# Women Under Polygamy/Chapter 30

CHAPTER XXX
MONOGAMY AND POLYGYNY
In this survey I have noted a present-day monogamic trend in the races of the East. The movement may not be widespread, nor readily recognisable in the more stationary nations practising polygamy, but it undoubtedly manifests itself among the newer Eastern spirits. It would be rash to infer from this slight indication of changing opinion that plural marriage will entirely disappear in the future. Perhaps we may assume that, with the spread of discontent among the cultured women of the East, polygamy will lessen very gradually.
The polygynous impulse will scarcely wane and disappear in a few generations, even if we grant that it is likely to vanish altogether in the course of human evolution. None of the cultivated dominant nations of the world have up to the present lived down the in​stinct of polygyny. Slowly, through the influence of religion, the fear of penalties, and economic inhibitions, plurality in wives or concubines ceased to be the recognised practice of the prosperous European races. But the cessation of sanctioned polygyny did not annihilate the custom. That which was open became clandestine and furtive.
Diminishing polygamous relationships in the East will not come about through the acceptation of the religious creeds of the West. The bias against polygamy is a phase of the Feminist Movement, which is invading every quarter of the civilised globe. This is not the mere agitation of a disenfranchised sex, but a tremendous, clamant uprising of thoughtful women, aroused, after centuries of repression and inertia, to revolution and to the complete reconstruction of all social opinions, moral codes, and laws affecting their sex. In certain aspects, it is a strife for feminine supremacy. Undoubtedly, feminism is, in the main, a revolt against the sexual domination of man.
In these days of rapid and easy travel, there is a wide mingling of races. The West is beginning to learn some of the wisdom of the East, and the Orient is losing some of its conservativism. Far-reaching changes in the East and the West, through international intercourse, are likely to occur in the near future.
​The Europeanized Hindu and Mohammedan, cultured, observant, and well-travelled, begins to reflect whether the zenana and the harem offer after all the best environment for women. A passion for education, for deeper human experiences, and for wider social scope has already fired the bosoms of Turkish, Hindu, and Japanese women. The Oriental Women's Movement will be resisted by patriarchal autocracy, as the parent movement in the West has been combated by men. But it is inevitable that the resistance will be worn down; for there is no plainer sign in human evolution at the present time than the advance of women.
The tendency to ascendancy among the energetic, educated women of the West has led to considerable speculation as to what will happen if women become supreme in social rule. There is no question that an important proportion of advanced women are inclined to criticise the existing form of legal sex relationships. During the past fifty years indissoluble monogamous marriage has been dissected and assailed. I am not inclined to predict a popular campaign in favour of polygamy, under the advocacy of European women. The forceful, independent-thinking woman, always mindful of her "rights," and jealous of her position in the home, is not the type of reformer likely to applaud polygamous marriage.
​As a purely speculative statement, though one not without a groundwork of evidence, it might be said that a form of recognised polyandry, rather than polygamy, may possibly one day be practised in the West, side by side with monogamous marriage. It is a significant fact that the predominant sex tends to exhibit the plurality impulse. The militarist patriarch obtains, by purchase or warfare, as many mates as he can afford to keep. A rich man in the East impresses his neighbours and demonstrates his social importance by the maintenance of a costly harem.
We have seen in our investigation that the seraglio is sometimes a symbol of a ruler's might, and that the potentate is forced to maintain such a show of affluence in order to keep up his authority. In like manner, the influential Nair woman maintains her sway by the possession of several husbands. Wherever polyandry prevails, on the testimony of many travellers, women occupy an exalted position in the community.
In the West, dominant, masterful women have often displayed their power over men by what may be described as the polyandrous aptitude. Catherine of Russia is a well-known instance, and there is a fairly long list of highly-gifted women who have shown a capacity for loving several men in succession, and even more than one at the same time.
​In the West, the relations of the sexes are in a curiously chaotic state. Monogamous wedlock is only one form of sexual association. A. E. Crawley, in his article on "Chastity," in "The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics," says very truly that "at least 50 per cent, of the sexual intercourse that occurs in Western nations is outside the bonds of wedlock."
