ferior and contemptible, and will not grant them dignity and respect. When they escape responsibility they lose liberty. Nevertheless, the customs, if introduced by the higher classes, spread downward by imitation; so it must have been with clositering and veiling. Men got security without care, women got the sense of refinement and elegance and of aristocratic usage; the interest of men and the vanity of women thus cooperated to establish the folkways which lowered the status of the latter.
In the early Aryan society the status of a wife depended on whether she was childless, bore daughters, or bore sons. In the first case she was blamed, being considered guilty, and was treated accordingly; in the last case she enjoyed honor.[1]
In that form of the religion of India which appears in the laws of Manu, and in the Mahabharata (about the beginning of the Christian era), fathers chose husbands for their daughters and proposed the marriage, but women also proposed to men who pleased them. Manu allows them to choose, but disapproves of it because the motive would be sexual desire, and for the same reason he classes love marriages as a bad form of marriage.[2]
"Husband-selections" were public ceremonies at which the suitors of princesses entered into competition for them, although the woman could, to some extent at least, set aside the result.[3] Devayani was given as a wife by her father to Yayati; he also gave her maid with her, telling Yayati to honor her, but not to make her his wife. Yayati begot two sons by his wife and three by the maid, and therefore Devayani went home to her father, saying: "Yayati has learned what duty is [from the Veda] and yet he has committed sin."[4] In the Nal episode the
