Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/784

 770 THE AUKIUCAX JOL'RXAL OF SOCIOLOGY

has the right to sell them, while the father regards as his chil- dren in fact the offspring of a slave woman, and these he treats as his personal property. To the same effect, among the Wan- yamwesi, south of the Victoria Nyanza, the children of a slave wife inherit, to the exclusion of children born of a legal wife. And husbands among the Fellatahs are in the habit of adopting children, though they may have sons or daughters of their own, and the adopted children inherit the property. 1 In Indonesia a man sometimes marries a woman and settles in her family, and the children belong to her. But he may later carry her forcibly to his own group, and the children then belong to him. 2

Bosman relates that in Guinea religious symbolism was also introduced by the husband to reinforce and lend dignity to this action. The maternal system held with respect to the chief wife :

It was customary, however, for a man to buy and take to wife a slave, a friendless person with whom he could deal at pleasure, who had no kindred that could interfere for her, and to consecrate her to his Bossum or god. The Bossum wife, slave as she had been, ranked next to the chief wife, and was like her exceptionally treated. She alone was very jealously guarded, she alone was sacrificed at her husband's death. She was, in fact, wife in a peculiar sense. And having, by consecration, been made of the kindred and worship of her husband, her children would be born of his kindred and wor- ship. 3

Altogether the most satisfactory means of removing a girl from her group is to purchase her. The use of property in the acquisition of women is not a particular expression of the male nature, since property is accumulated by females as well, but where this form of marriage exists it means practically that the male relatives of the girl are using her for profit, and that her suitor is seeking more complete control of her than he can gain in her group, and viewed in this light the purchase and sale of women is an expression of the dominant nature of the male. In conse- quence of purchase woman became in barbarous society a chattel, and her socially constrained position in history and the present

' A. GIRAUD TKULON, Les Origines du Mariage et de la Famille, p. 440.

2 VON DARGUN, loc. '/., p. 119.

'J. F. McLKNNAN, The Patriarchal Theory, p. 235.