"The Churches do not help to solve the problem by preaching total abstinence and encouraging scientific ignorance; their attitude is part of the conventional sexual morality of the time. They can aid in the scientific rehabilitation of a natural chastity only by joining hands with science. Western science to-day has begun their work by a thorough study of the sexual impulse, and important pioneering has been effected in the education of the intelligent upon these subjects and in the development of eugenic research."
It is fairly certain that sexual promiscuity never prevailed among primitive people to the extent that it prevails in the most highly-civilised nations of to-day. Prostitution, as we have seen, is one of the evils rarely apparent among polygamic nations.
Enforced celibacy for a host of normal women, with the normal woman's desire for the love and companion​ship of man, together with thwarted maternal yearnings, form one of the grave problems of Western civilised countries. It has been said that the higher civilisation simply spells celibacy for a vast number of women.
I recall an afternoon when I sat at the open window of a flat in London, in conversation with a cultured Hindu.
"Probably you think, like most Englishmen, that polygamy is an evil," said my friend. He stretched his hand towards the vista of countless houses.
"In this suburb alone," he remarked, "you have several thousand marriageable single women in excess of men. Is that an evil, or not? In India we cannot understand this anomaly. At the same time, you have a vast, degraded class of women in your White Slave Traffic."
Sir Richard Burton, who spent many years of his life among polygamous peoples, was never denunciatory concerning plural marriage. On the other hand, it would seem that he regarded it as suited to the racial needs of the East. Yet the monogamic trend in Turkey is an indication that the people of that country are beginning to outgrow the polygamic bias. Probably religiously-sanctioned and legally-permissible polygamy may disappear in the course of social evolution in the East.
​Such a disappearance of polygamous marriage would probably be followed by a long period of polygyny. History is wont to repeat itself. When Christianity attacked the ancient practice of Hebrew plural marriage, polygyny lingered for centuries.
Lea, in his "History of Sacerdotal Celibacy," says that the chronicles of Christianity in the Middle Ages are "full of the evidences that indiscriminate license of the worst kind prevailed throughout every rank of the hierarchy." Prelates used to levy taxes upon priests for keeping concubines.
While polygamy favours male supremacy, and provides for the wandering amative impulses of men, in its Oriental form the practice militates against woman's influence in many of the wider interests of social life. It is the wastage of a highly valuable social force that a large number of women should be segregated and immured in harems. Under polyandry men are content to be shared as husbands, chiefly because the polyandrous wife has never insisted that her spouses shall be kept behind bolt and bar. Polygamous husbands have rarely, if ever, allowed such freedom to their partners.
The harem implies for women seclusion from the world. It is in a sense like the nunnery. The tendency of modern civilisation is towards a freer social intermingling of the two sexes, and this is one of the ​healthiest signs of the times. The West has practically declared for full sexual equality. No doubt women will lose some of their traditional privileges in the process of equalisation; but they will gain infinitely in mental and moral development. The State that neglects to use the potentialities of its women, and regards them only as wives and the mothers of children, will assuredly lag behind in the march of nations.
The life of the harem can have no attraction for the cultured woman whose aspirations are for freedom of thought and conduct, and for the full development of her mind and character. To such a woman even the economic dependence of monogamic marriage is distasteful. Polygamy appeals only to those women who are content to forego all active participation in affairs beyond the sphere of the home.
For the ease-loving woman, contented with narrow interests, the seraglio offers an escape from the stress of life. To live as one of four wives, or as one of a hundred concubines, is repugnant to the sentiment of the bulk of women reared in the traditions of Christendom. But this is not saying that polygamy is repellent to the whole mass of Western women. The fervent advocacy of plural marriage by female converts to Mormonism is sufficient evidence that such a form of the sex relationship attracts a fair number of European women. It must be remembered that in sex matters ​there is a great diversity of feeling and emotion. Women are not all of one temperament. There are many signs that an increasing number of women are dissatisfied with the conventional standards regulating the relations of the sexes.
