... At present, as the stealing of a woman
from a neighboring tribe would involve the whole tribe in war
for his sole benefit, and as the possession of the woman would
lead to constant attacks, tribes set themselves generally
against the practice.[228]
It is, of course, not to be denied that the sexual impulse of the male
was sometimes strong enough to lead him to seize a woman wherever
he found her, if he could not get a wife otherwise, but there is no
evidence that capture ever formed a regular or important means of
getting wives.[229]
On the contrary, the evidence points to the view that as soon as for
any reason men ceased to marry with the women of their own blood and
went outside of their immediate families for women, they ordinarily
secured them in a social, not a hostile, way, and from a different
branch of their own group, not, as a rule, from a strange group. In
fact, the regular means of securing a wife other than a woman of one's
own family seems to have been to exchange a woman of one's family for
a woman of a different family.
The Australian male almost invariably obtains his wife or
wives either as the survivor of a married brother, or
in exchange for his sisters, or later on in life for his
daughters.
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