Strange marriage customs
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Title: Strange marriage customs

Author: Leo Markun

Editor: E. Haldeman-Julius

Release date: June 23, 2026 [eBook #78927]

Language: English

Original publication: Girard: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1929

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78927

Credits: Tim Miller, Sam Lamb and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS ***

LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 1436

Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

Strange Marriage Customs

Leo Markun

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS

GIRARD, KANSAS

Copyright, 1929,

Haldeman-Julius Company

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

STRANGE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS

THE MATCHMAKER

Our young people seem to be fully capable of choosing their own mates. At any rate, they feel that they are, and they deeply resent interference on the part of others. Such a condition has not always existed. It does not exist everywhere even now.

For one thing, parental authority means comparatively little in twentieth-century America. Mothers and, to a lesser extent, fathers, are honored chiefly by the singing of sentimental songs and the giving of useless presents on certain days of the year. In China, the worship of parents and ancestors is still important. In New England, not many centuries ago, it was a serious and sometimes a capital offense to rebel against authority. In some of the most highly civilized countries of ancient times, the paterfamilias had the right of life and death over his offspring. His authority might last until his death. It was usually unimpaired until the child was married. Then the girl became the subject (under some codes, virtually the slave) of her husband. The boy became the head of a new family, though he owed respect and perhaps certain duties of obedience to his own father.

With strong paternal or parental authority goes usually the privilege of marrying off the children, whose tastes and inclinations may or may not be consulted. Right now in the United States, in families of old American stock, there are mothers strong-willed enough to impose their notions of what constitutes a suitable husband upon their daughters. “Mother knows best” in matrimonial as well as in other matters, and is able to carry out her desires. Of course, the motives of the domineering parent may be selfish or not. He or she may be unselfish and still cause a calamitous marriage by bringing together young people who are temperamentally unsuited for each other. On the other hand, inexperienced boys and girls who are free to choose for themselves often become the victims of an evanescent infatuation. From the point of view of, say, Dorothy Dix, the moral is that parental experience should generally be called upon for advice, though the absolute veto, except as to children who are really too young to marry, is hardly desirable. Granting this, it may still be argued that only the companionate marriage offers a genuine solution to many problems of our time.

Of the general evolution of marriage I have already written, and here I shall consider for the most part matters not discussed in Little Blue Book No. 83. With the companionate marriage and other allied questions, a number of Little Blue Book authors have dealt. It may be well to say here, though, that unfamiliar and consequently strange marriage customs should be interesting to us not merely as stray curiosities, but primarily because they throw light on our own manners and morals. Rice is thrown at our weddings without any magical intent, but still because the showering of grain upon bride and groom has been at other times and is in other lands considered a means of promoting fertility. We see little of the chaperon, and when we do see her we hardly realize that she takes the place of the duenna, the eunuch at the seraglio door, and other guards charged with the duty of seeing that persons of the opposite sexes not married to one another shall be kept apart.

The matchmaker has his (or her) place in the economy of things when young people eligible for marriage have insufficient opportunity to meet each other socially, and especially when more or less complex contracts dealing with economic goods, or with questions of precedence and social status, are involved. Thus, the marriage of kings and princes has often hinged upon delicate diplomatic negotiations. A prince of Wales may dance with stenographers and flirt with actresses, but is likely to marry a princess after consulting ministers of state. He had better not fall in love with an Italian princess unless she can be persuaded to become a Protestant or he is willing to renounce his right to succeed to the throne. His limitation in this regard is set by an act of Parliament.

Pecuniary considerations have often been primary problems in amateur and professional matchmaking. The connection between love and money is an old one, though not one which existed at the earliest stages of human development. Money was first used in a comparatively recent period, and the objects of capital which it represents are little known to simple savages. Whatever the nature of the tie men formed with women when human beings first appeared may have been, we may be sure that it did not depend upon the accumulation of goods. The marriage for money must, then, be considered a by-product of civilization.

So far as the matchmaker deals with money, he is an agent of a familiar sort. For example, there are peoples among whom it is customary for the father to think of his daughter as a piece of valuable property. His whole interest is to receive as much as possible for her in cows or weapons or silver. What his daughter will think of her husband is for him a matter of no importance. The purchaser must be able to pay for what he is getting, and he must be trustworthy if there are to be deferred installments. The tribe or the community often limits the circles from whom the husband may be drawn, but it may limit still more the marketability of objects other than daughters.

