Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/702

 686 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Up to this point the development of the family and the state had occurred in the realm of empirical self consciousness. There was no theorizing concerning right and wrong, no investigation, no idealism. The institution was judged solely by results, and was handed down by blind custom and imitation. We are now to notice the way in which the newly formed state, having asserted its superiority, begins to turn upon the family from which it empirically sprang, and to consciously regulate its internal structure by the further extraction of coercive features.

The earliest interference with private domestic control in Anglo-Saxon history was undertaken by the church. The church, not yet separated from the state, employed the coercive sanctions of the latter to enforce its decrees. Under the eccle- siastical laws of Theodorus and Edmund marriage was made a sacrament, polygamy was prohibited, the wife's consent was made a condition to marriage, as against sale by her parents ; the bridegroom was required to give pledges for her protection, and she was granted the right of divorce.' By these laws the prospective state began to use its coercive sanctions to regulate the family in the interests of right as conceived by the church. The succeeding triumph of feudalism subordinated certain of these marriage rights of the higher tenants in the interests of the feudal proprietors, but at the same time it elevated the slaves through serfdom and settled habitation to the rights of marriage. Not until the practical separation of church and state through the annulment of the sacramental character of marriage follow- ing the Reformation, and the innovation of parliamentary divorce in 1687, did the way open for the unequivocal interference of sovereignty in the family on the ground of its social importance. Finally, under the influence of nineteenth-century theories of the " rights of man," the legislature extracted from the head of the family so many incidents of private property in his wife that the structure of the state itself received a new differentiation in order to manage specifically this new access of sovereignty. Ecclesiastical courts and parliament were dispossessed of their judicial control over marriage and divorce, and this was

•See A. R. Cleveland, Woman under English Law (London, 1896).