Talk:Wife selling

War captives

Regarding this edit: It makes no sense to include the indiscriminate sale of war captives as slaves in an article on wife selling. It was not unusual in ancient warfare to sell off a population after a particularly virulent war: this might include surviving soldiers, but also women and children. "Women" may include married women, but their status as "wife" is irrelevant to their sale as slaves (except that it's especially insulting to their defeated husbands), and is most certainly not undertaken with the consent of their male relatives. It isn't "wife selling"; it's just a main feature of the ancient slave trade, which in ancient Greece and Rome largely depended on warfare. We could list dozens of instances of this kind of sale following the defeat of a city or tribe, but it is not an example of "wife selling" in ancient Greece. Cynwolfe (talk) 02:13, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

To clarify. the topic is "wife selling", not "woman selling" or "the selling of women who happen to be married": the woman's status as a wife has to be at issue, or the topic makes no sense. Selling the female population en masse (married or unmarried), along with children of any gender, cannot be characterized as "wife selling". Cynwolfe (talk) 02:40, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

The literature distinguished on the basis of wifehood and therefore it is within the scope of wife selling, the subject of the article, which is not limited to divorce cases or cases in which the selling was by wives' own husbands. The insult to husbands is indeed relevant, as is the insult to children losing at least their fathers and the insult to other slaves observing the fragility of slave friends' spousal relationships in the hands of slave masters. Also relevant is that slave wife sales were in spite of wifely status, because to masters that probably did not matter, whereas it probably did matter to slaves generally (many of whom over centuries and in many places married without masters' approvals or legal authority) and to nonslaves who thought that family was or should be important even among slaves. One step to restrictions on slave sales (in other places and times) was a prohibition on those sales that broke up marital couples, so that, even before that kind of regulation, an observation that slave wives were sold is relevant to the history of both wife sale and slavery. If that observation is reported in a source, it is reportable here. Mass slave sales without wifehood distinctions are not in the article because that would be outside of the article's scope. The content in this case is specifcally about "wives", not women, and the source did not say it was just about women. One could argue that all women who were slaves were described as wives back then but that view would need a source controlling or addressing the source cited (controlling if it overrides, such as if the same author later defined wife as 'any woman' so as to include the cited source but addressing if a source says some writers meant the word that way so that both views of the meaning of wife should be cited), because it's as likely or likelier that not all women were seen that way, because when gathered or lined up some would have been less likely to be standing next to men (thus more viewable by conquerors as women who were individually available), younger, and deemed as sexually attractive by conquerors and not sold into slavery (as the wives were) but taken by the conquerors for their own sexual use, thus taken into slavery but not necessarily sold into slavery (possibly that is even what was meant by "passion"). Whichever is the historical case, the source author distinguished by wifehood and so the article should cover that report, as it contributes to the history of wife sale, including that it was not just because a husband was tired of his wife. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:32, 27 June 2013 (UTC) (Edited a word: 16:38, 27 June 2013 (UTC))

I'm straining to follow the logic. This is a case of a population being sold off en masse as a result of a defeat in war—an extreme but not rare practice in ancient warfare. It is not a case of "wife selling": wives are simply one of the two components of the population in addition to children, and other than men of military service age. Besides, you're placing undue weight on a passing mention in an article that isn't at all concerned with "wife selling" or the status of ancient Greek women or even the slave trade: the article merely mentions that according to Diodorus one of the consequences of the Theban victory was that the wives and children of the defeated were sold into slavery. (I don't see anything at all of relevance in the article on the other pages that were cited.) "Children" includes daughters not married yet and underage sons, and it's assumed in ancient Greece and Rome that all mature women are wives. (Ancient sources aren't necessarily clear about what happened to the elderly who weren't fit for work and undesirable as slaves; one can guess, but again, that is a separate question.) They weren't selling the women because they were wives, and they weren't selling them to be wives. And at any rate, you may not be aware that in Greek and Latin, the same word can be used for "wife" and "woman", and translators decide which is best in context. In this case, the passage cited in H.'s article simply has τέκνα δὲ καὶ γυναῖκας, "children and women (who are presumably wives, since they are not children)". So while I imagine one could find material from ancient Greece that could be meaningfully described as "wife selling", this ain't it. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:15, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

