rule as more reasonable and expedient to be the guiding principle of the mores, although it has not yet become such. Also, "the fundamental truth that the same act can never be at once venial for a man to demand and infamous for a woman to accord, though nobly enforced by the early Christians, has not passed into the popular sentiment of Christendom."1186 Passing by the assertion that the early Christians enforced any such rule, which may well be questioned, we ask: Why are these views not in the mores? Undoubtedly it is because they are dogmatic in form, invented and imposed by theological authority1187 or philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience of life and cannot be verified by it. Woman bears an unequal share of the responsibilities and duties of sex and reproduction just as certainly and justly as man bears an unequal share of the responsibilities and duties of property, war, and politics. The reasons are in ultimate physiological facts by virtue of which one is a woman and the other is a man.

374. Love marriage. Conjugal affection. "Wife." It must be assumed that even in the lowest form of society a man may have preferred one woman to others, but love between a man and a woman is not a phenomenon of uncivilized society. It begins with wealth and luxury. Love stories can be found in very early folklore, legends, and poetry, but they belong to idealization, to romance and unreality. Realistic love stories are now hardly a century old. It is evident that they lead idealization. They put cases and solve them, and every reader forms a judgment whether the case has actuality and whether the solution is correct. Love in half-civilization and in antiquity was erotic only. The Greeks conceived of it as a madness by which a person was afflicted through the caprice or malevolence of some god or goddess. Such a passion is necessarily evanescent. The ancient peoples in general, and the Semites in particular, did not think this passion an honorable or trustworthy basis of marriage. The Kaffirs think that a Christian wife, married for love, is shameful. They compare her to a cat, the only animal which, amongst them, has no value, but is obtained as a gift.1188 The gandharva marriage of the Hindoos was a love marriage, and was not honorable. It was free love and became, in practice, an entirely informal union without institutional guarantees.1189 This would be, at best, a conscience marriage, to which a man would adhere from a sense of duty, the strength of which would depend on personal character only.

In all these cases the views entertained were justified, if love meant only erotic passion. On the other hand, we have seen (sec. 362) that conjugal love controls the will by the highest motives. It is based on esteem, confidence, and habit. It presents all varieties and degrees, from exploitation on one side and servility on the other, to good-fellowship on both sides. It depends on the way in which each pair arranges its affairs, develops its sentiments, and forms its habits. Conjugal affection makes great demands on the good sense, spirit of accommodation, and good nature of each. These are very great pre-conditions. It is no wonder that they often fail. In no primitive or half-civilization does the word "wife" bear the connotations which it bears to us. In Levit. xxi. 1 a case may be seen in which a man's blood kin takes precedence of his wife. Arabs, in the time of Mohammed, did not think that the conjugal tie could be as serious and strong as the kin tie, because the former is institutional only; that is, it is a product of convention and contract.1190 Public demonstrations of love they thought offensive and insulting to the woman. People of rank often admitted no suitors for their daughters. It was thought a disgrace to give a daughter into the power of an outsider. They killed female infants, not, like the poor, because they could not afford to rear them, but from fear of incurring disgrace from them.1191 By veiling the women are excluded from all social intercourse with men and from any share in intellectual interests.1192 They cannot win conjugal affection—certainly not from educated men. Erotic passion fills Mohammedan poetry and is cultivated at home. The few cultivated women of the higher classes emancipate themselves from moral restraints, often without concealment.1193 In Mohammed's last sermon he said: "You have rights against your wives and they have rights against you. They are bound not to violate marital fidelity and to commit no act of public wrong. If they do so, you have the power to beat them, yet without danger to their lives."1194 Islam is not a field in which conjugal affection could be expected to develop.1195 "A Japanese who should leave his father and mother for his wife would be looked upon as an outcast." Therefore the Bible "is regarded as irreligious and immoral."1196 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.