This is the extreme form of the economic motive in arranging matches. When the husband is “bought,” and in most instances when a bridal price is paid, the person or persons receiving the money pays some attention to the desirability of the marriage from the points of view other than the pecuniary one. The matchmaker consequently becomes something more than a business agent. In fact, he often officiates by virtue of his position. That is, he may act because he is a chief or a priest. Or he may be a relative charged with this delicate duty. Whether or not he receives any compensation depends upon the usages of the community.

Newly married young women make up most of the matchmakers with us. To be sure, cynics say that the sex as a whole is engaged in a conspiracy to deprive bachelors of their freedom. When men who have just been married talk to their friends who are still single about the advantages of matrimony, it is sometimes assumed that they are motivated by the desire to assuage their misery in accordance with the familiar principle. However, the amateur matchmaker can derive no direct (at least, no economic) benefit from his efforts in ordinary cases. Rather he is confronted with the necessity of buying engagement and wedding presents for the beneficiary (if you prefer, for the victim) of his work.

The two chief enemies of marriage are the religious ideal that there is something holy about celibacy and the economic state in which a wife or wives and their offspring are expensive to maintain. Among the early Hebrews, neither the one nor the other existed. It was considered a divine duty to “increase and multiply,” and wives and children were ordinarily put to work at agricultural tasks. The position of bachelors and spinsters consequently became anomalous, and matchmaking was considered a meritorious act. The medieval and modern Jews have been for the most part an urban people. This fact and their living to a large extent in predominantly Christian communities has meant the decline of polygyny among them, but orthodox Judaism still favors fruitfulness.

During the medieval period of oppression and massacres, it was all but miraculous—some rabbis and ministers say it was only because of the direct intervention of God—that the Jewish people survived. Allowing amply for recruits from without, as of the Chazars, a Turkish body living in what is now southern Russia, we must see that survival depended upon fecundity. The personal hygiene of the Jews, it is true, was better than that of their Christian neighbors; but we must not fail to give due credit to the matchmaker.

Perhaps only one Jewish youth survived in a town after a particularly bloody massacre, and the nearest family of his faith was a hundred miles off. It was, then, considered a particularly meritorious act of piety to find him a wife. Soon there arose a professional class of shadkans or shadchans, who enjoyed a legal status at least as early as the twelfth century. In the early days, these men were mostly rabbis and persons engaged in the study of Talmudic law and theology. It was considered improper for them to derive pecuniary benefits directly from their learning, but the matchmaking profession seemed a dignified way for them to earn a livelihood. Old scrolls record the fact that some of the most famous rabbis of the Middle Ages were shadchanim.

The matchmaker’s fee was usually a percentage of the dowry, which it was to his interest to make as large as possible. After a time, the haggling and indecorous competition which arose drove most of the learned men out of the profession, which was no longer held to be so honorable as in the earlier time.

The shadchan has survived among Jews to this day, chiefly in the Slavonic countries and elsewhere among immigrants from them. In old-fashioned families, the girls are not permitted to mingle freely with boys. Negotiations for their marriage are carried on by the parents, usually with the assistance of common friends or a matchmaker. In America, the shadchanim are mostly located in the East Side of New York. They advertise in the Yiddish newspapers, announcing their office hours and setting forth their ability to provide professional men, businessmen and honest workingmen for maidens and widows. A matrimonial bureau has recently been opened in a magnificent apartment house on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Others are found wherever there are large Jewish communities.

The American-born Jew is not particularly likely to patronize the professional matchmaker, since he can meet girls freely in dance halls and in the homes of his friends, just as Gentiles can. There are, indeed, young lawyers and physicians and dentists who appreciate that their education entitles them to large dowries, and who feel that they can find the best selection of beauty and the money that goes with it by visiting a shadchan. There are more or less wealthy Jewish merchants in small cities with daughters to marry off, but only non-Jewish neighbors. It is the matchmaker who wages a vigorous war against assimilation and for his commission.

The shadchan has often appeared in fiction, and almost always as a comic character. It is his business to convince the prospective bridegroom’s family and friends that he is in touch with the most beautiful and desirable of all womankind. If she is hunchbacked, her hump is ignored or else set forth as a slight curve which is but an added embellishment. A first-rate matchmaker can convince a hesitating swain that a one-legged girl is more desirable than she would have been if God had given her two.

