II THE FAMILY AND SOCIAL CHANGE WE [1909] E currently speak of the "institution" of marriage. We also use marriage instead of wedding, nuptials, or matrimony. The result is confusion. A wedding or even nuptials occur as a ceremony or festival, on a day, and as the commencement of wedlock or matrimony. Wedlock may be an institution, but a wedding is not, for a wedding lacks the duration or recurrence which belongs to an institution. It does not provide for an enduring necessity and has no apparatus for the repeated use of the same couple. Wedlock is a permanent relation between a man and a woman which is regulated and defined by the mores. It brings the pair into cooperation for the struggle for existence and the procreation and nurture of children. Wedlock therefore forms a family, and a family seems to satisfy our idea of an institution far better than marriage or matrimony. The family institution existed probably before marriage; a woman with an infant in her arms is what we see as far back as our investigations lead us. She was limited and burdened in the struggle for existence by her infant. The task of finding subsistence was as hard for her as for a man, and, in addition to this the infant was a claimant to her time and labor. Her chance of survival lay in union and cooperation with a man. Undoubtedly this gives us the real explanation of the primitive inferiority of women; they needed the help of men more than men needed theirs, and if a union was made it was made on terms under which the woman got the disadvantage. It certainly is a great mistake to believe that the women were put down because the men were always physically stronger. In the first place the men are not always stronger; perhaps it is, as a rule, the other way. Mr. H. H. Johnston says of the Andombies on the Congo that the women, though working very hard as laborers in general, lead a happy existence; they are often stronger than the men and more finely developed, some of them having splendid figures. Parke, speaking of the Manyuema of the Arruwimi in the same region, says that they are fine animals, and the women very handsome. They are as strong as the men. In North America an Indian chief once said to Hearne, "Women were made for labor; one of them can carry, or haul, as much as two men can do." Schellong says of the Papuans in the German protectorate of New Guinea that the women are more strongly built than the men. According to Kubary, a man has the right to beat his wife, but the women are so robust that a man who tries to do it may well find that he will get the worse of it. Fights between men and women are not rare in savage life, and the women prevail in a fair share of them; Holm mentions a case where a Greenland Eskimo tried to flog his wife, but she flogged him. We hear of a custom in south-eastern Australia that fights between the sexes were provoked when "there were young women who were marriageable but were not mated, and when the eligible bachelors were backward. The men would kill a totem animal of the 2 1 Ellis, H.: Man and Woman, 4. 2 Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Núkuóro- oder Monteverde-Inseln, 35. 'Ethnologisk Skizze af Angmagsalikerne, 55. women or the women would kill a totem animal of the men. This led to a fight of the young men and young women; then, after the wounds healed they would pair off and the social deadlock would pass away."1 Another case, from higher civilization, shows how the woman was weakened by considerations of another kind. Sieroshevski, a Pole, who lived for twelve years among the Yakuts, says that he knew a Yakut woman who was constantly abused by her husband, although she was industrious and good-natured. At last the European asked her why she did not fight. He assured her that she would succeed and he argued with her that if she would once give her husband a good beating he would not misuse her any more. She, however, answered that that would never do, that her husband's companions would deride him as the man whose wife beat him, and their children would be derided by the other children for the same reason. She would not do anything which would produce that consequence and would make her worse off. This case has many parallels. A characteristic incident occurred at the Black Mountain station on the Snowy River about the years 1855-56. “A number of Theddora (Ya-itma-thang) blacks had come across from Omeo and there met a woman, known to me as Old Jenny, of their tribe, who had broken their law by becoming the wife of a man to whom she stood in the tribal relationship of Najan (mother). She had been away for some years, and this was the first time that her kindred had encountered her. The wife of one of them attacked her first with a digging-stick, but she defended herself so well with the same weapon that the woman had to desist, and her husband continued the attack on Old Jenny, who had divested herself of all but one small 1 Howitt, A. W.: South Eastern Australia, 149. |