375. Heroic conjugal devotion. In general, the European analogy for the relation of husband and wife in the rest of the world, now or in past ages, would be rather that of master and servant. The erotic sentiment has generally been thought of as independent of marriage, possible in it, generally outside of it; and it has often been thought of as improper and disgusting between husband and wife. There is a poetical suggestion in Homer that marriages are made in heaven. Zeus is said to select a man's wife with a view to the fate allotted to him.1197 Achilles says that every wise and noble man cherishes his wife.1198 Ulysses says, "Nothing is better or more conducive to prosperity than that husband and wife should live together in concord."1199 Hector and Andromache manifested faultless conjugal affection. Penelope was a type of the devoted wife, a type which must be ranked lower than that of Andromache, because it does not imply equality of the spouses. Valerius Maximus (fl. 25 A.D.)1200 gave a chapter to "Conjugal Love." He found a few cases in which spouses, both male and female, had died for or on account of each other. They do not represent the mores. There is a tragic or heroic element in them all. That is the way in which conjugal love would strike the mind of an ancient man in his most serious moments. Apuleius1201 gives the case of Charites who had intense love for her husband. Her base lover was a victim of erotic passion. Stobæus (fifth or sixth century A.D.) collected and classified passages from Greek authors on various topics. Titles 63 to 73 are about women and marriage. The views expressed run to both extremes of approval and disapproval. No one of the writers has apparently any notion of conjugal affection. In some cases under the tyrannical Roman emperors of the first century women showed extreme wifely devotion.1202 Roman tombstones (not unimpeachable witnesses) testify to conjugal affection between spouses.1203 In the Icelandic sagas women show heroic devotion to their husbands, although they make their husbands much trouble by self-will and caprice.1204 The barbarian invaders of the Roman empire are reported to have been remarkable for conjugal fidelity. Salvianus excepts the Alemanni.

376. Hindoo models and ideals. In the Mahabharata, the heroic poem of Brahminism dating from about the beginning of the Christian era, much attention is given to beauty and love. Many marriages are made for love, which is regarded as the best motive. A love relation needed the approval of the girl's parents, otherwise it ran down to the gandharva form. A hero, who abducted a girl for his brother, released her when she pleaded that she loved another to whom she had given her promise, although her father did not yet know it. The favored lover renounced her on account of the abduction, but she said that she would never choose another. "Whether he lives long or only a short time, whether he is rich in virtue or poor, the husband is chosen once for all. When once the heart has decided and the word has been spoken, let the thing be done."1205 These words are now regarded in Hindostan as the completest and noblest possible expression of marriage and the woman's attitude to it. A model wife in the heroic period was amiable to all, and made herself beloved by politeness and friendliness, and by her virtue and proper behavior. She gave great attention to her parents-in-law. She was reserved in speech and submissive, and she charmed her husband by her grace, wit, and tenderness.1206 The Mahabharata contains episodes of strong devotion of men to their wives and of heroic self-sacrifice of wives for their husbands. In Hindostan now the relations of husband and wife are not mutual. The man's mother must always be the first to him. "This is in full accordance with the national sentiment which stigmatizes affection which asks for equal return as shop-keeping."1207 "Who talks of vulgar equality," asks the Hindoo wife, "when she may instead have the unspeakable blessedness of offering worship."1208

