檳榔嶼

- Marriage is a social invention, unique to human.
- Before marriage was invented, according to the Piegan, or Blackfoot Indians :
  - The men and women of the ancient Piegans did not live about together in the beginning. The women...made buffalo corrals. Their lodges were fine...They tanned the buffalo-hides, those were their robes. They would cut the meat in slices. In summer they picked berries. They used those in winter. Their lodges all were fine inside. And their things were just as fine.
    Now the men were... very poor.... They had no lodges. They wore raw-hides.... They did not know, how they should make lodges. They did not know, how they should tan the buffalo-hides. They did not know, too, how they should cut dried meat, how they should sew their clothes.
  - In the Blackfoot legend, it was the men, not the women, who needed marriage.
- Before marriage was invented, according to an Anglo-American anthropological theory :
  - The men hunted wild animals and feasted on their meat. Their brains became very large because they had to cooperate with each other in the hunt. They stood upright, made tools, built fires, and invented language. Their cave art was very fine... But the women were very poor. They were tied down by childbearing, and they did not know how to get food for themselves or their babies. They did not know how to protect themselves from predators. They did not know , too, how to make tools, produce art, and build lodges or campfires to keep themselves warm.
  - In this story, the invention of marriage supplies the happy ending for the hapless sex. Here, however, women were the weaker gender. They initiated marriage by offering to trade sex for protection and food. 
- The story that marriage was invented for the protection of women is still the most widespread myth about the origins of marriage. 
  - One way a woman could hold a mate was to offer him exclusive and frequent sex in return for food and protection. Human females became sexually available year-round, so they were able to draw men into long-term relationships.
  - Robin Fox : "The females could easily trade on the male's tendency to want to monopolize the females for mating purposes, and say, in effect 'okay, you get the monopoly... and we get the meat.'"
    - The male willingness to trade meat for sex was, according to Fox, "the root of truly human society."
  - Proponents of this protective theory of marriage claim that the nuclear family, based on a sexual division of labor between the male hunter and the femal hearth keeper, was the most important unit of survival and protection in the Stone Age.
- The male breadwinner model of marriage was a late and relatively short-lived way of organizing gender roles and dividing work in human history. But most people believed it was the natural and "traditional" family form.
  - The protective theory is still periodically recycled to explain why women are supposedly attracted to powerful, dominent men, while men seek younger women whol will be good breeders and hearth keepers.
- Some denied that male dominance and female dependence came to us from our primate ancestors.
- Studies of actual human hunting and gathering societies also threw doubt on the male provider theory.
  - Women's foraging, not men's hunting, usually contributes the bulk of the group's food.
  - In one African hunter-gatherer society, an woman typically walked about 12 miles a day gathering food, and brought home anywhere from 15~32 pounds. A woman with a child under 2 covered the same amount of ground and brought back the same amount of food while she carried her child in a sling, allowing the child to nurse as the woman did her foraging. In many societies women also participate in hunting, whether as members of communal hunting parties, as individual hunters, or even in all-female hunting groups.
- Today most paleontologists reject the notion that early human societies were organized around dominant male hunters providing for their nuclear families.
  1. hunting big game was less important for group survival than were gathering plants, bird eggs, edible insects, and shellfish, trapping the occasional small animal, and scavenging the meat of large animals that had died of natural causes.
  2. Hunting activities involved the whole group, women as well as men.
- Three general schools of thought on the subject :
  1. Some researchers believe that early humans lived in female-centered groups made up of mothers, sisters, and their young, accompanied by temporary male companions. Younger males, they suggest, left the group when they reached mating age.
  2. Other scholars argue that the needs of defense would have encouraged the formation of gouprs based on male kin, in which fathers, brothers, and sons, along with their female mates, stayed together. In this view, the female offspring rather than males left the group at puberty.
  3. Some researchers theorizes that hominid groups were organized around one male mating with several females and travelling with them and their offspring.
- None of the above three theories suggests that an individual male provided for "his" females and children or that the male-female pair was the fundamental unit of economic survival and cooperation.
