"The greatest task of morals is always sexual regulation; for the reproductive instinct creates problems not only within marriage, but before and after it, and threatens at any moment to disturb social order with its persistence, its intensity, its scorn of law, and its perversions. [...]
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section II, 1935
"[...] Even among animals, sex is not quite unrestrained; the rejection of the male by the female except in periods of rut reduces sew to a much more modest role in the animal world than it occupies in our own lecherous species. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section II, 1935
"Among the North American Indians the young men and women mated freely; and these relations were not held an impediment to marriage. Among the Papuans of New Guinea sex life began at an extremely early age, and premarital promiscuity was the rule. Similar premarital liberty obtained among the Soyots of Siberia, the Igorots of the Philippines, the natives of Upper Burma, the Kaffirs and Bushmen of Africa, the tribes of the Niger and the Uganda, of New Georgia, the Murray Islands, the Andaman Islands, Tahiti, Polynesia, Assam, etc.
Under such conditions we must expect to find much prostitution in primitive society. The "oldest profession" is comparatively young; it arises only with civilization, with the appearance of property and the disappearance of premarital freedom. [...]
Chastity is a correspondingly late development. What the primitive maiden dreaded was not the loss of virginity, but a reputation for sterility; premarital pregnancy was, more often than not, an aid rather than a handicap in finding a husband, for it settled all doubts of sterility, and promised profitable children.[...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section II, 1935
"What was it that changed virginity from a fault to a virtue, and made it an element in the moral codes of all the higher civilizations? Doubtless it was the institution o f property. Premarital chastity came as an extension, to the daughters, of the proprietary feeling with which the patriarchal male looked upon his wife. The valuation of virginity rose when, under marriage by purchase, the virgin bride was found to bring a higher price than her weak sister; the virgin gave provmise, by her past, of that marital fidelity which now seemed so precious to men beset by worry lest they should leave their property to surreptitious children.
Men never never thought of applying the same restrictions to themselves, no society in history has ever insisted on the premarital chastity of the male; no language has ever had a word for a virgin male. The aura of virginity was kept exclusively for daughters, and pressed upon them in a thousand ways. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section II, 1935
"Modesty came with virginity and the patriarchate. [...] At first modesty is the feeling of the woman that she is tabu in her periods. When marriage by purchase takes form, and virginity in the daughter brings a profit to her father, seclusion and the compulsion to virginity beget in the girl a sense of obligation to chastity. Again, modesty is the feeling of the wife who, under purchase marriage, feels a financial obligation to her husband to refrain from such external sexual relations as cannot bring him any recompense. Clothing appears at this point, if motives of adornment and protection have not already engendered it; in many tribes women wore clothing only after marriage, as a sign of their exclusive possession by a husband, and as a deterrent to gallantry; [...] Chastity, however, bears no necessary relation to clothing; some travelers report that morals in Africa vary inversely as the amount of dress. It is clear that what men are ashamed of depends entirely upon the local tabus and customs of their group. Until recently a Chinese woman was ashamed to show her foot, an Arab woman her face, a Tuareg woman her mouth; but the women of ancient Egypt, of nineteenth-century India and twentieth-century Bali (before prurient tourists came) never thought of shame at the exposure of their breasts."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section II, 1935
"We must not conclude that morals are worthless because they differ according to time and place, and that it would be wise to show our historic learning by at once discarding the moral customs of our group. A little anthropology is a dangerous thing. It is substantially true that -- as Anatole France ironically expressed the matter -- "morality is the sum of the prejudices of a community"; and that, as Anacharsis put it among the Greeks, if one were to bring together all customs considered sacred by some group, and were then to take away all customs considered immoral by some group, nothing would remain. But this does not prove the worthlessness of morals; it only shows in what varied ways social order has been preserved. Social order is nonetheless necessary; the game must still have rules in order to be played; men must know what t expect of one another in the ordinary circumstances of life. Hence the unanimity with which the members of a society practice its moral code is quite as important as the contents of that code. Our heroic rejection of the customs and morals of our tribe, upon our adolescent discovery of their relativity, betrays the immaturity of our minds; given another decade and we begin to understand that there may be ore wisdom in the moral code of the group -- the formulated experience of generations of the race -- than can be explained in a college course. Sooner or later the disturbing realization comes to us that even that which we cannot understand may be true. The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years. We are warranted in concluding that morals are relative, and indispensable.
Since old and basic customs represent a natural selection of group ways after centuries of trial and error, we must expect to find some social utility, or survival value, in virginity and modesty, despite their historical relativity, their association with marriage by purchase, and their contributions to neurosis.