377. Slavonic sex mores. The southern Slavs and people of the Caucasus have allowed their sex mores to run into some extreme forms which to outsiders seem vicious. Young married women contract a very intimate relation to their bride attendants, of whom two attend a bride on her wedding day. She is but a girl, and is given to a man whom she never saw before, does not like, and never can like; she comes into a strange house where it is of the first importance for the rest of her life that she shall please her parents-in-law by the greatest humility and submission; she is forbidden by custom to approach her husband freely; she scarcely sees him during the day; yet she may freely converse with his brothers, who were her bride attendants. The elder one, if he is married, and if he is polite to her, becomes her best friend. An Albanian who has been away at work will not bring back a gift for his wife. He shows more attention to the wife of his elder brother. The Servian bride is ashamed of her marital relation, and thinks it indecent to address her husband in public, even after she has borne him children. He remains a stranger to her, and her relation to him is scarcely more than that of sex. Her brother she loves beyond any other. She will mourn for him with the deepest sorrow, but it would be a shame for a woman to mourn for her husband, much more for a bride to mourn for her bridegroom. In former times it was improper for a man to begin conjugal life immediately after marriage. The bride attendants, brothers of the groom, spent the first night by the side of the bride, and for the next three nights the mother or sister of the groom slept with the bride. The groom is reluctant. A Servian woman is derided if she has a child within a year after marriage. In some districts sex morality is very high, in others very low. In Carinthia it is worst. There, in the Gurkthal, the illegitimate births are twice as numerous as the legitimate, so that the marriage institution hardly exists. In Slavonic Croatia persons who marry are indifferent to each other's previous conduct with others. Amongst other southern Slavs, at a wedding, the groom must neither talk nor eat, out of shame, and the bride must weep while being dressed. It is reported from Bocca di Cattaro, in the Balkan peninsula, that public contempt is so severe against illicit acts by men before marriage that such acts are very rare amongst those who have any reputation or position to lose.1209

378. Russian sex mores. A custom widely prevalent through parts of Great Russia and the adjacent Slavonic regions, until the nineteenth century, was that the father married his son, as a boy, to a marriageable young woman, whom the father then took as his own concubine. When the son grew up his wife was advanced in life and the mother of several children. He then did what his father had done. The large house and joint family offered temptation to this custom, and has generally been believed to be to blame for it. Rhamm contradicts that opinion.1210 The same custom existed amongst the Bulgarians.1211 Another motive for it is suggested, that the father wanted to increase the number of laborers in the big house. In 1623, in Poland, the death penalty was provided for a man who should so abuse his daughter-in-law.1212 The same custom is reported from the Tamils of southeast India.1213 In the mountains on the southwestern frontier of Russia there was, in the eighteenth century, an almost entire lack of sex mores. Amongst all the Slavonic peoples females are in a very inferior status and owe formal deference to males. In Bulgaria the wives are from five to ten years older than the husbands, because boys of fourteen begin to make love, but to adult marriageable women.1214 All these facts make it a phenomenon worthy of special mention that the people of the Ukrain are very continent, cherish a high ideal of love between the sexes, and greatly dislike all improprieties in language and conversation.1215 The popular Russian wedding songs are sad. The bride is addressed as a happy child, free in her father's house, with a sad future before her, of which she is blissfully ignorant.1216 In Karelia "a bride radiant with happiness is an unknown sight. With the betrothal begins the time of tears, which lasts until the marriage feast in the house of the bridegroom. Even if she is happy and contented the mores require that she shall shed tears and affect sadness."1217 The "wailer" is a functionary in a Russian village. She teaches the bride to bewail the loss of her "maiden freedom."1218

379. Tribes of the Caucasus and Sahara. The Cherkess of the Caucasus live in big houses, in a joint family, under the authority of a patriarch. Wives were bought or captured in common, but so many as the men. Darinsky thinks that those who could, and wanted to, buy separate wives threatened the arrangement. Hence the men, in a body, opposed monogamic unions. Such unions were a crime against the crowd. Hence the customs arose which are now prevalent,—the concealment of all marital relations, the public ignoring of each other by the spouses, and the practical jokes and horseplay at weddings by boys and neighbors. It is a survival of old manifestations of opposition and disapproval.1219 The men of the tribes in Sahara are often absent for days together. This gives the women liberty. The men begrudge this and punish the women for assumed infidelity. Some of the women are famous prostitutes.1220

