Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/204

 VI. Monogamy and Civilisation.

The foregoing facts are sufficiently numerous to enable us to deduce certain conclusions from them. These facts, taken as they are from nearly all the non-Aryan races, prove in the first place that the monogamic régime is in no way the appanage of the superior races, for among the lowest of human races some are monogamic. In regard to marriage, we find that primordial conditions impose the various forms of sexual union, quite independently of the caprice of individuals, or of the degree of culture and social development.

In attempting to estimate the moral worth of a people, a race, or a civilisation, we are much more enlightened by the position given to woman than by the legal type of the conjugal union. This type, besides, is usually more apparent than real. In many civilisations, both dead and living, legal monogamy has for its chief object the regulation of succession and the division of property. With much naïveté and effrontery, many legislators have sanctioned polygamy in reality by recognising the domestic concubinate by the side of legal monogamy. As for the position of the wife who is reputed to be specially legitimate, it is often much inferior to that enjoyed by the woman who lives under other conjugal régimes which are theoretically less elevated. In the greater number of countries more or less monogamic, which I have just passed in review, woman, whether married or not, has been subjected to extreme subordination. In an exceptional case she acquires a certain independence, where, thanks to maternal inheritance, she can become possessed of personal or real estate. It is to money alone, and not to the moralising influence of monogamy, that woman in barbarous countries owes the power of attaining a certain independence, for the two peoples who have granted it to her, the Egyptians in antiquity and the Touaregs of our own day, lived or live under a legislation which authorises polygamy. It is important also to notice that in the valley of the Nile, and in the Sahara, feminine emancipation is only the privilege of those women who belong to the ruling and propertied classes.