There is an anecdote about a matchmaker who finally brought a modest youth to be inspected by a beautiful virgin’s parents. Whatever the young man said about himself, the shadchan made out to be a ridiculous understatement. Thus, “Well, I manage to eke out a living” was followed by an indignant, “Why, he’s a millionaire!” “I come of a pretty good fam—” was interrupted by “I tell you all his relatives are great scholars.” Then the youth was unlucky enough to sneeze, and he apologetically explained, “I got a little cold.” “Pfui,” shouted the matchmaker, “a little cold! Why, he’s got consumption.”

It would be unfair to suggest that all Jews look upon marriage as a money-making venture, or that only Jews take such an attitude in the countries of European culture. After all, matrimonial papers and correspondence bureaus do flourish in the land of the kleagle, the evangelist, and the holy King James Bible. The rich widow is held out as a bait for the yokel’s ten cents in stamps, and sometimes for all the money he has in the bank as well.

In higher circles of society, Americans often purchase titles for their daughters. I do not doubt that the heart of a baron or a marquis can palpitate in honest and passionate love for a sugar or an asbestos princess. It is convenient, though, that the vons and des do not become similarly enamoured of vivacious Yankee misses whose pas do not cut coupons and whose mas do not patronize the opera.

It is hardly necessary for me to inquire into the morality of marrying money. Mores depend upon time and place. In Germany and Austria-Hungary, before the Great War, it was expected that military officers who were not independently wealthy should choose brides who were. According to Bloch, the Geldehe or marriage for money was common also in the higher middle class and in the aristocracies of noble birth and finance. The impoverishment of the nobility in several European countries since the war and the rise of profiteers and successful speculators anxious to win social prestige have operated in many instances to make pecuniary considerations primary in marriage. With the French, the dot or dowry has been and still is very important.

Travelers have found matchmakers at work in Korea and Siam as well as (among non-Jews) in a number of European countries. The go-between in Mohammedan lands is usually an old woman. Westermarck lists a number of peoples at low levels of culture who employ matchmakers. They include a variety of Indian tribes in the two Americas, Philippine Islanders, Formosans, Africans, and natives of the mountains in the north of India.

It is a widespread custom, too, for the young man in love, even if he is free to choose for himself, to ask his parents or other relatives to do his wooing for him. A Koryak youth is expected to do this, but he may declare his own intentions if the match he intends to make is disapproved by his parents. In such case, he is not supposed to say anything. Instead, he proposes by entering the house of his prospective father-in-law and doing such of the housework as becomes a man in his part of the world. It is good etiquette for the host to remain as silent as he.

Clearly, genuine or conventional bashfulness is at the bottom of such a custom. Sexual modesty is, in fact, at least as common with savages and barbarians as it is with civilized people, although the manifestations of it are not entirely the same. Therefore, a matchmaker may be required to bring together shy young people even if the economic aspects of matrimony are simple.

CHILD MARRIAGES

In recent years, much publicity has been given to the prevalence of infant and child marriages in India. This particular indiscretion of Mother India is, at any rate, not very new. The Law of Manu, which was established perhaps three thousand years ago, provides that a father may marry his eight-year-old daughter to a man of twenty-four and his daughter of twelve to a man of thirty. But, in truth, the usual age of marriage for females has gone down in modern times, though it is now tending to go up somewhat.

It is the general opinion in the Orient that every able-bodied adult should be married, and girls are held to be adult when they have reached the age of puberty. The people of India, especially the Hindus, feel that it is a disgrace for a girl to remain single after she is twelve or thirteen. Of the unmarried females among them, only a very small proportion are over the age of fifteen. A great many Hindu girls become wives before reaching the age of five. While the average marriage age for males is somewhat higher than that for females, it is by no means unusual for infant boys to become husbands.

The marriage of infants is not general everywhere in India, certain regions in the center of the empire bringing up the average for the country as a whole. It is confined almost entirely to the Mohammedans and the Hindus, especially the latter. When we come to consider children, girls over the age of twelve and boys over fifteen, the matter is somewhat different. The Christians and the Animists of India regard them as entirely ripe for matrimony. Child marriage is least common among the Buddhists.

When very young boys and girls are married, they do not ordinarily proceed at once to live together as husband and wife. In this respect, however, usage varies throughout the country, and there is no doubt that cohabitation sometimes occurs before the wife has menstruated.