380. Mediæval sex mores. The mediæval sex mores were produced out of two opposite currents of thought,—that women were evil and dangerous and to be shunned, and that women were lovely and adorable, and worthy of reverence and worship. Both of these sets of ideas degenerated into folly and vice, and became modes of selfishness and luxury. Elaborate hypocrisy and insincerity became common. Technical definitions of terms were used to obscure their ethical significance. Minne came to have a bad meaning and was used for erotic passion. Courtoisie became a term for base solicitation.1221 Gower, in the Vox Clamantis (1382), tried to distinguish and specify sensual love. He inclines to the monkish view of women, but he describes good and noble women. Alanus ab Insulis in his De Planctu Naturae1222 bewailed the vices of mankind and the vicious relations of men and women. His aim is to distinguish between good and evil love. He wrote at the height of the woman cult. In the Romaunt de la Rose the thing discussed seems to be positive vice. It is said that the way to win women is by lavish gifts. The meretriciousness of women and their love of luxury are denounced. If a marriage turns out badly, the men say that God made it, but God is good, and evil is due to man.1223 In the Paston Letters (fifteenth century) marriage appears to be entirely mercenary.1224 A girl tells her lover what her father will give with her. If he is not satisfied he must discontinue his suit.1225 "My master asked mockingly if a man might not beat his own wife."1226 The one love match in the book is that of Margaret Paston with a man who was a servant in the family. Margaret's mother, the most interesting person in the Letters, although she left £20 to her grandson by this marriage, left nothing to her daughter. Schultz1227 thinks that marriages turned out as well in the Middle Ages as now, and that adultery was no more frequent; also that ecclesiastics were not then more licentious than now. He quotes freely from Geiler and Murner, who were leading moral preachers of the fifteenth century. Geiler preached in Strasburg Cathedral. Murner was a Franciscan. Geiler is incredibly coarse and outspoken. He pretended to state cases within his knowledge of men who made gain of their wives, and of wives who entered into arrangements with their husbands to make gain for both. He preached from these as illustrative cases and tried to dissuade both men and women from matrimony.1228 Chateau life was monotonous and stupid, especially for women, who were moreover partly secluded in special apartments. The young men and women had very little chance to meet. The hope of happiness for women was in marriage.1229 Although the woman's consent was necessary, she was controlled by her male relatives, even if a widow, but she had little individuality and generally welcomed a suitor at once.1230 The jongleurs of the twelfth century were vulgar vagabonds. Love, in their conception, is sensual, and women are treated by them with great levity. The women, in their songs, woo the men. In the thirteenth century women are described as more dignified and self-respecting. Siegfried flogged his wife black and blue.1231 Brunhild was also beaten by her husband. The women manifest great devotion to their husbands, especially in adversity, even fighting for them like men.1232 We are constantly shocked at the bad taste of behavior. At Lubeck, if a young widow was married, the crowd made an uproar in front of the house and the bridegroom was forced to stand at show on a certain four-cornered stone in the midst of noisy music "in order to establish the good name of himself and wife."1233 The carnival was an occasion of license for all the grossness and obscenity in the popular taste.1234 The woman cult was a cult of free love and was hostile to honorable marriage. Even in the twelfth century there were complaints of corruption by bad literature. The nobles and knights degenerated in the crusades and in the Italian wars of the Hohenstaufen.1235 "The doctrine of the church appeared to be a support of the family, but it was not such. On the contrary, the bonds of the family were more loosened than strengthened by the ascetic-hierarchical religiosity of the church."1236 Dulaure1237 quotes Gerson and Nicolas de Clemangis that convents in the fifteenth century were places of debauch. Geiler, in a sermon in Strasburg Cathedral, gave a shocking description of convents.1238 A convent is described as a brothel for neighboring nobles.1239 At the end of the fifteenth century the revolt and change in the mores which produced the Protestant schism caused the social confusion on which Janssen lays such stress in his seventh and eighth volumes. It was a case of revolution. The old mores broke down and new ones were not yet formed. The Protestants of the sixteenth century derided and denounced the Roman Catholics for the contradictions and falsehoods of celibacy, and the Catholics used against the Protestants the looseness as to marriage. Both were right.

