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Updated: June 11, 2025
A man may have only one lawful wife, but may keep as many concubines as his means allow, all of whom live with the members of the family in the single room of the yurt. Adultery is openly practiced, apparently without prejudice to either party, and polyandry is not unusual in the more remote parts of the country. The Mongol is unmoral rather than immoral.
'We believe the restrictions on marriage to be connected with the practice in early times of female infanticide, which, rendering women scarce, led at once to polyandry within the tribe, and the capturing of women from without. . . . Hence the cruel custom which, leaving the primitive human hordes with very few young women of their own, occasionally with none, and in any case seriously disturbing the balance of the sexes within the hordes, forces them to prey upon one another for wives.
The whole weight of labour being supported by these unhappy women, we must not be surprised if, in some nations, their number is extremely small. Where this happens, a kind of polyandry is formed, which we find more fully displayed in Thibet, and on the lofty mountains at the extremity of the Indian peninsula. Among the Avanos and Maypures, brothers have often but one wife.
I gave a brief history of the marriage institution in all times and countries, of the matriarchate, when the mother was the head of the family and owned the property and children; of the patriarchate, when man reigned supreme and woman was enslaved; of polyandry, polygamy, monogamy, and prostitution.
Wallace's claim to the origination of the idea of natural selection; on the former barbarism of civilised nations; on improvements in the arts among savages; on resemblances of the mental characters in different races of men; on the arts practised by savages; on the power of counting in primeval man; on the prehensile organs of the male Labidocera Darwinii; on Chloeon; on Smynthurus luteus; finding of new mates by jays; on strife for women among the North American Indians; on music; on the ornamental practices of savages; on the estimation of the beard among the Anglo-Saxons; on artificial deformation of the skull; on "communal marriages;" on exogamy; on the Veddahs; on polyandry.
It is a notable fact in this connection that there are fewer women in Ceylon than men, a circumstance which has furnished a weak argument for some native writers in favor of polyandry, which is still sanctioned in the central districts. In the island of Malta, this relative position of the sexes is entirely reversed.
We swear it and close our ears to our admirers, and to escape them we plunge into consideration of Violet's soul and her aptitudes, saying, and saying well, that if polygamy thrives with Mohammedanism in the East, polyandry has settled down in the West with Christianity, and that since Nora slammed the door the practice of acquiring a share in a woman's life, rather than insisting on the whole of it, has caught such firm root in our civilization that it is no exaggeration to say that every married woman to-day will admit she could manage two men better than her husband could manage two wives.
In the end she solved the problem in her own way, to everybody's satisfaction except Paul's and Lloyd's. Getting them together, she said that she really could not choose between them because she loved them both equally well; and that, unfortunately, since polyandry was not permitted in the United States she would be compelled to forego the honor and happiness of marrying either of them.
Forced and long-continued toil became the rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and polyandry, which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity. It was a terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the former group life, and the chief remaining institution was the Priest or Medicine-man.
Certain other conditions besides economic ones might also favor the existence of polyandry, such as the scarcity of women. Summing up, we can say, then, that this rare form of the family seems to have as its causes: In barren and inhospitable countries the labor of one man is sometimes found not sufficient to support a family. Also there probably exists in such regions an excess of males.
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