ugh the social sanctions of communities more primitive than our
own. The new family begins with the ceremonial breach of taboo,--the
taboo which enjoins the shunning of woman as a being both sacred and
unclean. Once married, the woman falls under the property taboo, and is
as restricted as ever she was before marriage, although perhaps in
slightly different ways. In ancient Rome, the wife was not mistress of
the hearth. She did not represent the ancestral gods, the lares and
penates, since she was not descended from them. In death as in life she
counted only as a part of her husband. Greek, Roman and Hindu law, all
derived from ancestor worship, agreed in considering the wife a
minor.[5]

These practices are of the greatest significance in a consideration of
the modern institutional taboos which surround the family. Students
agree that our own mores are in large part derived from those of the
lowest class of freedmen in Rome at the time when Christianity took over
the control which had fallen from the hands of the Roman emperors. These
mores were inherited by the Bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages, and were
passed on by them as they acquired economic supremacy. Thus these
practices have come down to us unchanged in spirit even if somewhat
modified in form, to fit the changed environment of our times.

The standardization of the family with its foundations embedded in a
series of institutional taboos, added its weight to the formulation of
the Model Woman type referred to at the close of the preceding chapter.
The model wife appears in the earliest literature. In _The Trojan
Women_, Hecuba tells how she behaved in wedlock. She stayed at home and
did not gossip. She was modest and silent before her husband. The
patient Penelope was another ideal wife. To her, her son Telemachus
says:

"Your widowed hours apart, with female toil, And various labours of the
loom, beguile, There rule, from palace cares remote and free, That care
to man belongs, and most to me."

The wifely type of the Hebrews is set forth in Proverbs xxxi, 10-31. Her
virtues consisted in rising while it was yet night, and not eating the
bread of idleness. In her relation to her husband, she must never
surprise him by unusual conduct, and must see that he was well fed.

The Romans, Hindus, and Mohammedans demanded similar virtues in their
wives and mothers. The wives of the medieval period were to remain
little girls, most admired for their passive obedience