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 CHAPTER VII.

MARRIAGE BY PURCHASE AND BY SERVITUDE.

I. The Power of Parents.—The hypothesis of a primitive matriarchate—Maternal filiation and the condition of the woman—Parental right of property in children—Conjugal sales of little girls in Africa, Polynesia, America, and India. II. Marriage by Servitude.—Labour and exchange value—Marriage by servitude with the Redskins, in Central America, in India, with the Hebrews—Influence of marriage by servitude on the condition of the woman. III. Marriage by Purchase.—With the Hottentots and the Kaffirs in Middle Africa, in Polynesia, in America, with the Mongols in China, with the aborigines of India, with the Berbers, the Hindoos in Malasia, and in Greco-Roman antiquity—Dowry marriage—Moral signification of marriage by purchase. I. The Power of Parents.

Marriage by capture, that is to say, the custom of rape, necessarily supposes a profound disdain for the ravished woman, and the antipathies or sympathies she may feel. It is indeed the truth that, as far back as we can carry our historical and ethnographical investigations, we find, with very rare exceptions, the subjection of woman is the rule in all human societies, and that the more backward the civilisation the harder was the subjection. Some sociologists have pretended that maternal filiation implied for the woman a sort of golden age—a reign of Amazons—during which the woman, as centre of the family, must have been honoured as its chief. All we know of ethnography gives the lie to this hypothesis. In the present day the matriarchate