It is not wholly improbable that the harem will slowly disappear with the advance of education among the women of the East. Discontent is a concomitant of education. The "disenchanted" in the Turkish seraglios are an instance. The seclusion, the dependence, and the narrow environment of harem life are the causes of the disenchantment. An aversion to plural marriage per se may possibly increase among Oriental women. But the root of the dissatisfaction is in the repressed and monotonous life behind the walls of the harem rather than in ethical objections to polygamy.
It has been said that though women may exhibit an innate bias for monogamy, they have been the accessories of polygamy whenever it suited their purpose. For example, polygamy has seemed the only rational solution of the problem of an excess of women in certain tribes and at different stages. Such disproportion in the sexes has threatened the community with celibacy and infertility, the two evils universally dreaded and avoided by primitive people. Under such conditions any inhibition of polygamous marriage ​would be regarded as disastrous to the tribe. Had they the knowledge, the primitive group would declare with Cicero that virtue is but nature carried out to the utmost.
Monogamy, naturally evolved, and not as it is shaped and controlled by religious beliefs, is now acknowledged in our own country as the highest form of love union. "It is not the legal or religious formality which sanctifies marriage," writes Havelock Ellis, "it is the reality of the marriage which sanctifies the form." The cardinal virtue of monogamic marriage is its claim that the betrothed pair are irresistibly drawn to one another by affection. That love and passion are often absent, and that marriage is entered into for a variety of social and material reasons, is perfectly true. But the monogamic ideal is the expression of a genuine sentiment of love between men and women.
Courtship under the monogamous system of marriage is the prelude to union. During this period the man and the woman have each at least the opportunity for ascertaining their lover's salient virtues, foibles, and defects of character, and this probation often prepares the way for pacific matrimony. No such period of wooing is permissible under the Eastern system of purchase, or arranged, marriage. In most instances the contracting persons are strangers to one another; and in some cases they do not even see each other's ​faces until the nuptial day. The risks of psychic incompatibility, and of physiological maladaption are at all events lessened when a period of wooing is permitted.
In polygamous unions courtship begins with wedlock. Two strangers unite in the closest of human intimacies. To the Western mind this practice cuts at the very roots of the ideal of romantic affection. We are, however, assured by highly intelligent observers that the system of post-marital courtship has fewer risks of disaster than we imagine.
Courtship before mating is the universal rule among the higher animals. It is a natural process of selection, with a very definite aim. Wooing, love-play, and the exercise of choice would seem to be as natural for men as for animals. Polygamy as generally practised in the East appears contrary to the general law of Nature, in so far as it dispenses with preliminary courtship.
What chance of selection has a Georgian girl of fifteen sold into harem marriage? Virtually she is a serf, though her serfdom may not be irksome. In any case, the human right of freedom of choice of a sexual partner is wholly repudiated, and she is merely a purchased woman, or human chattel.
The thousand devices of Nature for the free play of the selective will in the matings of animals seem a con​vincing argument against any form of human marriage that negatives this free play. The idyllic courtship of birds foreshadows the passionate, romantic wooing of human beings. Even among the polygamous mammals and among birds there is love-making in both sexes as an introduction to physical mating.
The cramping of feminine intelligence is one of the gravest defects of the harem form of polygamic marriage. The harem stands for a sign of that aggressive, anti-social affluence that the most thoughtful minds all the world over regard as anomalous and evil. It is, in a measure, a symbol of vulgar ostentation. Unrestricted polygyny leads to the inequality exampled in Dahomey, where the king possessed thousands of wives, and his chiefs hundreds, while the ill-paid soldier could not maintain even one woman.
It is a menace of the power of wealth that a rich man's money should enable him to fill his harem with a multitude of women, while great masses of the population earn barely sufficient to provide for one wife and her children. It is a low ideal of woman's vocation that urges a Circassian mother to sell her daughter to the lord of a seraglio. The harem system favours such forms of female parasitism.
