l or
fictitious capture and get her status from that fact; that is, she
becomes very much at the mercy of her husband. The same is true of a
purchased wife. The relation of a wife to her husband is analogous to
property. The same is true of the relation of children to their father.
The husband gives, sells, or lends wife or daughters as he sees fit,
although an interference with his dominion over them without his consent
would be a thing to be earnestly resented. Loyalty and fidelity to
husband became the highest duties of wives, which the husband enforced
by physical penalties. Female honor, for wives, consisted in chastity,
which meant self-submission to the limitations which men desired in
wives and which the mores had approved, for the mores teach the women
what conduct on their part is "right," and teach them that it is "right"
that they should be taken as wives by capture or purchase. Female virtue
and honor, therefore, acquire technical definitions out of the mores,
which are not parallel to any definitions of virtue and honor as applied
to males. In Deut. xxi. 10 the case of a man enamored of a captive woman
is considered, and rules are set for it. The woman may not be sold for
money after she has been "humbled." It is evident that the notions of
right and wrong, and of rights in marriage and the family, are
altogether contingent and relative. In the mores of any form of the
family the ideas of rights, and of right and wrong, will conform to the
theory of the institution, and they may offer us notions of moral things
which are radically divergent or antagonistic.

+370. Capture and purchase become ceremonies.+ As population increases
and tribes are pushed closer together, capture loses violence and is
modified by a compromise, with payment of money as a composition, and by
treaty, until it becomes a ceremony. Then purchase degenerates into a
ceremony, partly by idealization, i.e. the purchase ceremony is
necessary, but the arrangement would seem more honorable if some other
construction were put on it. The father, if he takes the customary bride
price but is rich and loves his daughter, so that he wants to soften for
her the lot of a wife as women generally find it, gives a dowry and by
that binds her husband to stipulations as to the rights and treatment
which she shall enjoy. In Homer's time, no man of rank and wealth gave
his daughter without a dowry, although he took gifts for her, even, if
she was in great