Obviously, children who are married off long before reaching years of discretion, sometimes before they have learned simple measures of self-control, do not choose their husbands or their wives for themselves. It may be that the desire of the parents to preserve their authority in so important a matter is chiefly responsible for maintaining the custom. There are other factors, some of them historical. India was for many centuries the seat of devastating wars. Now one and now another conqueror came into the land, and attractive virgins made up an important part of the spoils. Married women were less attractive and therefore more secure.

Hypergamy, too, has probably played an important part in the development of extremely early marriage. This requires girls to marry into a higher sub-caste than their own, or at least forbids them to marry into a lower sub-caste. By greatly narrowing the circle of lawful bridegrooms, it stimulates foresight on the part of parents. The fathers and the mothers of female children who disregard the rule are themselves reduced in status. While boys and men are not allowed to marry outside the caste, they may take girls from subdivisions lower than their own without penalty.

It naturally arouses pity in the hearts of Europeans and Americans to see child brides of six or eight put through ceremonies of which they do not understand the import and led into ways of living for which they are evidently far too young. We are told about little girls nearly fainting for lack of air while the wedding guests gather about to have a good look. Still, the accustomed is seldom the horrible, and it is improbable that the women of India resent the custom half so much as the benevolent ladies from abroad do.

To the imperialists who use child marriage as an argument in favor of the maintenance of British rule in India, it may be apposite to point out that the English have themselves practiced it even in what we are wont to think of as modern times. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, it was fairly common in the higher social ranks. In 1564, a three-year-old boy was married to a girl of two. Neither could do much talking, and the witnesses in whose arms they were held during the ceremony made most of the responses for them. In Scotland, it was not until 1600 that the age limit was set at fourteen for males and twelve for females. It is at these points that the law of Great Britain now sets the age of puberty, though a change is impending.

When the diplomacy of Europe was chiefly a matter of negotiation between monarchs, young princes and princesses were often used as pawns. It sometimes happened that children were betrothed at two or three to cement alliances or to consolidate realms. History has carried down to us the tears of at least one young princess whose mother flogged her for declaring that she did not like the man who had been chosen as her husband and that she would not go to him under any consideration.

The age of consent in Great Britain and in most parts of the United States was quite low until the second half of the nineteenth century. This situation encouraged, if not child marriage, the exploitation of girls by unscrupulous parents. Many children were prostitutes or concubines. In the 1850’s, two thousand New York prostitutes were asked, “How old will you be next birthday?” The answers ranged all the way up to 77 years, but the most frequent answer was 20; 268 girls said they were nineteen years old, 258 were or professed to be eighteen, 143 said they were seventeen, 62 gave their age as sixteen, seventeen as fifteen, and two as fourteen. It is highly probable that many of the younger girls added to their actual years. Some decades later, there were brothels in New York in which most of the prostitutes were only ten or eleven. In the year of Our Lord in which I write, a reverend gentleman resident in one of these United States has been sent to the penitentiary for marrying a child of ten though already possessing a wife several times as old.

The average marriage age advances as we move from south to north. It is higher in the city than in the country and among the educated than among those who have little schooling. Puberty generally sets the lower limit, for the marriage of children who have not yet reached it is almost always treated as a mere betrothal. Perhaps we may set up the generalization that the age of marriage tends to vary inversely with the value attached to chastity and the fear that unmarried girls will be unduly tempted. It is said that child marriage became commoner in India after the Dravidians came in, bringing the custom of premarital promiscuity with them. There is another factor, the value attached by religion and current morality to sexual indulgence. The Israelites glorified fecundity, the Mohammedans and the Hindus have attached sanctity to acts that Christian preachers denounce as sinful. During the Middle Ages, a pretty large part of the Christian population was sworn to celibacy, while the men of Islam were marrying early and often. Of course, there were many illegitimate births in western Europe. Who knows, this fact may be responsible for the fact that Christian civilization was not supplanted by the barbarous bathhouses and libraries and laboratories of the dread worshipers of Allah.

In medieval Europe, the apprentices had to defer marrying. The students too helped to swell the ranks of the unmarried. However, the great bulk of the population consisted of farm laborers, who could provide for their wives about as well at sixteen as at twenty-six. Among the Jews there were many students, but special provision was made for them. It was usual for them to live at the expense of their fathers-in-law for some time after the marriage. This custom was important a generation or two ago, and no doubt it still survives in some Polish communities.

