Teaching Values

This document illustrates some of the problems inherent in teaching values, and suggests that perhaps one should avoid trying to do so.

"In theory[the husband of a Roman woman] could always divorce her. But it was wise to have a reason -- committing adultery, getting drunk, brewing poisons, making copies of the household keys -- and to discuss the divorce in family council. (He could sell the children, too, if he needed money, though in the fourth century [Emperor Constantine of the Holy Roman Empire] made it a crime for a father to kill them, at least without cause.)"

Under the reign of William the Conqueror, "[s]ervants could be bribed or tortured to testify to a wife's adultery. Not that testimony was always necessary; in the early Middle Ages a man might simply accuse and kill her in a single gesture."

"Christianity moved into the leadership vacuum left by the Fall of Rome. Suddenly monogamy was supposed to apply to men as well as women. 'And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery; and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.' Furthermore, 'What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.'"

"In the sixth and seventh centuries upper-class men could have all the women they could afford (Dagobert I, King of the Franks, married three women in a single ceremony)."

"In 18th-century England, a man . . . Could dispose of his wife by selling her to another man. . . . . . '[The husband] puts a halter around her neck and thereby leads her to the next marketplace, and there puts her up to auction to be sold to the highest bidder, as if she were a brood mare or a milch-cow'"

Barbara Holland. "The Long Good-Bye,"Smithsonian, March 1998, pp. 86-93.