Sex and Society by William I. Thomas

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But checks upon conduct are even more definitely expressed, and
more definitely expressible, than approvals of conduct. Approval is
expressed in a more general expansive feeling toward the deserving
individual, and this may be accompanied with medals for bravery,
promotions, and other rewards; but in general the moral side of life
gets no such definite notice as the immoral side. Practices which are
disliked by all may be forbidden, while there is no equally summary
way of dealing with practices approved by all. In consequence,
practices which interfere with the activities of others are inhibited,
and to the violation of the inhibition is attached a penalty,
resulting in a body of law and a system of punishment. An analysis of
the following crimes and punishments among the Kafirs, for instance,
indicates that a definite relation between offensive forms of
activity and punishments is present at a comparatively early period of
development:

Theft: restitution and fine. Injuring cattle: death or fine,
according to the circumstances. Causing cattle to abort:
heavy fine. Arson: fine. False witness: heavy fine. Maiming:
fine. Adultery: fine, sometimes death. Rape: fine, sometimes
death. Using love philters: death or fine, according to
circumstances. Poisoning, and practices with an evil intent
(termed "witchcraft"): death and confiscation. Murder: death
or fine, according to circumstances.... Treason, as contriving
the death of a chief, conveying information to the enemy:
death and confiscation. Desertion from the tribe: death and
confiscation.[197]

Similarly among the Kukis:

Injuring the property of others, or taking it without payment;
using violence; abusing parents; fraudulently injuring
another; giving false evidence; speaking disrespectfully to
the aged; marrying an elder brother's wife; putting your
foot on, or walking over, a man's body; speaking profanely of
religion--are acts of impiety.[198]

As the vigorous and aggressive activities of the male have a very
conspicuous value for the group when exercised for the benefit of
the group, they become particularly harmful when directed against the
safety or interests of the group or the members of the group, and we
find that civil and criminal law, and contract, and also conventional
morality, are closely connected with the motility of the male. The
establishment of moral standards is mediated through the sense of
strain--strain to the personal self, and strain to the social self.
Whether a man is injured by an assault upon his life or upon his
property, he suffers violence, and the first resort of the injured
individual or group is to similar violence; but this results in a
vicious tit-for-tat reaction whereby the stimulus to violence is
reinstated by every fresh act of violence. Within the group this
vicious action and reaction is broken up by the intervention of public
opinion, either in an informal expression of disapproval, or through
the headmen. The man who continues to kill may be killed in turn, but
by order of the council of the tribe; and one of his kinsmen may be
appointed to execute him, as under that condition no feud can follow.
But there is always a reluctance to banish or take the life of the
member of the group, both because no definite machinery is developed
for accomplishing either, and because the loss of an able-bodied
member of a group is a loss to the group itself. The group does not
seek, therefore, immediately to be rid of an offensive member, but
to modify his habits, to convert him. Jones says of the Ojibways that
there were occasionally bad ones among them, "but the good council of
the wise sachems and the mark of disgrace put upon unruly persons had
a very desirable influence."[199] The extreme form of punishment in
the power of the folk-moot of the Tuschinen is to be excluded from the
public feasts, and to be made a spectator while stoned in effigy and
cursed.[200] Sending a man to Coventry is in vogue among the Fejir
Beduins: one who kills a friend is so despised that he is never
spoken to again, nor allowed to sit in the tent of any member of the
tribe.[201]

The formulation of sentiment about an act depends also on the
repetition of the act. The act is more irritating, and the irritation
more widespread, with each repetition, and there is an increase of
the penalty for a second offense, and death for a slight offense when
frequently repeated: in the Netherlands stealing of linen left in the
fields to be bleached led to the death penalty for stealing a pocket
handkerchief. And with increasing definiteness of authority there
follows increasing definiteness of punishment; and when finally
the habit becomes fixed, conformity with it becomes a paramount
consideration, and a deed is no longer viewed with reference to its
intrinsic import so much as to its conformity or nonconformity with a
standard in the law: _summum jus, summa injuria_.

