It must not be assumed, however, that the condition of primitive man is correctly represented by even the lowest of existing races. The very fact that the latter have remained stationary, that their manners, habits, and mode of life have continued almost unaltered for generations, has created a strict, and often complicated, system of customs, from which the former was necessarily free, but which has in some cases gradually acquired even more than the force of law.[145]
Yet we find him comparing primitive women with this race which for thousands upon thousands of years, because of its environment, or through some cause which is not understood, has been unable to advance.
While this writer perceives clearly that foreign women were much more desirable for wives than those belonging to a man’s own tribe, he has not been able to discover the reason why this was so, but, continuing to babble about the “rights” of the men of the group, overlooks the fact that native-born women were free, and as only those women who had first been torn from their friends and shorn of their independence could at this stage of human existence be forced into the position of wife, it became necessary to secure them by violence from surrounding tribes. He is not blind to the fact that it was a desire to extend the limit of conjugal liberties on the part of males which prompted wife-capture; yet he would have us believe that although women were absolutely independent of men, and although they were the recognized heads of families, and the source whence originated all the privileges of the gens, it was in no degree owing to their influence that the conjugal liberties of males were restricted within the tribe, but, on the contrary, that this restriction was enforced out of regard for the “proprietary rights” of the men of the group. He says: “We must remember that under the communal system the women of the tribe were all common property. No one could appropriate one of them to himself without infringing on the general rights of the tribe.”
As well might we say of the female bird for whose favours the male fights until overcome by exhaustion and loss of blood, that she belongs to him, or that he may appropriate her, as to say that the men of early groups could “appropriate” women. From all the facts relative to the condition of early society, it is plain that if either sex could with propriety be designated as property it must have been the male. It is evident that women were stolen from distant tribes for the express purpose of sexual slavery, a position to which free, native-born women could not be dragged; therefore, when Lubbock assures us that these foreign women naturally “became wives in our own sense of the term,” we may be sure that he is neither unmindful of the origin of our present social system, nor of the true significance attached to the position of wife. Indeed, he informs us that the “origin of marriage was independent of all sacred and social conditions,” and proves the same by actually producing the evidence. He has no hesitancy in declaring that marriage is a masculine institution, established in the interest (or supposed interest) of males; that it was “founded not on the rights of the woman, but of the man,” and that there was not on the woman’s part even the semblance of consent. In fact he declares that he regards it as an illustration of the good old plan that “he should take who has the power, and he should keep who can.” He says also that it had nothing to do with mutual affection or sympathy, that it was invalidated by no appearance of consent, and that it was symbolized not by any demonstration of warm affection on the one side and tender devotion on the other, but by brutal violence and unwilling submission. To prove that the connection between force and marriage is deeply rooted, Sir John Lubbock, like Mr. McLennan, has furnished numerous examples of peoples among whom marriage by actual capture still prevails, as well as many among which the system has passed into a mere symbol. He is quite certain that the complete subjection of the woman in marriage furnishes an explanation to those examples in barbarous life in which women are looked upon as being too great to marry—and cites the case of Sebituane, chief of the Bechuanas, who told his daughter, Mamochisáne, that all the men were at her disposal—“she might take any one, but ought to keep none.”