381. The standard of the "good wife." Pair marriage. It is safe to believe that if any woman ever entered into a marriage which was not repugnant to her she entered it with a determination to be a "good wife." Her education under the mores of the society around her gave her the notion and standard of a good wife. The modern sentiments of love and conjugal affection have been produced in the middle class. They probably have their roots in the mores of the bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages and in those of the lowest class of free people in the Greco-Roman empire. This middle class is the class which has taken control of modern society, and whose interests are most favored by modern economic developments. They have set aside the old ideas of male dominion and of ascetic purity. In the middle of the nineteenth century the poems of Coventry Patmore and the novels of Anthony Trollope perhaps best expressed the notions of conjugal affection which English-speaking people entertained at that time. It seems that now those notions are thought to be philistine, and there is a reaction towards the old aristocratic standards. The "good husband," as correlative to the good wife, belongs to modern pair marriage. The erotic element has been refined and suppressed, or at least disavowed. The ideals which have been accepted and favored have disciplined and concentrated masculine waywardness, and they have made the sex sentiments more durable. All this has integrated the family more firmly, and the family mores have cultivated and preserved the sentiments. We have seen many cases in which, out of the unconscious and unpremeditated action of the mores, results have been produced which have been most important for the weal or woe of men, but it is one of the most marvelous of these cases that conjugal affection, perhaps the noblest of all sentiments, should have been developed out of the monopolistic tyranny of men over women, and out of the ascetic negation of sex, the common element in which is a prurient and unhealthy sensuality.

382. "One flesh." The notion or figure of "one flesh" is not peculiar to the Jewish or Christian religion. In the Old Testament it clearly refers to carnal union. It has been used to express the ideal that marriage should be the fusion of two lives and interests. It is instructive to notice, in all the discussions of marriage which are to be found in all ages, how few and commonplace are the things which have been said, and how largely refuge has been taken in figures of speech. "One flesh," if not carnal, is only ritual, but ritual conceptions are only conventional conceptions,—good amongst those who agree to repeat the formulas and perform the ritual acts. They are not realities. The problem of marriage is that two human beings try to live together. They are two and not one. Since they are two, their tastes, desires, characters, and wills are two. Ethical philosophers or jurists may be able to define the "one-flesh" idea by translating it into rights and duties, but no state authority can enforce such a definition. Therefore it is nugatory. The idea belongs in an arena beyond state or family, where two make a world. It is beyond the mores also, except so far as the mores have educated the man and woman to a sense of the conduct which is necessary to marital harmony, by the judgments which are current on the hundreds of cases, real or imaginary, which come up for discussion. How then shall two wills be one will? The old way was that one will (the woman's) always was bound to yield. Since that no longer seems right, the modern way is endless discussion, a defeat for one, and all the inevitable consequences in daily experience and effect on character.

383. Pair marriage. Pair marriage is the union of one man and one woman in which all the rights, duties, powers, and privileges are equal and alike for both, the relationship being mutual and reciprocal in all points. It therefore produces a complete fusion of two lives and interests. Pair marriage and all its attendant mores are products of monopoly. Herodotus1240 says of the Agathyrsi that they practiced communalism of women in order that they might all be brethren, without envy or enmity to each other. That is one solution. In it peace and harmony are given a higher place than sex interests. Pair marriage aims at the highest satisfaction of sex interests by monopoly. It sacrifices peace and harmony. Any monopoly exists for the benefit of those who are embraced in it. Its evil effects are to be found by turning to those who fail to get entrance to it. While our mores now require that a man and woman shall come together through love, and therefore make a selection of the most special and exclusive kind, we have no apparatus or intelligent method for making such a selection. The notion that such a selection is necessary, therefore, adds a new difficulty and obstacle. Pair marriage also, partly on account of the intenser sentiment of parenthood and the more integrated family institution, increases expense, and makes the economic conditions of marriage more severe. Pair marriage forces a large fraction of the population to celibacy, and it is they who are the excluded who suffer by that arrangement. This bears chiefly on women. Everything which violates the taboo in the mores is vice, and is disastrous to all who participate in it. The more real pair marriage is, the more disastrous is every illicit relation. The harm is infinitely greater for women than for men. Within the taboo, unmarried women lead aimless existences, or they are absorbed in an effort to earn a living which is harassed by especial obstacles and difficulties. This is the price which has to be paid for all the gain which women get from pair marriage as compared with any other form of sex relation. It assumes that every man and woman can find a mate, which is not true. Very little serious attention is paid to this offset to the advantages of pair marriage. The mores teach unmarried women that it is "right" that things should be so, and that any other arrangement would contain abominations which are not to be thought of. Probably the unmarried women rarely think of themselves as victims of the arrangement by which their married sisters profit. They accept a life career which is destitute of self-realization, except for those few who are so gifted that they can make independent careers in the struggle for existence. Nearly all our discussions of our own social order run upon questions of property. It is under the sex relation that all the great problems really present themselves.

