Thursday, March 20, 2014

On the institution of marriage...

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I don’t pretend to be a historian, let alone an expert on the history of marriage. The history of marriage varies greatly between cultures, and it’s not my intention to give you an exhaustive reference. What I will show, however, is the general path and forms marriage has taken, particularly through to the modern Western culture of America today.

Marriage began as a simple property exchange contract between the father of the bride and a man and/or his family. A man or his family would pay a father who would guarantee the woman’s virginity. Virginity was very important for purposes of property/real estate inheritance. A man wanted to ensure that what he owned was passed down to his posterity. There were no DNA tests at the time, so the only way a man could ensure that he was raising his own child and that his own child would inherit his property would be if the woman with whom he had a child only ever had sex with him. In some cultures, marriages were also a way to form alliances, settle disputes, expand a family’s influence, etc. But it was always a transaction in which the woman involved was chattel.

This is where the state comes in. As the proto-state tribes formed into actual states through conquest and war, taxes became prevalent. Thus marriage laws came into being for the state to accurately track property owners and legitimate heirs. Still, this wasn’t the institution we recognize today, though this was the institution recognized throughout most of human history and can still be seen in many cultures today. Women were chattel and marriage was the means to control them.

The word matrimony comes from the Latin mātrimōnium, which combines the two concepts mater meaning "mother" and the suffix -monium signifying "action, state, or condition." In other words, a woman was only as important as her ability to be a mother to the son of her husband. In fact, often if a woman was determined to be infertile (whether the man or woman was infertile or there was some other problem, the woman was usually blamed and declared barren), the man she married was entitled to a divorce. Full story...

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