WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
propagation of offspring and the maintenance of the group. If the conquering side bore off a large number of women, each man was able to secure three or four wives.
Among the semi-civilised communities of our time, polygyny is far commoner than polygamy. The secondary wife, or concubine, is found amongst the Fijians, the tribes of the Pacific Coast, in Madagascar, in Uganda, Ashanti, and other parts of Africa.
Polygyny is often confused with polygamy; but the distinction is important. A devout Mohammedan, the husband of not more than four wives, duly legitimatized, is, strictly speaking, a polygamist; but the Chinese mandarin—with a legal wife chosen for him by his parents—who takes concubines or inferior wives into his household, may be called a polygynist.
This form of sex union in its most primitive example occurs when several sisters are married to the same man. An instance of such a marriage is to be found in the story of Jacob and Rachel and Leah.
Wake, in his painstaking survey of early marriage customs, states that, in the oldest form of polygyny, all of a man's wives possessed equal rights. In another form there is a favourite, or principal, wife, or wives, and inferior wives, who are sometimes legal wives, and at others serf-wives or concubines.
An economic cause of polygamy must not be over-
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