Morality, involving the modification of the conduct of the individual
in view of the presence of others, is already highly developed in
the tribal stage, since the exigencies of life have demanded the most
rigorous regulation of behavior in order to secure the organization
and the prowess essential to success against all comers. But the tribe
is a unit in hostile coexistence with other similar units, and its
morality stops within itself, and applies in no sense to strangers and
outsiders. The North American Indians were theoretically at war with
all with whom they had not concluded a treaty of peace. In Africa
the traveler is safe and at an advantage if by a fiction (the rite of
blood-brotherhood) he is made a member of the group; and similarly
in Arabia and elsewhere. The old epics and histories are full of the
praises of the man who is gentle within the group and furious without
it. The earliest commandments doubtless did not originally apply to
mankind at large. They meant, "Thou shalt not kill within the tribe,"
"Thou shalt not commit adultery within the tribe," etc. Cannibalism
furnishes a most interesting example of the prohibition of a practice
as applied to the members of the group, while extra-tribal cannibalism
continued unabated. And within the tribe there is a continuance of
this practice in the forms which do not interfere with the efficiency
and cripple the activity of the group. That is, while cannibalism
in general is prohibited, the eating of the decrepit, the aged,
of invalids, of deformed children, and of malefactors is still
practiced.[202]

But there gradually grew up a set of disapprovals of conduct as such,
whether within or without the group. In the _Odyssey_ Pallas Athene
says that Odysseus had come from Ephyra from Ilus, son of Mermerus:
"For even thither had Odysseus gone on his swift ship to seek a deadly
drug, that he might have wherewithal to smear his bronze-shod arrows:
but Ilus would in no wise give it to him, for he had in awe the
everlasting gods."[203] Here is an extension to society in general
of a principle which had been first worked out in the group; for
poisoning without the group was long allowed after it was disallowed
in the group. The case of poisoning is, indeed, a particularly good
instance of an unsatisfaction felt in the substitution of clandestine
methods for simple motor force in deciding a dispute, and affords
a clear example of an important relation between moral feeling
and physiological functioning. Animal as well as human society has
developed strategy alongside of direct motor expressions, but strategy
is only an indirect application of the motor principle. Co-ordination,
associative memory, will, judgment, are involved in strategy; it is
only a different mode of functioning. On the other hand, there is
a peculiar abhorrence of murder by night, poisoning, drowning in a
ship's hold, because, while all the physiological machinery for action
is on hand, there is no chance to work it. It is a most exasperating
thing to die without making a fight for it. The so-called American
duel is an abhorrent thing, because life or death is decided by a turn
of the dice, not on the racially developed principle of the battle to
the strong.