The Industrial Revolution has raised the usual age at which Europeans marry, and also it has increased the proportion of unmarried adults. The average age of men and women marrying for the first time in England and Wales between 1876 and 1885 was respectively 25.9 and 24.4, while for 1906-1910 the averages were 27.2 and 25.6. However, the tendency in Great Britain and in the United States is not toward a constantly upward movement in these figures. Conditions which enable young people to earn good wages bring them down. In the “upper” classes, marriages are usually more retarded than in the “lower” ones. The higher standards of living maintained by the former probably account for part of the difference, although there is a counterbalancing element in hereditary wealth: the rich man’s son seldom needs to worry about how he is to support a wife, at least, if his father is satisfied with his choice. On the other hand, he may wait until he has inherited the family fortune before marrying the woman he wants. It may be that the poor, who are generally accused of being improvident, prove the truth of the charge by getting married while they are quite young.

Schmoller has estimated that, under normal circumstances, about half the population of a country would consist of married people, widows, and widowers. This does not hold true of either Europe or the United States, because many live and die single. Wherever law or custom fixes monogamy as the only form of marriage, it is, indeed, inevitable that there shall be either bachelors or spinsters, for the number of marriageable males is never exactly equal to that of marriageable females. The excess of females amounts, in Europe, to about three per cent. Special conditions such as arise out of a great war make the difference in numbers still greater.

But there are bachelors as well as spinsters in Europe. There are monks as well as nuns, unmarried rakes as well as prostitutes. In short, what some are pleased to consider normal conditions do not exist. According to the figures given by Iwan Bloch, the percentage of people who have reached the age of fifty without marrying is 3 in Hungary, 9 in Germany, 13 in Austria, and 17 in Switzerland. For the period 1886-1890, the official statistics of England and Wales show that 60 out of every 100 inhabitants over the age of fifteen were or had been married. The number in Belgium was 56, the lowest in Europe. It was 61 in Germany, 62 in the United States, 64 in France, 76 in Hungary. Of these, from eight to ten had been widowed. The variations from one country to another point chiefly to economic factors.

Feminism, or, wider than this, a general tendency arising out of the constantly growing freedom and power of women, seems to be advancing the marriage age and adding to the proportion of celibates in almost all the civilized countries of the world. It is this, without much doubt, which will put an end to the infant marriages of India. From one point of view, feminism is a moral movement. More important, it depends upon the economic changes of the last few centuries. The Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, until quite recently, strove to maintain women in an inferior position. The orthodox Jew still gives thanks to God for making him something better than a woman, while the Jewess meekly praises him for making her what he thought it right that she should be. In the Middle Ages, when these prayers were written and seemed perfectly natural, the position of women among Jews seems to have been considerably higher than it was among Christians and Mohammedans. It was the Renaissance, which was essentially a revolt against medieval other worldliness, that gave women something much better than chivalric glorification, the right to develop freely, to study, to live for themselves.

The Renaissance grew out of the beginnings of the Commercial Revolution. That the time was not altogether ripe for it is shown by the coincident and essentially opposite movement of the Reformation or Protestant Revolution. The Renaissance was choked, but it did not die, and it rose up once more in the Enlightenment. Again there was a development of feminism, frowned upon by the leaders of the religious revival that spread through Europe after the downfall of Napoleon and flickered out as the prudery of the Victorian age.

If marriage for money must be considered a by-product of civilization, it is possible to contend that it belongs only to the upper savage and the barbarous stages. That is to say, it is characteristic neither of the lowest (simplest) peoples nor of the most highly civilized. With both these classes, the position of women is comparatively advantageous.

In early days, however, it is highly probable that the women had no objection to “child marriage.” I put these words within quotation marks for two reasons. First, though most anthropologists have been coming over to Westermarck’s views that primordial man was accustomed to live in families not essentially different from our own, this still remains unproved. Secondly, young people who have reached the age of puberty are considered adults in savage and barbarous communities. They are circumcised or submitted to other initiation rites and then admitted to the full privileges of men and women.

Now, in such countries as the United States and Great Britain, we feel differently about girls of thirteen. We consider them immature, and we believe that they should play and go to school. Our changed attitude is largely the result of conditions brought about by the machine age. As to the hygienic advantages and disadvantages of marriage or its sexual equivalent for such young girls, I suppose there is room for difference of opinion. We hear that the women grow old quickly in those countries where marriage takes place early, but probably this is because the ripening is naturally advanced in most of them. Other interesting questions arise in this connection. For example, are the children of a fourteen-year-old and of a fifteen-year-old mother inferior mentally and physically to those born of older women? The matter is not easily solved. Even if scientists were more free than they are to experiment with human beings, they could not easily establish the equality of “other things” necessary in bringing about valid results.

