MARRIAGE (OF., Fr. mariagr, from ML. marital marriage. from maritrts, husband, from mas, male. husband). A consorting or union of man and woman which is sanctioned by the community. The sanction may he moral, religions, or legal. This definition is broader than that of legal usage, which makes marriage only a legal form or the status corresponding thereto; and it is not so broad as Westermarek's definition, "a more or less durable connection between male and female, lasting beyond the more act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring." Properly speaking, the mating of animals is not marriage. and in no community Of human beings is sexual union regarded as mar riage until it is socially sanctioned in some way. On the other hand. communities can hardly be said to have a positive law not infre quently attach the deepest significance to ens tonthry and religious sanctions applied to sexual relations. There has been, however, an unbroken continuity of historical forms, sonic of which IMP fallen short of marriage in any true sense, sonic of which have fallen short of marriage in a legal sense, while others, emerging as civil mar riage, have dropped the earlier religious sanc tions. A complete understanding of marriage as a social institution, therefore. can he arrived at only through a survey of its historical evolu tion.
Such a survey shows us that the eonsortings of males with females among animals and among men have not been restricted to the simple mat ing of one individual with one of the opposite sex which becomes the basis of monogamy. There have been unions of one woman with two or more men (polyandry) and of one man with two or more women (polygyny), and sueh arrangements have been socially approved. It reveals also interesting restrictions, which have had a dis tinct evolution of their Own, marking off groups or classes that might not intermarry from those that might. Finally, it diseloses the origin and development of the social sanctions themselves, whereby natural mating becomes the social in stitution, marriage.
Distinguished ethnologists have maintained that relatively permanent sexual unions have slowly developed out of an original promiscuity. There is. however, no satisfactory evidence that a state of true promiscuity ever existed among human beings, and the hypothesis is rendered in herently improbable by our knowledge that among the lower animals a distinct progress to ward true pairing is observed as we ascend the scale from the lower to the higher vertebrata.
It must he admitted that there are few life-long unions Of one male with one female in any animal species, even among the birds, whose ten dencies toward an exclusive mating have been the subject of some exaggeration. As a rule in the animal kingdom within the reproductive period of life the female, no less than the male. consorts at one time or another with more than one individual of the other sex, and among the relatively numerous gregarious animals many females commonly associate with one male.
Chief among the facts which suggested the hypothesis of a primitivv promiscuity is the widespread custom among uncivilized men of tracing names and descent through the mother instead of the father. It has been shown that the civilized races also, including the peoples of Aryan culture, in all probability passed through this matronymic stage. Furthermore. an all-sufficient explanation of descent in the female line is found in the general instability of pairing arrangements among primitive men. If a mother with her infant remains with her own kindred. or returns to them, she naturally keeps, and her child takes. her elan name; and her brethren or other near clansmen become the child's natural protectors.
It seems probable that from the first sexual mating among human beings has tended toward monogamic unions, but that permanency has been of slow growth. Among the lowest savages, such as the Australians, the Bushmen. the Fuegians, the forest hordes of Brazil, and the liumit, a mating of one man with one woman for an indefinite, but usually not long period, is the common arrangement. Sometimes, as in Aus tribes, it is complicated by a system of relationships more nominal than real, such that each man in a given class or group is theondie ally the husband of each woman in some other class or group, and in like manner each woman in the latter class is theoretically the wife of each man in the former. These nominal unions probably do not point to a primitive promis cuity. but rather to an early limitation of the range of choice in the selection of consorts; that is to say, each woman of a certain class is a possible mate for any man of some other class.