WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
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
321