384. Marriage in modern mores. It is very remarkable that marriage amongst us has become the most distinct example there is, and the most widespread, of ritual (what is said in the marriage ceremony, in its rational sense, is of little importance, and people rarely notice it. What force attaches to "obey"?), of religious intervention in private affairs, and of the importance attached to a ceremony. If two people cohabit, the question of right and wrong depends on whether they have passed through a certain ceremony together or not. That determines whether they are "married" or not. The reason is, because if they have passed through the ceremony together, no matter what was said or done, they have expressed their will to come into the status of wedlock, as the mores make it and as the state enforces it, at the time and place. The woman wants to "feel that she is married." Very many women would not feel so in a civil marriage; others want a "fully choral" ceremony; others want the communion with the wedding ceremony. Perhaps the daughter of a great nobleman might not feel married without a marriage settlement. Thus the active effect of the mores may be observed in contemporary custom, and it is seen how completely the notion of being duly married is produced by the mores of the society, or of a class or sect in it.

385. Pair marriage; its technical definition. Polyandry passed over into polygamy when sufficient property was at command.1241 There was a neutral middle point where one man had one wife. It follows that monogamy is not a specific term. It might be monogamy if one man had one wife but also concubines and slaves, or he might have but one wife in fact, although free to have more if he chose. The term "pair marriage" is needed as a technical term for the form of marriage which is as exclusive and permanent for the man as for the woman, which one enters on the same plane of free agreement as the other, and in which all the rights and duties are mutual. In such a union there may be a complete fusion of two lives and interests. In no other form of union is such a fusion possible. This pair marriage is the ideal which guides the marital usages of our time and civilization, gives them their spirit and sense, and furnishes standards for all our discussions, although it is far from being universally realized. The ideal is made an object of "pathos"1242 in our popular literature. Whence did it come? In truth, we can hardly learn. It existed, by necessity of poverty and humble social status, in the classes amongst whom Christianity took root. It found expression in the canon law. It resisted, in the lower classes, the attempt of the church to suppress it in order to aggrandize the corporation. It resisted, in the same classes, the corruption of the Renaissance. It has risen with those classes to wealth and civil power. In modern times "moral" has been used technically for what conforms to the code of pair marriage.