- Hunting with projectile weapons became the domain of men, partly because it was hard for women to chase swift game while they were nursing. However, this did not make women dependent upon their individual mates.
- Division of labor did not make nuclear families self0sufficient. Collective hunting and gathering remained vital to survival.
- Marriage was certainly an early and a vitally important human invention.
  - One of its crucial functions in the Paleolithic era was its ability to forge networks of cooperation beyond the immediate family group or local band.
- In the 1970s several feminist researchers built on this idea to turn the protective theory of mairrage on its head. They suggested that marriage originated not to protect women but to oppress them. 
  - Because women probably played a leading role in the invention of agriculture through their experimentationwith plants and food preservation, and because women were cerntainly responsible for the physical reproduction of the group, the origins ofmarriage lay not in the efforts of women to attract protectors and providers but in the efforts of men to control the productive and reproductive powers of women for their own private benefit.
  - According to this oppressive theory, men coerced women into marriage, often using abduction, gangrape, or wife beating to enforce their will.
  - Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard argue that marriage is one of the primary ways that "men benefit from, and exploit, the work of women".
  - There is strong historical evidence that in many societies marriage was indeed a way that men put women's labor to their private use. Rich men accumulated many wives, who worked for them and bore more daughters who could be exchanged to place other men in their debt.
  - Men have exchanged women without consulting them and in which husbands have used the labor or their wives and children to produce surpluses that increased the men's prestige and power.
- With the growth of inequality in society, the definition of an acceptable marriage narrowed.

The Transformation of Marriage in Ancient Society
- Greater economic differentiation reshaped the rules of marriage. 
  - Within the leading lineages, young men often had to borrow from their seniors in order to marry, increasing the control of elders over junior men as well as over women.
- As marriage became the primary vehicle for transmitting status and property, both men and women faced greater restrictions on their behavior.
  - The laws and moral codes of ancient states exhorted men to watch carefully over their wives "lest the seed of others be sown on your soil."
- Use of the plow diminished the value of women's agricultural labor, because plowing requires greater strength than women were believed to have and is less compatible with child care than gardening with a hoe.
  - Husbands began to demand dowries instead of giving bridewealth for wives, and daughters were devalued to the point that families sometimes sesorted to female infanticide.
  - The spread of warfare that accompanied the emergence of early states also pushed women farther down in the hierarchy.
- As societies became more complex and differentiated, upper classes cometimes displayed their wealth by adopting standards of beauty or behavior that effectively hobbled women.
  - Restrictive clothing, heavy jewelry, or exceedingly long fingernails, for example, made a public statment that the family had slaves to do the work once done by wives and daughters.
  - Much later, in China, binding the feet of young girls became a symbol of prestige.
- Women's bodies came to be regarded as the properties of their fathers and husbands. Assyrian law declared : "A man may flog his wife, pluck her hair, strike her and mutilate her ears, There is no guilt."
  - Centuries later in China, Confucius defined a wife as "someone who submits to another." A wife, according to Confucian philosophy, had to follow "the rule of the three obediences: while at home she obeys her father, after marriage she obeys her husband, after he dies she obeys her son."
- Marriage had become the way most wealth and land changed hands. Marriage was also the main vehicle by which leading families expanded their social networks and political influence. 
  - Commoners could no longer hope to exchange marriage partners with the elites.
- Only in the last hundred years have women had the independence to make their marital choices without having to bow to economic need and social pressure.
- In hunting and gathering bands and egalitarian horticultural communities, unstable marriage did not lead to the impoverishment of women or children as they often do today. Unmarried women participated in the work of the group and were entitled to a fair share, while children and other dependents were protected by strong customes that mandated sharing beyond the nuclear family.
  - This is not the case today. Today's winner-take-all global economy may have its strong points, but the practice of pooling resources and sharing with the weak is not one of them.
- The question of how we organize our personal rights and obligations now that our older constraints are gone is another aspect of the contemporary marriage crisis.