The ancient civilisations most favourable to the ​equality of the sexes gave the woman proprietary rights, liberty in the choice of a husband, and opportunity for sharing in the counsels of the nation. Such is the ideal of the spirit of modern feminism. An ever-growing number of women of the Western civilisations condemn the economic dependence of their sex. Olive Schreiner explicitly warns women that parasitism results in female degradation. Mrs. Ethel Snowden urges that, so far as possible, every woman should be self-supporting. This insistence upon the economic freeing of women is based upon an appreciation of the status of the sex in the period of mother-right. In America over five million women earn a livelihood without dependence upon men. Japan has a large population of industrial women. The entrance of women into almost every field of employment has its menace; but the long age is nearing the end during which women had no trade but marriage.
Wider knowledge for women is the rock upon which the system will ultimately wreck itself. This is not stating that polygyny will disappear entirely in civilised nations. Sexual variation has always existed, and there is no reason to believe that one stable, rigid form of erotic relationship will ever obtain. But the spread of the revolutionary influence of culture, a perfectly natural process, will cause a steady reduction of the harems of the East.
​Although men scarcely realise the fact, women in civilised communities are the predominant controllers of the sex relations. If women in England elected to live either in polygamy or in polyandry men would be forced sooner or later to accept the condition. The "mate-hunger" of the male renders him, to a large extent, the servitor, and often the dupe of the female. A sex-strike among the greater mass of Western women would overthrow the supposed male supremacy in a few weeks, and lead to a complete reconstruction of ethical and social views regarding love and marriage.
Another inevitable concomitant of the harem system is jealousy. This passion is common enough in monogamous conjugality. But it is even more likely to show itself, in its basest forms, among a number of women equally anxious to win the favour of a common spouse. The seraglio is often the scene of bitter envies, quarrels, plots, and sometimes of crimes arising from this source. No doubt the women of polygamous countries are taught to subjugate the instinct of jealousy. A really jealous woman would find harem life unbearable. But even the defenders of plural marriage do not all assert that jealousy is absent.
The glaring contrast that Western polygyny affords to Eastern polygyny is in the fact that our variety is without obligations. The Oriental concubine, mis​tress, or secondary wife, has her clearly-defined status and legal rights. Among us the mistress loses caste, and has practically no rights whatever, while her children are punished by a cruel outlawry.
As Havelock Ellis very truly remarks: "By enabling a man to escape so easily from the obligations of his polygamous relationships, we encourage him, if he is unscrupulous, to enter into them; we place a premium on the immorality that we loftily condemn." It is equally true that "in no part of the world is polygyny so prevalent as in Christendom."
Chaotic promiscuity, "wild love," and prostitution flourish under our pseudo-monogamic system. It is easier to live licentiously in the West than in the East, and we should face the fact frankly. Lecky, in "The History of European Morals," boldly asserts that while monogamy of a permanent character is the normal and prevalent form of conjugality, it is idle to pretend that this type of union is adapted to the needs of a whole race. Even such a distinguished Christian cleric as Charles Kingsley declared that: "There will never be a good world for women until the last remnant of the Canon law is civilized off the earth."
Polygyny, whether sanctioned or unrecognised, has ​always accompanied monogamy. Dr. Johnson admitted the variety impulse, and condoned it in his own sex, stating that a wise wife would not pry into the amours of her husband. Under recognition by the law the concubine in mediæval Europe was often raised to the dignity of the wife, and she might even be indicted with infidelity. I have referred to the "legitimate concubine" in Thirteenth Century England. Other facts proving an English sanction for the maintenance of second wives or mistresses may be found in Smith and Cheetham's "Dictionary of Christian Antiquites," and in Lea's "History of Sacerdotal Celibacy."
The legal recognition of plural sex unions was gradually relaxed and finally withdrawn, with the result that, as usual, the woman suffered. She was no longer protected by law or social opinion; she became a socially inferior citizen, usually regarded with extreme hostility by her own sex. And so has the mistress remained, possessing only a status among the unconventional members of society.
With the tightening of the bonds of permanent marriage came an increase of the pariah class of women, variously estimated in this country to number from a hundred to two hundred thousand. Is not this of itself sufficient evidence that the polygynous instinct is not readily eradicated?
​A Puritan writer, in 1658, stirred by the spectacle of sexual proflicacy, asked whether it would not be better to allow polygamy.