Modesty was the strategic retreat which enabled the girl, where she had any choice, to select her mate more deliberately, or compel him to show finer qualities before winning her; and the very obstructions it raised against desire generated those sentiments of romantic love which heightened her value in his eyes.
The inculcation of virginity destroyed the naturalness and ease of primitive sexual life; but, by discouraging early sex development and premature motherhood, it lessened the gap -- which tends to widen disruptively as civilization develops -- between economic and sexual maturity. Probably it served in this way to strengthen the individual physically and mentally, to lengthen adolescence and training, and so to lift the level of the race."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section II, 1935 (italics and formatting added)
"It was easier for the Papuans, since among them, as among most primitive peoples, there were few impediments to the divorce of the woman by the man. Unions seldom last more than a few years among the American Indians. "A large proportion of the old and middle-aged men," says Schoolcraft, "have had many different wives, and their children, scattered around the country, are unknown to them." They "laugh at Europeans for having only one wife, and that for life; they consider that the Good Spirit formed them to be happy, and not to continue together unless their tempers and dispositions were congenial." The Cherokee changed wives three or four times a year; the conservative Samoans kept them as long as three years.
With the coming of a settled agricultural life, [marital unions] became more permanent. Under the patriarchal system [that is, after the development of private property] the man found it uneconomical to to divorce a wife, for this meant, in effect, to loose a profitable slave.
As the family became the productive unit of society, till the soil together, it prospered -- other things equal -- according to its size and cohesion; it was found to some advantage that the union of the mates should continue until the last child was reared. By that time no energy remained for a new romance, and the lives of the parents had been forged into one by common work and trials, Only with the passage to urban industry, and the consequent reduction of the family in size and economic importance, has divorce become widespread again."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section II, 1935 (formatting added)
"In general, throughout history, men have wanted many children, and therefore have called motherhood sacred; while women, who know more about reproduction, have secretly rebelled against this heavy assignment, and have used an endless variety of means to reduce the burdens of maternity. Primitive men do not usually care to restrict population; under normal conditions children are profitable, and the male regrets only that they cannot all be sons. It is the woman who invents abortion, infanticide and contraception -- for even the last occurs, sporadically, among primitive peoples. It is astonishing to find how similar are the motives of the "savage" to the "civilized" woman in preventing birth: to escape the burden of rearing offspring, to preserve a youthful figure, to avert the disgrace of extramarital motherhood, to avoid death, etc. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section II, 1935
"When abortion failed, infanticide remained. Most nature peoples permitted the killing of the newborn child if it was deformed, or diseased, or a bastard, or if its mother had died in giving it birth. As if any reason would be good in the task of limiting population to the available means of subsistence, many tribes killed infants whom they considered to have been born under unlucky circumstances: so the Bondei natives strangled all children who entered the world headfirst; the Kamchadals killed babes born in stormy weather; Madagascar tribes exposed, drowned, or buried alive children who made their debut in March or April, or on a Wednesday or a Friday, or in the last week of the month. If a woman gave birth to twins it was, in some tribes, held proof of adultery, since no man could be the father of two children at the same time; and therefore one or both of the children suffered death. The practice of infanticide was particularly prevalent among nomads, who children a problem on their long marches. The Bangerang tribe of Victoria killed half their children at birth; the Lenguas of the Paraguayan Chaco allowed only one child per family per seven years to survive; the Abipones achieved a French economy in population by rearing a boy and a girl in each household, killing off other offspring as fast as they appeared. Where famine conditions existed or threatened, most tribes strangled the newborn, and some tribes ate them. Usually it was the girl that was most subject to infanticide; occasionally she was tortured to death with a view to inducing the soul to appear, in its next incarnation, in the form of a boy. Infanticide was practised without cruelty and without remorse; for in the first moments after delivery, apparently, the mother felt no instinctive love for the child.
Once the child had been permitted to live a few days, it was safe against infanticide; soon parental love was evoked by its helpless simplicity, and in most cases it was treated more affectionately by its primitive parents than the average child of the higher races. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section II, 1935
"Youth was brief, for at an early age marital and martial responsibility began, and soon the individual was lost in the heavy tasks of replenishing and defending the group. The women were consumed in caring for children, the men in providing for them. When the youngest child had been reared the parents were worn out; as little space remained for individual life at the end as at the beginning. Individualism, like liberty, is a luxury of civilization. Only with the dawn of history were a sufficient number of men and women freed from the burdens of hunger, reproduction and war to create the intangible values of leisure, culture and art."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section II, 1935 (italics added)
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