When, then, it is observed within the group that this, that, and
the other man has died of poison, each interprets this in terms of
himself, and no one feels safe. The use of poison is not only a means
of checking activities and doing hurt socially, but this form is most
foul and unnatural because it involves a death without the possibility
of motor resistance (except the inadequate opportunity on the
strategic side of taking precautionary measures against poison) and
a victory and social reward without a struggle. The group, therefore,
early adopts very severe methods in this regard. Death is the usual
penalty for the use of poison, and even the possession of poison,
among tribes not employing it for poisoning weapons, is punished.
Among the Karens of India, if a man is found with poison in his
possession, he is bound and placed for three days in the hot sun, his
poison is destroyed, and he is pledged not to obtain any more. If
he is suspected of killing anyone, he is executed.[204] Particularly
distressing modes of death, and other means of penalizing death by
poison more severely than motor modes of killing, were adopted. The
Chinese punish the preparation of poisons or capture of poisonous
animals with beheading, confiscation, and banishment of wife and
children. In Athens insanity caused by poison was punished with death.
The _Sachsenspiegel_ provides death by fire. In the lawbook of the
tsar Wachtang a double composition price was exacted for death by
poison. And in ancient Wales death and confiscation were the penalty
for death by poison, and death or banishment the penalty of the
manufacturer of poisons. The same quality of disapproval is expressed
in early law of sorcery, and it is unnecessary to give details of this
also. But, stated in emotional terms, both poison and sorcery, and
other underhand practices arouse one of the most distressing of the
emotions--the emotion of dread, if we understand by this term that
form of fear which has no tangible or visible embodiment, which
is apprehended but not located, and which in consequence cannot be
resisted; the distress, in fact, lying in the inability to function.
The organism which has developed structure and function through action
is unsatisfied by an un-motor mode of decision. We thus detect in the
love of fair play, in the Golden Rule, and in all moral practices a
motor element; and with changing conditions there is progressively
a tendency, mediated by natural selection and conscious choice, to
select those modes of reaction in which the element of chance is
as far as possible eliminated. This preference for functional over
chance or quasi-chance forms of decision is expressed first within
the group, but is slowly extended, along with increasing commercial
communication, treaties of peace, and with supernatural assistance, to
neighboring groups. The case of Odysseus is an instance of a moment
in the life of the race when a disapproval is becoming of general
application.

On our assumption that morality is dependent on strains, and that
its development is due to the advantage of regulating these strains,
we may readily understand why most of the canons of morality are
functions of the katabolic male activity. Theft, arson, rape,
murder, burglary, highway robbery, treason, and the like, are natural
accompaniments of the more aggressive male disposition; the male is
_par excellence_ both the hero and the criminal. But on the side of
the sex we might expect to find the female disposition setting the
standards of morality, since reproduction is even a greater part of
her nature than of man's. On the contrary, however, we find the male
standpoint carried over and applied to the reproductive process, and
the regulation of sex practices transpiring on the basis of force. In
the earliest period of society, under the maternal system, the woman
had her own will more with her person; but with the formulation of a
system of control, based on male activities, the person of woman was
made a point in the application of the male standpoint. "The wife,
like any other of the husband's goods and chattels, might be sold or
lent."[205] "Even when divorced she was by no means free, as the tribe
exercised its jurisdiction in the woman's affairs and the disposal of
her person."[206] Forsyth reports of the Gonds that

infidelity in the married state is ... said to be very rare;
and, when it does occur, is one of the few occasions when
the stolid aborigine is roused to the extremity of passion,
frequently revenging himself on the guilty pair by cutting off
his wife's nose and knocking out the brains of her paramour
with his ax.[207]

The sacrifice of wives in Africa, India, Fiji, Madagascar, and
elsewhere, upon the death of husbands, shows how completely the person
of the female had been made a part of the male activity. Where this
practice obtained, the failure of the widow to acquiesce in the habit
was highly immoral. Williams says of the strangling of widows by the
Fijians:

It has been said that most of the women thus destroyed are
sacrificed at their own instance. There is truth in this
statement, but unless other facts are taken into account it
produces an untruthful impression. Many are importunate to
be killed, because they know that life would henceforth be to
them prolonged insult, neglect, and want.... If the friends
of the woman are not the most clamorous for her death, their
indifference is construed into disrespect either for her late
husband or his friends.[208]

Child-marriages are another instance of the success of the male in
gaining control of the person of the female and of regulating her
conduct from his own standpoint. Girls were married or betrothed
before birth, at birth, at two weeks, three months, or seven years of
age, and variously, often to an adult, and their husbands were thus
able to take extraordinary precautions against the violation of their
chastity. On the other hand, it frequently happens, especially where
marriage by purchase is not developed, that the conduct of the girl
is not looked after until she is married; it becomes immoral only when
disapproved by her husband. In the Andaman Islands,

after puberty the females have indiscriminate intercourse
... until they are chosen or allotted as wives, when they are
required to be faithful to their husbands, whom they serve....
If any married or single man goes to an unmarried woman, and
she declines to have intercourse with him by getting up or
going to another part of the circle, he considers himself
insulted, and, unless restrained, would kill or wound
her.[209]

