Book Sixteen - How The Laws of Domestic Slavery Have Some Relation to The Nature of The Climate

Summary

Chapter 1: About Domestic Servitude

Slaves are rather established for the family than being in the family. Thus, I shall distinguish their servitude from that in which the women of certain countries are, and which I shall properly call domestic servitude.

Chapter 2: That There Is Between the Two Sexes in Southerly Countries a Natural Inequality

In hot climates women are nubile at eight, nine, and ten years of age. So there childhood and marriage nearly always go together (a). Women are old at twenty. Hence, reason is never found in them contemporaneously with beauty. When beauty insists on ruling, reason causes one to reject it. When reason could acquire empire, beauty is no more. Women must [be] in subjection, for reason cannot procure for them in their old age the empire which beauty had not accorded even in their youth. Therefore it is most easy that a man would leave his wife in order to take another, when religion does not oppose this, and that polygamy should arise.

In temperate countries, where the charms of women are better conserved, or where they are nubile later, and where they have children at a more advanced age, the old age of their husbands follows their own, in some fashion. And since they have greater reason and understanding when they marry, even if this were only because they have lived longer, there naturally had to arise a kind of equality between the two sexes and, consequently, the law of a single wife.

In cold countries the almost necessary use of strong beverages brought about intemperance among men. Women, who have a natural comportment in this respect, because they always have to defend themselves, therefore also have the advantage over them in reason.

Nature, which has distinguished men by strength and by reason, has placed no limit on their power but the limit of this strength and this reason. It has given women charms and intended that their pre-eminence should terminate along with these charms. But in hot countries these charms are found only in the first stages and never in the course of their lives.

Therefore, the law that allows only one wife is related more to the physics of Europe's climate than to the physics of Asia's climate.