I would also clarify that the passage is concerned with transferring free people into enslavement as a political and social consequence of the Theban victory; the existing slaves within the defeated population aren't at issue. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:53, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

I take it verification did not fail, despite the edit summary; I was going to check JStor again, but I see that's not necessary. The other pages, as stated, were cited to support inclusion in Greece and on a dispute against a critique. The passage as was quoted in Wikipedia did indeed say "sell their wives ... into slavery", so part of your clarification was covered; another part ("as a political and social consequence") is reasonable and likely but I don't want to go beyond the sourcing; and that "existing slaves within the defeated population aren't at issue" is true and the contrary wasn't in the Wikipedia paragraph. Child sales and sales of women to become wives are covered elsewhere in Wikipedia and only incidentally or not at all in this article.

The source author distinguished wives within the sales. We could say of almost any topic that it can be subsumed within another (for example, that all wife sales should be subsumed within spouse sales, spouse sales within people sales, the last within sales generally, the last within economics, etc., to take just one branch of knowledge organization), but here, as with many other topics, the source author identified wives separately from all other people as objects of sale. You may be right that wife was another word for 'woman' in Greece (I don't know Greek and haven't looked for a Greek or classical Greek dictionary with etymology), but then that would be a dispute against a source (we ordinarily accept a translator's choices unless a reason or a source disputes it, an unsourced reason being perhaps a clearly typographical slip, which this is not) and, for that, we need a source, so we can state and source both sides of the case, namely, approximately, that one view is that wives were sold when other women were not necessarily sold or that by another view a source saying wives were sold is saying only that women were sold. The latter is an interesting perspective but stating it would be original research now and the prospect that a source for the other view will turn up is not a basis for leaving out the sourced view entirely.

You said, "They weren't selling the women because they were wives"; if that's so (whether you meant the vocabulary point or not), please provide a source denying the motivation, since the cited source said wife and not woman in the context and we shouldn't ignore that. Why they sold the wives was not clear but that does not disqualify the content from weight in an article on wife sale, in which wife sale due to any reason, including unstated, is reportable. It's for the same reason that we include wife sales motivated by (say) divorce even though the reasons for wanting divorces are often unstated in surviving records. In the ancient Greek case, that wife sale occurred, even if we don't know why, is historically important, including knowing where and when it occurred and what is known of surrounding circumstances, such as war. Weight is solvable.

Nick Levinson (talk) 16:27, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

An article titled something like [[List of wife sales]] or [[Index of wife selling cases]] would not need to be as comprehensive, but then the other wife sale content would need an article anyway and there's not much reason for a split.

Some of the new content you added, such as on marriage, is, I assume, there to provide context for wife sale, although I would think it should go into other articles, if it's not substantively already there, and then linked to. I'm not inclined to move it out now while no one else minds its presence, since doing that would be a bunch of work and some amount of context being in the same article is not a bad thing.

Nick Levinson (talk) 17:23, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

My understanding of the scope of this article is that it is about the institution of wife selling as it existed in various cultures, not a list of every instance of a wife being sold. Thus I would agree that the section on the Thebans selling war captives didn't really add anything substantive to the article. Kaldari (talk) 17:51, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

The article is about wife selling generally, so I moved the content on Thebans to wife selling#Other cultures, where another several apparently isolated practices or instances are reported from sources, including several from the same continent (Europe), thus showing that even in societies where it may not have been widespread within one set of borders it does occur and does so across several societies. Previously, a similar concern was raised about India and dealt with in much the same way, and then more sourcing on India revealed substantially more wife selling there. "Other cultures" solves the weight problem on the Thebans. We don't list every wife sold, largely because citing to a source allows more instances to be found indirectly by readers, but we should cover whatever is important worldwide, so readers can research it further. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:29, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't understand why you want to make the subject of the article so incoherent. A proper encyclopedia subject is not "the combination of the words 'wife' and 'selling'", but an actual idea that has some consistency and is notable. I would suggest limiting the subject to the topic of men selling their wives when it is done as part of an actual cultural practice (that is not already covered by another topic such as sexual slavery). Otherwise, it contributes nothing useful to article and just turns it into a list of barely related facts. Kaldari (talk) 00:03, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