In the First Book of Kings, there is revealed one reason for child marriage that has been of some importance. “Now King David,” the story goes, “was old and stricken in years; and he was covered with clothes, but he did not get warm. Therefore his servants said to him, ‘Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin, and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat.’ So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite, and brought her to the king. And the damsel was very fair, and she cherished the king and ministered to him; but the king knew her not.”

This is rather puzzling to the modern reader. Why was it necessary to warm the aged monarch with a virgin, especially since we are told explicitly that there was no sexual intercourse? Why would the ancient equivalent of our modern hot-water bottle not have served the purpose just as well? We have here a magic practice or a bit of superstition. King David’s advisers believed that close propinquity between a young and vigorous person and an old and feeble one would bring about a transfer of energy from the former to the latter. A chaste maiden was held to be particularly desirable as the subject. Late in the eighteenth century, a well-known German physician, J. P. Frank, remarked that there might be something in the old belief. When Henry James wrote The Sacred Fount, he made the flow of beauty and of wisdom between people much exposed to each other an important element in his story.

Belief in the special sacredness of virginity is still widespread. It takes some curious forms, as in parts of Jugoslavia, where the peasants think that venereal disease can be cured by intercourse with a maiden. In primitive communities, when the magical effects supposed to be derived from virgins is sought, very young girls are usually chosen. Ploss-Bartels has called it a regular symptom of simple culture that undeveloped females are married or exploited. This is an exaggeration; but, so far as the statement is true, it largely reflects the King David superstition.

The Guatos of Brazil are said to sell their daughters between the ages of five and eight or nine. A traveler asked one of the Indians how he could treat such a child as his wife, and the answer was, “She only sleeps at my side because she is my property, and I will not cohabit with her until she is twice as large.” However, he later learned that this was not the case. Similar cases have been reported from widely separated parts of the world. In Celebes, it is said that Europeans sometimes conform to the native practice sufficiently to lease girls of twelve or thirteen. In the New Britain Islands, girls of ten or twelve are married to men of twenty-five or thirty.

In some of the islands of the Pacific, it is common for fathers to betroth their unborn children. The Fijians and the Samoans used occasionally to arrange marriages between infant girls and middle-aged or elderly men. More often, the Pacific islanders affiance children to each other. In one region, it is customary for the engaged boy to be taken into the care of his future wife’s family at the same time that his own parents take care of the engaged girl. Elsewhere, the betrothed female child is taken to her future husband’s home even though the rule may be that he is not to have any social intercourse with her whatsoever, as much as a passing word being forbidden.

While the girls (except in the instances where some of them serve as celibate priestesses or as prostitutes) marry young among practically all simple peoples, this is not always the case with the boys. For example, there is a part of Dutch New Guinea where the young men live together in a communal house, their erotic life being homosexual. Wherever it is common for the older and wealthier men to have large seraglios, the younger and poorer ones may be compelled to do without wives.

While most American Indians married young, there were a few tribes in which it was considered proper for men to wait until they were twenty-five or thereabouts. Moreover, many savage and barbarous communities require young men to undergo certain tests before they can join the ranks of the married. They may have to show that they are good fishermen or hunters or that they are skilled in certain handicrafts or that they are courageous and skilled in war.

There are Australian tribes in which men under thirty, if they are determined to marry, must take old women. The young girls go to the elders of the community. It is said that gray hairs in the beard are prerequisite to marriage among the Arunta and the Loritja. There are some simple communities where sexual indulgence is easy outside of marriage, and here there are more likely to be large classes of bachelors over the age of twenty. But it is usually desirable to have a home and children, who support the father in his old age and feed his ghost or pray for the repose of his soul after he dies.

There is a fairly widespread belief among the simpler peoples that chastity is requisite to the fullest exercise of magical and physical powers. Accordingly, the men may have to sleep apart from their wives for a certain period before leaving on an expedition of hunting or war. But if the soldiers of the village or tribe must be constantly on the alert, it is sometimes held necessary for them to remain unmarried. This does not always imply their entire abstinence from sexual relations. However, the soldiers are usually discharged from active service at thirty or thirty-five. For a long period in Roman history, military men were required to remain unmarried. Most of them seem to have had concubines, in some instances the same women who had been their wives before their entrance into the army.

