Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: April 30, 2025
We too often forget that our failure to recognize such variations merely means that we accord in such cases an illegitimate permission to perpetrate injustice. In those parts of the world in which polygyny is recognized as a permissible variation a man is legally held to his natural obligations towards all his sexual mates and towards the children he has by those mates.
It is only in the monogamic family that the highest type of altruistic affection can be cultivated. It is difficult to understand, for example, how anything like unselfish affection between husband and wife can exist under polygyny. Under monogamy, husband and wife are called upon to sacrifice selfish desires in the mutual care of children.
By enabling a man to escape so easily from the obligations of his polygamous relationships we encourage him, if he is unscrupulous, to enter into them; we place a premium on the immorality we loftily condemn. Our polygyny has no legal existence, and therefore its obligations can have no legal existence.
Under some circumstances, if all three parties agreed, he saw no objection to polygyny or polyandry. "There are some cases of hardship," he said, "which such permission would remedy. Such, for instance, would be the case where the man or woman had become the victim of a chronic disease; or, when either party should be childless, and in other contingencies that could be imagined."
Thus the basic cause of polygyny is not economic, but psychological; and given certain moral and economic conditions of society, these polygynous tendencies assert themselves. Monogamy, on the other hand, has in no sense been determined by economic conditions but is fundamentally determined by the biological fact of the numerical equality of the sexes.
The father, too, under polygyny is rarely cared for by the children, because the polygynous household has never given the opportunity for close affections between parents and children.
Nevertheless, while male sensuality is at the basis of polygyny, it would be a mistake to think that sensuality is an adequate explanation in all cases. On the contrary, we find many other causes, chiefly, perhaps, economic, operating also to favor the development of polygyny. One of these is wife capture, as we have already seen.
Under polygynous conditions the father cannot devote himself to any extent to his children or to any one wife, since he is really the head of several households, and therefore, as we have already noted, fatherhood in the fullest sense scarcely exists under polygyny.
The captured women in war were held as trophies and slaves, and later became wives or concubines. Among all peoples at a certain stage the honor of wife capture has alone been a prolific cause of polygyny. Another cause, after slavery became developed, was the high value set on women as laborers. Among many barbarous peoples the women do the main part of the work.
But such cases as these are altogether exceptional and manifestly could not become general. Summing up, we may say that the causes of polygyny are, then: First of all, the brutal lust of man. No doubt man's animal propensities have had much to do with the existence of this form of the family.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking