The History of Human Marriage

Abstract

BY “history” our author means “natural history” (p. 19), and his reason for using the odd term “human marriage” is that “marriage, in the natural history sense of the term, does not belong exclusively to our species” (p. 6). According to him, “marriage is nothing else than a more or less durable connection between male and female, lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring.” In this sense marriage is “an almost universal institution among birds,” and “occurs as a rule among the monkeys, especially the anthropomorphous apes, as well as in the races of men” (p. 20). Among mankind it is universal, and in all probability is “an inheritance from some ape-like progenitor” (p. 538). In this book, therefore, marriage is taken to mean what ordinary people call “pairing”, and the professed subject of the volume is the natural history of the habit of pairing in the human race. But surely, on any proper use of terms, marriage is not simple pairing, but such pairing as is protected and regulated by law, or by the public opinion which in rude societies stands for law. And the history of an institution which is controlled by public opinion and regulated by law is not natural history. The true history of marriage begins where the natural history of pairing ends.

The History of Human Marriage.

By Edward Westermarck (London: Macmillan and Co., 1891.)