There has been serious recommendation of polygamy by more recent English humanists. James Hinton, a surgeon, and the author of the well-known essay "The Mystery of Pain," declared that it would be better to admit and recognise polygamy in England than to pretend that we are strictly monogamous. Hinton, an extremely earnest-minded man of unassailable morality, spoke and wrote boldly upon the subject of sex. He held that a furtive, hypocritical polygyny was far more disastrous than recognised polygamic marriage could ever become. In the United States the Rev. J. H. Noyes preached the doctrine of "omnigamy," which might be explained as co-existing polygamy and polyandry. The teaching was carried into practice by the Free Love community, established at Oneida Creek. Since then the doctrine has spread among a fair number of the countries of the West.
Dr. George Brandes, in his "Impressions of Russia," refers to the sexual freedom of the cultured classes in that country, and says that this principle has ​passed out of the region of discussion into full recognition. But this freedom is not that form to which we are accustomed in England. It has its serious obligations among a nation where the intelligentia look upon the love of the sexes "as a holy thing."
The born-amorists, the Don Juans of the race, with their marked polygynic tendencies, form an order sundered by physical and psychic differences from the more contained and parental types. Among the historic amorists are a great number of most distinguished and exceptionally gifted men and women. But the paternal man and the maternal woman, the less erotic type common in all the Northern and Western nations, are, probably, the best types for the propagation of the race.
Both classes have their marked limitations as well as their finer endowments. The born-fathers and mothers of the race are instinctively monogamic. Love may besiege their bosoms with irresistible sway in the early days of marriage, but with the begetting and rearing of children come that intense solicitude for the well-being of offspring and profound parental affection which overpower all errant desires. When passion subsides they remain tender companions, serenely content with family love.
These are the solid bulwark of the monogamic society. No polygynous impulses, no vehement ​passions, assail and distract them. They are the devoted progenitors of the species.
Monogamy grows out of polygyny whenever and wherever the ideal of close personal attachment between the sexes satisfies the emotional and physiological needs of the race. In the West the conception of romantic love is associated with devotion to, and lasting affection for, one member of the opposite sex. This conception of monogamic marriage for the whole life of the united pair arose very early from the instinct of races in the course of evolution, though the strict observance of monogamy has rarely been general in the monogamic nations.
Religious and ethical precepts and stern legislation have played their part in the enforcement of monogamic sex relationships among individuals of the community predisposed to polygyny. But a great number of men and women need no such counsels and deterrents. They have an innate bias to single marriage, and in that state they find their highest ideal of connubial happiness.
No far-seeing student of the sexual history of mankind can predict a total extirpation of the polygynic impulse, even though polygamous marriage may be doomed. The Western marriage customs, like ​everything else, have undergone numerous changes and modifications through the ages of culture. At the present time the demand for greater facility for practical dissolution of marriage is one of the indications of dissatisfaction with the inevitability of indissoluble wedlock.
Marriage has always taken the form demanded by the mass of the people. Like all things human, the form has never been so perfectly adapted to the passions, predilections, and variational impulses of the race as to banish all discontent.
We live, indeed, only in the infancy of the finer ideals of sex-love. Lofty, poetic, and moral appreciation of the greatest dynamic of life is developing through an awakening consciousness that upon a recognition of the full significance of sex and its manifold phenomena depends, to an almost inconceivable extent, the progress of the race. To a few minds have come beautiful foreshadowings of a nobler estimate of love, potent to overcome the evil and the misery that spring more often from low ideals and ignorance than from depravity of heart.
* ↑ Mrs. Ethel Snowden ("The Feminist Movement") states that "the educated and advanced women of Turkey demand prohibition of polygamy, the right to choose a husband, and higher education. The freeing of Turkish women is only a matter of time."
* ↑ Op. cit. A. E. Crawley.
* ↑ See "The Courtship of Animals," W. P. Pyecraft.
* ↑ See section "Marriage," Havelock Ellis Op. cit., Vol. VI., for reflections upon Western polygyny.
* ↑ "A Remedy for Uncleanness," by "A Person of Quality."
* ↑ For a summary of Hinton's ethical beliefs see "Three Modern Seers," by Edith Ellis.
* ↑ According to Starcke op. cit. polygamy will disappear.