and the regulation of sex practices transpiring on the basis of force.  In the earliest period of society, under the maternal system, the woman had her own will more with her person; but with the formulation of a system of control, based on male activities, the person of woman was made a point in the application of the male standpoint.  “The wife, like any other of the husband’s goods and chattels, might be sold or lent."[205] “Even when divorced she was by no means free, as the tribe exercised its jurisdiction in the woman’s affairs and the disposal of her person."[206] Forsyth reports of the Gonds that

infidelity in the married state is ... said to be very rare; and, when it does occur, is one of the few occasions when the stolid aborigine is roused to the extremity of passion, frequently revenging himself on the guilty pair by cutting off his wife’s nose and knocking out the brains of her paramour with his ax.[207]

The sacrifice of wives in Africa, India, Fiji, Madagascar, and elsewhere, upon the death of husbands, shows how completely the person of the female had been made a part of the male activity.  Where this practice obtained, the failure of the widow to acquiesce in the habit was highly immoral.  Williams says of the strangling of widows by the Fijians: 

It has been said that most of the women thus destroyed are sacrificed at their own instance.  There is truth in this statement, but unless other facts are taken into account it produces an untruthful impression.  Many are importunate to be killed, because they know that life would henceforth be to them prolonged insult, neglect, and want....  If the friends of the woman are not the most clamorous for her death, their indifference is construed into disrespect either for her late husband or his friends.[208]

Child-marriages are another instance of the success of the male in gaining control of the person of the female and of regulating her conduct from his own standpoint.  Girls were married or betrothed before birth, at birth, at two weeks, three months, or seven years of age, and variously, often to an adult, and their husbands were thus able to take extraordinary precautions against the violation of their chastity.  On the other hand, it frequently happens, especially where marriage by purchase is not developed, that the conduct of the girl is not looked after until she is married; it becomes immoral only when disapproved by her husband.  In the Andaman Islands,

after puberty the females have indiscriminate intercourse ... until they are chosen or allotted as wives, when they are required to be faithful to their husbands, whom they serve....  If any married or single man goes to an unmarried woman, and she declines to have intercourse with him by getting up or going to another part of the circle, he considers himself insulted, and, unless restrained, would kill or wound her.[209]

Under these conditions the rightness or wrongness of the sexual conduct of the wife turned upon the attitude of the husband toward the act.  Hence a very general practice that the husbands prostituted their wives for hire, but punished unapproved intercourse: