Note 382.1 — Chapter XIV · MARRIAGE RITES.

The foregoing examples all show the wife as bound to the husband’s kin. The right of a man to his wife’s sister, either in his wife’s lifetime, or after her death, or, as it is found among some races, the right of a woman to share her sister’s husband even in her lifetime, is equally widespread. I have incidentally alluded to it as practised by the Gippsland tribes of Australia. Among the North American Indians, who preserve many traces of mother-right, the usage was common. The Blackfeet regarded all the younger sisters of a man’s wife as his potential wives. If he did not care to marry them they could not be married to any other man without his consent.382.1 Among the Root-Diggers of California to a whole family of sisters the happy husband often added their mother; and the Seminole and Carib customs were the same. The Pawnee who had married an elder sister might demand all the younger ones as they arrived at maturity. An Osage was obliged to wait two years after his first marriage before demanding another of the same family; and after complying with this demand the parents might refuse him any more. Among the Hidatsas, as probably among other tribes, the wife’s sisters included her cousins according to our reckoning. A Mutsun wife would often press her husband to wed her sister or even her mother.382.2 An Omaha can marry three wives, who are generally related. Sometimes a wife invites her husband to wed her sister, her aunt or her niece, because “she and I are one flesh.”382.3 Among the Sioux and some other tribes the lover would attach to another man’s tent as many horses as corresponded in value to the daughters he desired to marry; and if the proposition were accepted they were all married at once.382.4 In other cases it seems that marriage with one daughter only gave a right of preemption over the others.382.5 Among some of the tribes of Guiana the husband has to wait until his first wife is dead before marrying her sisters.383.1 Similar regulations are found among the aborigines of Bengal. In many of their tribes a man may marry two sisters; but, in accordance with the rule as to marriage of a widow with a deceased husband’s brother, the second wife must be a younger sister of the first, not an elder. A second sister, however, cannot always be married during the lifetime of the first.383.2 Among the Todas a woman became wife to several brothers, and her younger sisters, on attaining maturity, became successively her fellow-wives.383.3 An Ostiak is allowed to take several sisters.383.4 In the Laws of Manu it is provided that, “if, after one damsel has been shown, another be given to the bridegroom, he may marry them both for the same price.”383.5 This refers, of course, to two damsels in the same family. Among the Somali of Eastern Africa a widower commonly marries his deceased wife’s sister.383.6 On the other side of the continent a folktale from Angola represents the eldest of four sisters as replying to an offer of marriage: “Very well. Thou shalt marry me, if thou marriest us all, the four of us. If thou thinkest that thou wilt have me alone, the eldest, thou canst not marry me. It must be that we marry our one man, the four of us in the fourhood of one mother.” And the gallant had no choice but to fall in with her terms.383.7 In historical times the Israelites were forbidden to take a woman to her sister to be a rival to her in her lifetime;384.1 but the more ancient practice, if we may judge by the legend of their eponymous hero as well as by analogies in other parts of the world, permitted it. Under supernatural guidance the Church has bettered the prohibition, so as to prevent the posthumous vexation of a wife by the succession of her sister to her husband’s affections, and has been at pains to give it the logical extension to marriage with a deceased husband’s brother, in the very teeth of the divine institution of the Levirate. It would be profane to call a bargain the provision whereby the English bishops once compounded for the sin of assenting to a nobleman’s union with his deceased wife’s sister, by condemning all such unions for the future. Among the heathen Hovas of Madagascar the first wife might at any time be divorced, unless she allowed her husband to marry her younger sisters and younger cousins. A Gilbert Islander had a right to dispose of his wife’s younger sisters.384.2 In Samoa a younger sister often accompanied the bride and became an inferior wife to the bridegroom.384.3 On the island of Mangaia, “if a man of position married the eldest girl of a slave family, the younger sisters became his as a matter of course, being only too glad to have a protector. Even amongst those of equal rank a man often had two or three sisters to wife at the same time. Even now, in Christian times, a woman feels herself to be deeply injured if her brother-in-law does not, on the death of his wife, ask her to become a mother to his children.”384.4 How greatly it is to be regretted that they who have professed to christianise these poor, benighted Polynesians have disregarded the Church’s canon against such marriages, and permitted so-called Christian homes to be contaminated by the presence of a deceased wife’s sister in the capacity of wife!