The Prophet says: “I charge you with your women, for they are with you as captives (_awânî_).” Professor Smith informs us that according to the lexicons _awânî_ is actually used in the same sense as married women generally.[135] For long ages after _ba’al_ marriages had been established, so degrading was the office of wife that women of rank were considered too great to marry.
After relating some interesting accounts of certain practices in common with the custom of capture among the Brazilian tribes, Sir John Lubbock says:
This view also throws some light on the remarkable subordination of the wife to the husband, which is so characteristic of marriage, and so curiously inconsistent with all our avowed ideas; moreover it tends to explain those curious cases in which Hetairæ were held in greater estimation than those women who were, as we should consider, properly and respectably married to a single husband. The former were originally fellow-countrywomen and relations; the latter captives and slaves.[136]
With the development of the egoistic principle, or when selfishness and the love of gain became the rule of action, the protection of her kindred, which in an earlier age a woman could count on against her husband, was withdrawn, and daughters came to be looked upon as a legitimate source of gain to their families. On this subject C. Staniland Wake remarks:
Women by marriage became slaves, and it was the universal practice for a man who parted with his daughter to be a slave to require a valuable consideration for her. Moreover, as a man can purchase as many slaves as he likes, so he can take as many wives as he pleases.[137]
[137] C. Staniland Wake, _Marriage and Kinship_, p. 199.
In Rome, in the Latter Status of barbarism and the opening ages of civilization, woman, at marriage, forfeited all the privileges belonging to her as a member of her own family, while within that of her husband no compensatory advantages were granted her. Even a proprietary right in her own children was denied her, and from a legal point of view the wife became the daughter of her husband, and not unfrequently the ward of her own son.
After the power gained by man over woman during the latter ages of barbarism had reached its height, the family was based not on the marriage of a woman and a man, but upon the power of a man over a woman and her offspring, or upon the absolute authority of the male parent. In Rome a man’s wife and children were members of his family not because they were related to him but because they were subject to his control. At this stage in the development of the family, the father had the power of “uncontrolled corporal chastisement” and of life and death over his children.[138] If it was his will to do so, he could even sell them. Indeed, a son’s freedom from paternal tyranny could be gained only by the actual sale of his person by his father. Relating to the control exercised by the father over his children, it is observed that he had the right “during their whole life to imprison, scourge, keep to rustic labour in chains, to sell or slay, even though they may be in the enjoyment of high state offices.”[139] If a father granted freedom to his son, that son was no longer a member of his family.
