THE RELIGIOUS DEDICATION OF WOMEN
DR. ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS Lecturer in Sociology, Barnard College
Among all groups of men the inferior has been wont to turn away the anger or win the good-will of his superior by gift- making. Religious worship in many of its forms is, at bottom, gift-making by man, the inferior, to God, the superior. 1 The nature of the gift from man to man varies according to prevailing social values. Cattle, slaves, women, precious stones or metals, manifold forms of personal service or devotion, are the gifts characteristic of various economic and cultural states of society. The form of man's gift to God is likewise determined by social values. The following discussion is an attempt to tell the story of one particular form of religious gift, the gift of women.
In almost all primitive groups women are valued as a form of property which their owners husbands, fathers, or brothers may dispose of at pleasure. Ordinarily they are disposed of by male relatives in marriage by barter, purchase, or service, or by husbands in conjugal servitude, in wife-exchange, or in sexual hospitality. 2 Occasionally they serve as gifts to chiefs or gods. The occasion sometimes requires the immolation of the gift. Peter de Cieza relates of the Quillacingas of New Granada that neighboring chiefs sent one, two, or three women to be buried alive with a deceased chief, that he " might go to the devil with company." 3 There is a Chinese story that a man once interred
1 Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. II, pp. 340, 341. Granted, with Robertson- Smith, Jevons, and Frazer, the hypothesis of the origin of sacrifice as a means of assimilation with the totem-god, it is, nevertheless, a fact that sacrifice as an expiatory or propitiatory offering exists in all forms of religion which have passed beyond the stage of sympathetic magic.
- A variation of the practice of sexual hospitality, particularly interesting in
connection with the following discussion, is found on the west coast of Africa. Bosman, quoted by McClennan (Studies in Ancient History, 26. series, p. 424), states that in polygynous Guinea a man's second wife is " consecrated " to his god.
f The Seventeen Years of Travels of Peter de Cieza through the Mighty Kingdom of Peru .(London, 1709), pp. 89, 34.
610