386. Ethics of pair marriage. Pair marriage has excluded every other form of sex relation. To modern people it is hard to understand how different forms of sex relation could exist side by side and all be right. The explanation is in the mores. A concubine may be a woman who has a defined and legally guaranteed relation to one man, if the mores have so determined. Her circumstances have not opened to her the first rank, that of a wife, but she has another which is recognized in the society as honorable. The same may be said of a slave woman, or of a morganatic wife. Amongst the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans of the empire concubines were a recognized class. A concubine was not a woman who had cast off her own honor until after the thirteenth century,1243 and although her position became doubtful, it was not disreputable for two or three centuries more. Morganatic marriages for princes have continued down to our own time. Whatever is defined and provided for in the mores as a way of solving the problem of life interests is never wrong. Hence the cases of sacral harlotry, of temporary marriage (as in China, Korea, Japan, and ancient Arabia), of royal concubines (since the king was forced to accept a status wife of prescribed rank, etc.), and all the other peculiar arrangements which have existed in history are accounted for. Pair marriage, however, has swept all other forms away. It is the system of the urban-middle-capitalist class. It has gained strength in all the new countries where all men and women were equal within a small margin and the women bore their share of the struggle for existence. The environment, in the new countries, favored the mores of the class from which the emigrants came. In the old countries the mores of the middle class have come into conflict with the mores of peasants and nobles. The former have steadily won. The movement has been the same everywhere, although the dates of the steps in it have been different. As to women, the countries which are at the rear of the modern movement keep the old mores; those which are at the head of it have emancipated women most, and have swept away from their legislation all toleration for anything but pair marriage. Vice, of course, still affects facts, and the growth of wealth and luxurious habits seems to be developing a tendency to take up again some old customs which bear an aristocratic color. It must be expected that when the economic facts which now favor the lower middle classes pass away and new conditions arise the marriage mores will change again. Democracy and pair marriage are now produced by the conditions. Both are contingent and transitory. In aristocratic society a man's family arrangements are his own prerogative. When life becomes harder it will become aristocratic, and concubinage may be expected to arise again.

It seems clear that pair marriage has finally set aside the notion which, in the past, has been so persistently held,—that women are bad by nature, so that one half of the human race is permanently dragging down the other half. The opposite notion seems now to be gaining currency,—that all women are good, and can be permanently employed to raise up the men. These fluctuations only show how each sway of conditions and interests produces its own fallacies.

387. Pair marriage is monopolistic. It has been shown that pair marriage is monopolistic. It produces an exclusive family, and nourishes family pride and ambition. It is interwoven with capital, and we have hardly yet reached the point where we can see what it will become with great wealth, and under the treatment of a plutocratic class. From what has been said it is evidently most important that man and wife should have been educated in the same mores. Pair marriage is also individualistic. It is the barrier against which all socialism breaks into dust. As the cost of a family increases, the connection between family and capital becomes more close and vital. Every socialist who can think is forced to go on to a war on marriage and the family, because he finds that in marriage and the family lie the strongholds of the "individualistic vices" which he cannot overcome. He has to mask this battery, however, because he dare not openly put it forward.

388. The future of marriage. It is idle to imagine that our mores about marriage have reached their final stage. Since marriage is free and individualistic as it exists in our mores, there is little care or pity for those who cannot adapt themselves to it, or it to their circumstances. They are allowed divorce, but not without some feeling of annoyance with them if they use it. It is also idle to imagine that those who are now satisfied will alone control the changes which the future will bring in the mores. It is not difficult to make marriage such that men will refuse it. Women have revolted against it in the past.1244 It is not beyond imagination that they might do so again.

389. Normal type of sex union. It may be, as Lecky says,1245 that "we have ample grounds for maintaining that the lifelong union of one man and one woman should be the normal or dominant type of intercourse between the sexes. We can prove that it is, on the whole, most conducive to the happiness, and also to the moral elevation, of all parties. But beyond this point it would, I conceive, be impossible to advance, except by the assistance of a special revelation. It by no means follows that because this should be the dominant type, it should be the only one, or that the interests of society demand that all connections should be forced into the same die."

390. Divorce. In the mother family the woman could dismiss her husband. This she could also do in all the transition forms in which the husband went to live with the wife at her childhood home. In the father family the wife, obtained by capture or purchase, belonged to her husband on the analogy of property. The husband could reject or throw away his property if he saw fit. It is clear that the physical facts attendant on the two customs—one that the man went to live with his wife, the other that he took her to his home—made a great difference in the status of the woman. In the latter case she fell into dependence and subjection to the dominion of her husband. She could not divorce him.