The article shows how global the concept of selling wives has been. Marriage is considered special; relatively few societies are polygamous in either direction because usually an adult is supposed to have exactly one spouse; therefore, selling a spouse is unlike selling just anyone, even as extraordinary as selling anyone is. Sometimes, a husband sold his wife; sometimes, a third party sold a husband's wife; and sometimes the act was more important to an observer than to the third party who did the selling and becomes notable because of the observer's report. That last happened often with slavery, where masters sold slaves regardless of marital status and others who objected generally to slavery objected more acutely because the sales broke up families by separating wives from husbands and that became part of the public ground for opposing slavery in general, often on religious grounds of harming morality among slaves by disrupting marriage. That wife sale occurred in war does not reduce its importance. Among tools of war, besides bombs and arrows, there is rape; rape serves more than the satisfaction of victorious male soldiers because it also worsens the defeat of the surviving losers, who, after combat has ended, often ask the victors to restore civil order, there being no one else to ask, thus enhancing the power of the victors. That a victorious army practiced wife sale is not to be assumed as an accidental coincidence irrelevant to history. I don't say all of the foregoing in the article but present what is sourced on the subject of wife sale so that readers can see the breadth of it. Wikipedia has lists and indexes and this is more informative on topic. That people even think of selling wives apparently more often than they think of selling mice and rats (there are relatively few as pets or in laboratory suppliers' stocks) is culturally significant; we can explain it without agreeing with it but it is still significant. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:31, 5 July 2013 (UTC) (Corrected misspelling and clarified generally: 16:39, 5 July 2013 (UTC))

Theodosius and Eudocia

The example of the emperor Theodosius II being "persuaded" to sell his wife Aelia Eudocia into slavery is not an example of "wife selling". Theodosius was not persuaded, but tricked.[1] This was not the deliberate selling of a wife as such, but a ruse to call attention to his inattention to detail: the point is precisely that selling one's wife was an outrageous thing that he never would've done knowingly.[2] Moreover, it's a mere anecdote (dismissible as "court gossip") told to impugn his character and to show the enmity of two women. It's the opposite of evidence for wife selling: it presents wife selling as a preposterous thing to imagine doing—not to mention that Eudocia wasn't actually sold as a wife or slave or anything else. I expressed my concerns a couple of years ago (now archived) about the care required to keep this article within scope, and would like to reiterate those now. Cynwolfe (talk) 22:15, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

I have to get offline now, but you raise something interesting and I'll return, probably this weekend. That wife sale is outrageous is indeed coverable within the scope of wife selling and is covered elsewhere in the article, so this case is not irrelevant. I have indeed kept within scope in my editing; there seems to be a view that only certain kinds of wife sale are to be covered, but the scope of the article is reflected in its title, which is not exclusionary. Nick Levinson (talk) 17:17, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

I'll try to get both books you referenced. Possibly I can get Freisenbruch, Annelise, Caesars' Wives: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Roman Empire Tuesday and read it or relevant parts over the next few weeks. I can possibly access the full text of Holum, Kenneth G., Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity tomorrow or next Sunday; I'm assuming the library offering it is offering the full text. The page of the latter that you linked to in Google Books (p. 177) refers to a gift rather than some form of sale (e.g., barter or for money), so I want to follow the footnote (p. 177 n. 9) (the other page offered through that link was merely of an index page and not everything is displayed). Google Books seems too constrained for this. Maybe I'll need to use interlibrary loan, which can take a few weeks to a few months.

Whether something was court gossip is not dispositive but may be relevant and I'll consider it in context.

You "expressed ... [your] concerns a couple of years ago (now archived) about the care required to keep this article within scope, and would like to reiterate those now". You participated in two archived topics/sections. Your complaint in the topic/section India was based on a misunderstanding that if a source was about something it could not also have been about something else so as to be usable for the latter in this article and appears to have been resolved, including by the expansion of coverage on India. Your complaint in the topic/section Contemporary China was not about my editing, I helped resolve it, and you appreciated what I did. That's the total of your complaints archived here. Wife selling has many angles, has many things that can be said about it, and is not limited to actual sales but can encompass opposition to wife sales, theory of wife sale, and popular culture about wife sales, analogously with many other articles. Wikipedia intends that kind of breadth of coverage within a subject defined by an article's title. If you wish to be more specific about your present concerns, please do. If some other articles tend to be narrower than their titles encompass and the research that could broaden them has been performed, narrowness is not a limit on this one.

Nick Levinson (talk) 18:48, 29 June 2013 (UTC) (Corrected syntax: 18:54, 29 June 2013 (UTC))

I agree with Cynwolfe that the anecdote about Theodosius II adds nothing to the article and has no relation to the concept of wife selling. Kaldari (talk) 00:07, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

We would have included it had it been from popular culture (such as in a novel), and this was apparently an actual event (the signing of the contract), so it should be included. I was going to expand it today based on the sources identified by editor Cynwolfe to the following (except for links and sources):

Theophanes claimed that in the 5th century Theodosius II, emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, was persuaded "to sign unread a contract selling his wife Eudocia into slavery", although, according to Kenneth G. Holum relying on Theophanes, Pulcheria may have "tricked" Theodosius so that the wife would be given by Theodosius to Pulcheria so that Pulcheria could then sell the wife into slavery (this was a trick unless this information, said to be "apocryphal" and perhaps traceable to "gossip", is therefore false); in any case, that sale is not known to have occurred in fact, i.e., it is not known if the contract was actually carried out; what is known is that after the signing Pulcheria "gave him [Theodosius] a mighty scolding."

Sources are by Pazdernik, Holum, and Freisenbruch. The source that was already cited is from 1994 and none of the sources replaces any of the others. They do disagree and I have reported that disagreement. Managed and tricked have different meanings. The Pazdernik source said "persuaded" and I paraphrased it as "managed", which was a justifiable paraphrase. The other two sources said "tricked", which I quoted, thus showing the disagreement. Gossip and apocrypha may be true, false, or lacking a needed qualification; I reported the status as gossip and apocryphal in accordance with the sourcing. I did not use Google Books for the retrieval of any of these sources. What do you think?

I was going to post today about the sentence on prostitution as irrelevant (it was not my sentence) unless a source supporting it was explicit about wife selling, but the deletion of that sentence obviates the need for that discussion.

Nick Levinson (talk) 16:49, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I edited on point, with shorter content. Nick Levinson (talk) 21:51, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

right, debt bondage, potestas, and nontransferrable property

The phrases "theoretically he had the right" and "this supposed right" seem contradictory. They are in the section History and Practice, the subsection Ancient Rome, in the first paragraph, in one sentence. Did he have the right?

The next sentence says "it was prohibited by law". Which was prohibited, debt bondage or the placing of sons in debt bondage?

Is "potestas" synonymous with "vitaeque necisque potestas"? They're in the next sentence.

In the third paragraph, a woman who is a citizen is described as "not ... property with a transferrable right of ownership". Presumably, property has no right, unless a woman was not entirely property. Was what was meant is that she was property but that no one had a transferrable right of ownership of her? Either way, it needs rephrasing. If "no one had a transferrable right of ownership of her" (my wording), that needs explaining, since I'm having a hard time understanding what property I have that I can't transfer into someone else's ownership apart from whether conditions of transfer may be regulated; for instance, I can transfer a kidney (by surgical gift); it seems implicit in an inalienability of property that is a human being that the said human is not property.

These are to clarify the article.

Nick Levinson (talk) 17:07, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

You have serious ownership issues with this article, and you're throwing around terms in the Roman section that you clearly don't know the meaning of. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:14, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

No ownership; the article should be clear. The terms that I didn't know were terms I asked about, which is what we editors should do, because if I'm not clear about them probably many other readers won't be clear, either: the writing using those terms seems to suggest interchangeability and I wanted to know if that was correct, because if they're not then clarification is needed, so could you please let us know or should I search for them elsewhere and apply what I find? I asked here because you had just written the passage and thought you would know. If anythng else seems incomprehensible (per your edit summary), please let me know what and I'll try to clarify. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:21, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

To clarify further on terminology about which you said I didn't know the semantics: If you meant familia, I sourced it and linked to definitions and I was correct, but you may be disagreeing with sourcing or with Wiktionary, in which case you may bring it up with a source author or at Wiktionary, because your complaint is not best directed to those of us who rely on sources. Since you had already edited the passage to delete that word, I assume this resolves your subsequent complaint; and you've added it in your other additions, and I relinked it. If you still are concerned about its use or semantics, feel free to edit or post.