Under these conditions the rightness or wrongness of the sexual
conduct of the wife turned upon the attitude of the husband toward the
act. Hence a very general practice that the husbands prostituted their
wives for hire, but punished unapproved intercourse:

The chastity of the women does not appear to be held in much
estimation. The husband will, for a trifling present, lend
his wife to a stranger, and the loan may be protracted by
increasing the value of the present. Yet, strange as it may
seem, notwithstanding this facility, any connection of this
kind not authorized by the husband is considered highly
offensive and quite as disgraceful to his character as the
same licentiousness in civilized societies.[210]

When woman lost the temporary prestige which she had acquired in the
maternal system through her greater tendency to associated life, and
particularly when her person came more absolutely into the control of
man through the system of marriage by purchase, she also accepted and
reflected naively the moral standards which were developed for the
most part through male activities. Any system of checks and approvals
in the group, indeed, which was of advantage to the men would be of
advantage to the women also, since these checks and approvals were
safeguards of the group as a whole, and not of the men only. The
person and presence of woman in society have stimulated and modified
male behavior and male moral standards, and she has been a faithful
follower, even a stickler for the prevalent moral standards (the very
tenacity of her adhesion is often a sign that she is an imitator);
but up to date the nature of her activities--the nature, in short,
of the strains she has been put to--has not enabled her to set up
independently standards of behavior either like or unlike those
developed through the peculiar male activities.

There is, indeed, a point of difference in the application of
standards of morality to men and to women. Morality as applied to man
has a larger element of the contractual, representing the adjustment
of his activities to those of society at large, or more particularly
to the activities of the male members of society; while the morality
which we think of in connection with woman shows less of the
contractual and more of the personal, representing her adjustment to
men, more particularly the adjustment of her person to men.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXOGAMY

Perhaps the most puzzling questions which meet the student of early
society are connected with marriage and kinship; and among these
questions the practice of exogamy has provoked a very large number of
ingenious theories. These are, however, I believe, all unsatisfactory,
either because they are too narrow to cover the facts completely,
or because they assume in the situation conditions which do not
exist.[211] But quite aside from the facts and the interpretation
of the facts, all theories in the field have failed to reckon
sufficiently with the natural disposition and habits of man in early
society, particularly with his attitude toward sexual matters; and it
seems entirely feasible to get some light on the question why man went
outside his immediate family and clan for women through an examination
of the nature of his sexual consciousness, and of the operation of
this in connection with the laws of habit and attention.

First of all, it is evident to one who looks carefully into the
question of early sex-habits that the lower races are intensely
interested in sexual life. A large part of their thought, and even of
their inventive ingenuity, is spent in this direction. The pleasures
of life are few and gross, but are pursued with vigor; and, _mutatis
mutandis_, love bears about the same relation to the activities of
the Australian aborigine as it bore to those of Sir Lancelot and the
knights of olden time.

A failure to perceive this is the great defect in Westermarck's great
work, where it is assumed that, if animals were monogamous, primitive
man must have been much the more so. The fact is that in respect
to memory, imagination, clothing, mode of association, and social
restraint man differed radically from the animals, and precisely
through these added qualities he took not only an instinctive,
but an artificial and reasoned, interest in sexual practices; and
this resulted in a state of consciousness which made sexual life
uninterruptedly interesting, in contrast with a pairing season among
animals, and also in a constant tendency toward promiscuity, whether
this state was ever actually reached or not. The widespread and
various unnatural sex practices, the use of aphrodisiacs, the practice
of drawing attention to the girl at puberty, phallic worship, erotic
dances, and periodic orgies, of which the Orient furnishes so many
examples, are all found also among the natural races.[212]

Again, the eagerness of men to obtain girl wives, and even a claim on
infants, thus assuring virginity and marriage at the moment of sexual
maturity;[213] the habit of keeping girls in solitary confinement from
a tender age until the consummation of marriage;[214] and the African
custom of infibulation,[215] are classes of facts indicating that
the sexual element occupied a large place in the consciousness of the
natural races.