FORBIDDEN MARRIAGES

With us, just as with savages and barbarians, there is an inner circle of relatives with whom we may not mate, an outer circle beyond which we may not go. Thus, in modern civilized countries, brothers do not marry sisters, mothers do not marry sons. There are jurisdictions in which the marriage of first cousins is forbidden. As to the outer circle, it sometimes engirdles the whole of humanity. We are, however, familiar with narrower limits, since we have in the United States laws forbidding white people to marry Negroes and sometimes members of other races as well. Besides, lines are drawn by custom and religion. Catholics seldom marry Protestants, pious Jews practically never marry Gentiles. There was a time when orthodox Quakers did not allow their children to woo Hicksites. Even in America, there are important class distinctions. A millionaire’s daughter may elope with the chauffeur, but her father and his friends are not likely to be pleased about it. The son of a first family is not expected to marry a girl from the wrong side of the gasworks.

We may define endogamy as the requirement of marrying within a certain group. The laws and customs which forbid “mixed marriages” are endogamous. Exogamy is the rule prohibiting the marriage of those who are considered too closely related. The crime forbidden by exogamy we call incest. In most civilized countries, there are comparatively few degrees of relationship which are considered incestuous. In primitive communities, very distant cousins and persons whose blood ties are imaginary may be forbidden to marry.

The most general rule of incest forbids a father to marry his daughter, a mother to marry her son. It seems to be “universally prevalent in mankind,” according to Westermarck. Rivers says, “We know of no people who allow marriage between mother and son.” He thinks that matrimony between father and daughter is sometimes legal. The authorities do not deny that there are cases of mother-son as well as father-daughter cohabitation. In fact, they exist in Europe and the United States. The debatable matter is whether or not they are ever recognized and approved by custom.

We have a number of accounts, from various parts of the American continents, of Indian tribes in which our rules of incest do not hold. Thus, a traveler in Ecuador tells us that Pioje widows often take their sons as second husbands, and that widowers take their daughters. Some of the Tinne Indians marry sisters and daughters. And similar cases are reported from Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world. If these are incestuous, at least incest is treated as a very mild offense in the communities where they occur. And we know that there was a time when the priests of Persia advocated marriage between near relatives as a religious duty. In short, the comparative study of exogamy confirms the general rule that there is absolutely no moral principle upon which all mankind agrees. There are, indeed, some fairly well defined ethical principles; and it may be true that the human repugnance toward intimate relations with a father or mother, with sons or with daughters, which is widespread though not universal, arose originally out of an animal instinct.

Marriage between brother and sister is not a great deal commoner. It has perhaps occurred most commonly in the case of monarchs. The Pharaohs and the Ptolemies of Egypt seem to have believed that they could find women sufficiently exalted to be their queens only in the daughters of their own fathers and mothers. The chieftains of Hawaii had similar ideas. Among the Incas of Peru, the Singhalese, the Persians, and a few other peoples, the kings were privileged to marry full sisters.

In some of these countries, persons of lower rank are also reported to have contracted such matrimonial alliances. Much more frequent are weddings between half-brothers and half-sisters. In our own century, a king of Siam has had two queens, both his half-sisters. Usually the relationship in such marriages is through the fathers, perhaps because paternity is more difficult to prove than maternity. In ancient Athens, it was legally permissible to marry a half-sister. According to some authorities, she might not be the child of the same mother. There are several stories in the Bible about unions between half-brother and half-sister. Abraham says of Sarah, “And yet she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife.”

The propriety of marriage between cousins, between uncle and niece, and between aunt and nephew, varies greatly from one country to another and sometimes within the community according to religious belief and social rank. The Jewish code permits an uncle to marry his niece, but treats a union between aunt and nephew as incestuous. There is a tribe in the Caucasus where a mother’s sister, but not a father’s sister, may be married. Marriage with a first cousin is by some peoples considered highly meritorious. By others it is strictly forbidden. It is against the law in a few European countries and in some of our states, but is usually possible with some little extra trouble. The objection to it seems to be derived chiefly from the old law of the Christian church, although it may be eugenically unsound in certain instances. The prohibition against marrying a nephew or a niece is commoner than that against the marriage of cousins german. There does not seem to be any civilized country where remoter cousins are forbidden to marry, except a few influenced by the Eastern church.

