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This brings us to the subject of the dissolution of marriage. Marriage is as a rule concluded for life—at times beyond death, as mentioned above. It is questionable whether the short period "marriages" reported from isolated districts (Eskimo of Ungava district, some tribes of the Indiati Archipelago, Arabia, Persia, Tibet) deserve the name of marriage, i.e., whether they should not be put into a different sociological category; but our accounts of them are too slight to allow of deciding this question. In some tribes we are told that marriage is indissoluble (Ved das, Andamanese, certain tribes of the Indian Archipelago and Malay Peninsula). The general rule, however, is that divorce (q.v.), is possible, but not easy, and entails damages and disabili ties to both partners. Even where divorce is said to be easy for husband and for wife, we find on further enquiry that a con siderable price has to be paid for the "liberty to divorce," that it is easy only to exceptionally powerful or successful men and women, and that it involves in most cases loss of prestige and a moral stigma. Often also divorce is easy only before children have been born, and it becomes difficult and undesirable after their arrival. In fact the main ground for divorce, besides adultery, economic insufficiency or bad temper, is sterility in the wife or impotence in the husband. This emphasises the aspect of marriage as an institution for the preservation of children.
The threat of divorce and of the disabilities which it entails is one of the main forces which keep husband and wife to their prescribed conduct. At times the husband is kept in check by the payment he gave at marriage and which he can reclaim only when the union is dissolved through no fault of his. At times the con siderable economic value of the wife is the motive of his good and dutiful conduct.
The duties of the wife towards the husband are apparently in some communities enforced to a considerable extent by his personal strength and brutality, and by the authority given him by custom. In others, however, husband and wife have an almost equal status. Here again, unfortunately, we find too often in ethnographical accounts generalities and stock phrases such as that "the wife is regarded as the personal property of the husband," as "his slave or chattel," or else again we read that "the status of the wife is high." The only correct definition of status can be given by a full enumeration of all mutual duties, of the limits to personal liberty established by marriage, and of the safeguards against the husband's bru tality or remissness, or, on the other hand, against the wife's shrewishness and lack of sense of duty. It is often held that mother-right and the economic importance of woman's work, es pecially in agricultural communities, go with a high social status of the wife, while in collecting, nomadic and pastoral tribes her status is on the whole lower (E. Grosse, in Die Formen der
Familie und die Formen der Wirtschaft; Schmidt and Koppers, in Volker und Kulturen).
Marriage not only defines the relations of the consorts to each other, but also their status in society. In most tribes, marriage and the establishment of an independent household are a condition for the attainment of the legal status of full tribesman in the male and of the rank and title of matron in the woman. Under the system of age-grades (q.v.) the passage through certain in itiation rites is a condition of marriage and this is as a rule con cluded soon after it is permitted (cf. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies; Schurtz, Altersklassen und Mannerbiinde). In all tribes, however, all normal and healthy tribesmen and women are mar ried, and even widows and widowers remarry if they are not too old, under the penalty of losing some of their influence. The attainment of a full tribal status is always a powerful motive for marriage.
Descent.—Marriage affects not only the status of the consorts and their relations, but imposes also a series of duties on the parents with regard to children, and defines the status of children by reference to the parents.
As we know already in virtue of the universal principle of legitimacy, the full tribal or civil status of a child is obtained only through a legal marriage of the parents. Legitimacy is at times sanctioned by penalties which devolve on the parents, at times by the disabilities under which illegitimate children suffer, at times again by inducements for the adoption of children or for their legitimisation by the presumptive father or some other man.
In connection with this latter point it is necessary to realise that the children have invariably to return in later life some of the benefits received earlier. The aged parents are always dependent on their children, usually on the married boys. Girls at marriage often bring in some sort of emolument to their parents and then continue to help them and look after them. The duties of legal solidarity also devolve on the children, uniting them to father or mother according to whether we deal with a matrilineal or a patri lineal society.
One of the most important legal implications of marriage is that it defines the relation of the children to certain wider groups, the local community, the clan, the exogamous division and the tribe. The children as a rule follow one of the parents, though more complex systems are also in existence, and the unilateral principle of descent is never absolute. This however belongs to the subject of Kinship (q.v.; cf. also MOTHER-RIGHT).