We must also consider the fact that sexual life is organically a
utilization of a surplus of nutriment, and that when food and leisure
are abundant there is a tendency on the part of sexual activity to
become a play activity, just as there is a tendency of activities in
general to become play activities under the same conditions. And while
there was no leisure class in early society, primitive man was a man
of leisure in the sense that his work activities were intermittent;
a successful hunt was followed by a period of rest, recuperation, and
surplus energy, and a consequent turning of attention to sexual life,
with the result that the sex interest appears as one of the main play
interests among the natural races.

Under these conditions, and in the absence of any considerably
developed social institutions or altruistic sentiments, we not
unnaturally find that the older and stronger men have the better of
it, both in regard to the food supply and the women, and the younger
men are obstructed in their efforts to satisfy their desires in regard
to both. The following passages from the ethnological literature of
Australia indicate the nature of the Australian male in sexual life,
and the nature of the obstructions encountered by the youth in the
presence of the older men.[216]

It is noticeable, first of all, that among the Australian tribes the
older men have worked out or fallen into such habits regarding the
females that the younger men obtain wives with great difficulty and
usually not before waiting a long time. In fact, Spencer and Gillen,
in their invaluable works on the central Australian tribes state
that usually a man is married to a woman of another generation than
himself:

The most usual method of obtaining a wife is that which is
connected with the well-established custom in accordance with
which every woman of the tribe is made _Tualcha mura_ with
some man. The arrangement, which is often a mutual one, is
made between two men, and it will be seen that owing to a girl
being made _Tualcha mura_ to a boy of her own age the men very
frequently have wives much younger than themselves, as the
husband and the mother of the wife obtained in this way are
usually approximately of the same age. When it has been agreed
upon by two men that the relationship shall be established
between their own children, one a boy and the other a girl,
the two latter, who are generally of a tender age, are taken
to the _Erlukwirra_, or women's camp, and here each mother
takes the other child and rubs it over with a mixture of fat
and red ochre.... This relationship indicates that the man has
the right to take as wife the daughter of the woman; she is in
fact assigned to him, and this, as a rule, many years before
she is born.[217]

It will be noticed that this is in reality a modification of the
system of exchanging women, and has an advantage over capture,
elopement, and charming (all of which are methods in practice among
the same tribes) in the fact that it is of the nature of a business
transaction or social agreement, and provokes no bad feeling or
retaliation. It also shows considerable regard on the part of the
elders for the young; but practically it is a reluctant admission of a
youth to participation in sexual privileges, since marriage is delayed
until a girl of his own age has been married and given birth to a girl
who in turn has become marriageable.

In the same connection we have the testimony of Curr that

the marriage customs of the blacks result in very ill-assorted
unions as regards age; for it is usual to see old men with
mere girls as wives, and men in the prime of life married to
old widows. As a rule wives are not obtained by the men
until they are at least thirty years of age. Women have very
frequently two husbands during their lifetime, the first older
and the second younger than themselves. Of course, as polygamy
is the rule and the men of the tribe exceed the females in
number besides, there are always many bachelors in every
tribe; but I never heard of a female over sixteen years of age
who, prior to the breakdown of aboriginal customs after the
coming of the whites, had not a husband.[218]

And Bonwick says:

The old men, who get the best food and hold the franchise of
the tribe in their hands, manage to secure an extra supply of
the prettiest girls.[219]

A further evidence of the keen sexual interest of the male is
furnished by the fact that even when the difficulties in the way of
getting a wife are regularly overcome by the youth, the other men of
the group, especially the older ones, reserve a temporary but prior
claim on her.[220]

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