In the simpler communities, exogamy often has reference to a large class, such as a phratry or sub-tribe or clan. Whether the members of these subdivisions are what we should call close relatives or not, marriage between them is forbidden. Some of the Iroquois Indians had a complicated system of clans, of which half were in one group and half in another. It used to be forbidden to marry any person within the group to which one belonged; that is to say, about half the tribe was ineligible. More recently, exogamy has been confined to the clan alone, or to about one-eighth of the tribe. Other Indians have had similar laws, varying greatly in detail.

There are regions in various parts of the world where known relatives, no matter of what degree, are unable to marry legally. The old penal law of China provided that anybody marrying a person bearing the same name as himself should be severely beaten, and the marriage declared invalid. Elsewhere, cousins of seven degrees or less are held to be within the incest circle. Clan exogamy is found in most of the Australian tribes, with complications which we might otherwise believe to be beyond the capacity of the natives; and violations have until recent times been usually punishable with death.

In the early days of Rome, marriages within the sixth degree were treated as incestuous. The degrees were computed by counting back to the common ancestor and then down again. Thus, second cousins were related in the sixth degree; parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, grandparent, parent, and the cousin. In the Eastern or Orthodox branch of the Christian church, second cousins were forbidden to marry, only the seventh degree being considered sufficiently removed. In the Western or Roman Catholic church, the prohibition extended at one time to sixth cousins. It no longer exists beyond the degree of third cousins, and dispensations for those who are more closely related are common.

Adoption and the spiritual relationship existing between godfather and godchild (sometimes also between close relatives of the two) have been at various times and in many places barriers to marriage. In Great Britain, it was not made possible until 1907 for a man to wed his deceased wife’s sister. Such a wedding is also forbidden by the Catholic canon law.

However, the levirate (from the Latin levir, brother-in-law), which is a custom according to which a dead man’s brother must inevitably under certain circumstances marry his widow, has been very widespread. Among the Hindus and some others, the obligation arises if the dead man has left no children behind. The Bible has two laws on the subject. In Leviticus: “And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he has uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.” In Deuteronomy: “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, leaving no child, the dead man’s wife shall not marry a stranger; her husband’s brother shall go unto her, and take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her. And the firstborn that she bears shall succeed in the name of his brother who is dead, that his name shall not disappear in Israel.”

It is sometimes said that the law of Leviticus sets up a general rule, to which an exception is made in Deuteronomy. More likely, there was an actual change in custom. Later still, the rabbis frowned upon levirate marriage even in cases of childless death. The exposure to shame provided for brothers-in-law who fail to marry as directed in Deuteronomy has become a merely formal ceremony among orthodox Jews. The widow loosens her brother-in-law’s shoe (this and his foot must be clean, according to rabbinic law) and spits on the ground before him. The levirate often encourages polygamy, for the duty of marrying a dead brother’s sister may exist even when one already has a wife or two.

Among various peoples, marriage between cousins has been especially stimulated. Sometimes it is possible to get a cousin as a wife without charge, while others must be paid for. Or, as among the desert Bedouin, the first cousin has an option to purchase at a reduced rate. In certain Hindu communities, a man is supposed to marry his sister’s daughter, even if she happens to be older than himself.

The caste system of India greatly limits the circle from which a wife or a husband may be chosen. There are sub-castes, and under certain circumstances bride and groom may have to belong to the same one. Sometimes hypergamy, which has already been explained, makes the matter still more complicated.

In general, caste or class as a matter of endogamy is of importance not only in India. In parts of Africa, the blacksmiths never intermarry with the rest of the population, taking only smiths’ daughters as their wives. Free men have often been forbidden to marry slaves, though not necessarily to cohabit with them. Medieval knights were not accustomed to make the daughters of serfs their wedded wives. Modern noblemen marry untitled women only for especially good reasons. Monarchs are expected to enter into full matrimony with persons of royal or princely rank.

Transcriber’s Note

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice.

Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following changes:

Page 8: “to earn a livilihood” | to | “to earn a livelihood”
Page 12: “for the young men” | to | “for the young man”
Page 15: “it may be opposite” | to | “it may be apposite”
Page 28: “could find women sufficently” | to | “could find women sufficiently”

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Table of Contents

- Strange Marriage Customs
- THE MATCHMAKER
- CHILD MARRIAGES
- FORBIDDEN MARRIAGES
- Transcriber’s Note
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE