Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of SexThomas, William Isaac
Science
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
Thomas, William Isaac
Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
women frequently become interested in others than their partners in
matrimony. I may also just allude to the fact that the large body of
the literature of intrigue, represented by the tales of Boccaccio and
Margaret of Navarre, is based on the interest in unfamiliar women.
Familiarity with women within the group and unfamiliarity with
women without the group is the explanation of exogamy on the side of
interest; and the system of exogamy is a result of exchanging familiar
women for others. We have seen that capture was not an important
means of securing wives outside the group, and that exogamy was fully
developed before property and media of exchange were developed to any
extent, and consequently before the purchase of women had become a
system. We have seen also that the Australian who wants a woman at
the present time gets her by exchanging another woman for her. Social
groups were necessarily small in the beginning. Before invention and
co-operation have advanced far, the group must remain small in order
to pick up enough food to sustain life on a given area.
Starting out with a single pair, when the family increases in size a
separation is necessary; and clans are an outcome of the process of
division and redivision, the bond between the clans and their union
in a tribe resulting from their consciousness of kinship. Now, it is
a well-known condition of exogamy that, while a man must marry without
his clan, he must not marry without his tribe, and for the most part,
in fact, the clan into which he shall marry is designated. In other
words, allied clans gave their women in exchange mutually. This was
a natural arrangement, both because the two groups were neighbors and
because they were friendly, and at the same time the psychological
demand for newness was satisfied. When a family was divided into
two branches, Branch A had a property interest in its own women, but
preferred the women of Branch B because of their unfamiliarity. The
exchange took place at first occasionally and not systematically, and
the women parted with in each case were not, perhaps, in all cases the
youngest, and we may assume that they had in all cases been married
before they were given up. But gradually, and when the habit of
exchange had been established, men came to look forward to the
exchange and to desire to secure the girl at the earliest possible
moment, until finally young women were exchanged at puberty, and
virgins. When for any reason there is established in a group a
tendency toward a practice, then the tendency is likely to become
established as a habit, and regarded as right, binding, and
inevitable: it is moral and its contrary is immoral. When we consider
the binding nature of the food taboos, of the _couvade_, and of the
regulation that a man shall not speak to or look at his mother-in-law
or sister, we can understand how the habit of marrying out, introduced
through the charm of unfamiliarity, becomes a binding habit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account