WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
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.[1] 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
- ↑ See "The Courtship of Animals," W. P. Pyecraft.
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