ABSTRACT
The childhood of a girl up to the age of nine or twelve passes with little restraint on her activities and play: she enjoys the freedom of most of the camp and there are few restrictions on her contacts with her relatives, always excluding of course the son-in-law, be he a crinkled baby who has just emerged from his mother’s womb, or a wizened greybeard. With the affinal group into which she will someday marry, her associations have been of the slightest. But at the age of nine or possibly later, she is suddenly handed over to her future husband and sleeps at his fireside from time to time, though she will be close to her parents’ camp. On the surface, the change seems so radical that some writers have not hesitated to call it “child-marriage”. But immediately a whole phalanx of questions confronts us, before we can accept this assumption finally. Does she in reality assume the responsibilities of an adult before puberty? What does marriage involve for the individual in this community: what are its functions and advantages? What are the attitudes adopted by men and women towards it, and how far is a girl prepared for marriage before, during, and after puberty? These are problems which must be settled before we can decide whether in fact a girl’s childhood is abruptly truncated in order that she may become a child-wife.