The question on debt bondage and sons is now unnecessary, as the relevant text has been deleted from the article.

Nick Levinson (talk) 19:12, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

marriage content seems excessive

The content on marriage and spousal relationships in the Ancient Rome subsection of the History and Practice section seems more relevant to articles on marriage and on Roman history. I think having content that is itself not even vaguely on wife sale is contributing to confusion about the scope of the article, as the recent content on prostitution may have done. While I originally thought it might be appropriate as context, I now propose to delete it. An alternative is to add explanations, if sourced, on how these relationships may have contributed to wife sale or, more than marriage elsewhere, may have constrained it, although I don't know of such sourcing. I'll wait a week for any response. Nick Levinson (talk) 21:46, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

The content was not mine, which is why I'm asking here. Nick Levinson (talk) 15:40, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

This content, "it was a transaction carried out through the mechanism of mancipatio, which conveyed ownership of property. Mancipatio, however, was also the legal procedure for drawing up wills, emancipating children from their parents, and adoption.", has one reference, which is at the end. I don't know whether the reference was intended to support both sentences or only the latter. I could not access Historia and do not know where to see it. The linked-to article, Mancipatio, has only two references and both are apparently only in support of one source for a quotation in that article, thus those references are presumably not entirely relevant to this article. And it appears that the passage may only be about bride-buying, which is excluded form this article (a hatnote above the lead states the exclusion); that it is about bride-buying is supported by the article on Manus marriage (the Coemptio subsection). Since the second sentence, "Mancipatio, however, was also the legal procedure for drawing up wills, emancipating children from their parents, and adoption.", adds nothing to this article (many of the procedures used in wife sale are also used for other purposes, such as deeds are), so I am moving it from this article into the other (with editing).

The paragraph beginning "[a] woman in manu had little independent legal standing" adds nothing to this article that should not be satisfied with linking. I plan to address this paragraph, probably by moving, when I have more time to work out the editorial issues.

Nick Levinson (talk) 16:40, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I will also consider moving what is left of the paragraph beginning "[i]n Rome's earliest period", as it appears to be entirely about bride-buying, thus outside of this article's scope, per the hatnote.

Bride-buying would belong if a bride being bought was already a wife and was being sold, but that requires that a source say so, which is not evident in this case from the article.

The quoted phrase "law of persons" should not have been directly linked, since it is in a quotation, and indirect linking with an {{Efn}} template should have been employed instead.

Nick Levinson (talk) 17:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Editing has now been completed on all paragraphs except possibly the first. I don't know if I will revisit that paragraph other than with respect to a prior talk topic/section. Nick Levinson (talk) 19:02, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

If all the sections are as full of synth and cherrypicking as the one on ancient Rome, then I reiterate my objections when this article was first under construction. A "legal fiction" is just that: a legal fiction. If the same legal procedure (mancipatio) pertains to adult adoption, wills, and similar transactions among gentes, it is not "wife selling": it is simply a means for sorting out property rights. Since it was standard practice in the "core" period of Roman history (2nd century BC to 2nd century AD) to keep the property of husbands and wives separate in Rome (because the wife's property was regarded as belonging to her paternal gens), a legal fiction was resorted to when it was desirable for the husband to manage his wife's property and have the legal right to make decisions about it. Otherwise, his wife was so legally independent of him that he couldn't make contracts concerning, say, sales from her wheat farm. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that "property rights" and thus sales transactions were not exercised over free people in Rome. That was the distinction between "slave" and "free", which under Roman law was the fundamental status distinction. Slaves had no legal right to marry, because they lacked legal personhood; if you had legal personhood, you could not be bought and sold. Roman law is an extraordinarily complex specialist topic. It should be enough that Frier and McGinn in their "casebook" on Roman family law state plainly that wives could not be sold in ancient Rome. This is a social impossibility, because slaves could not legally marry, and free people, who were the only ones who had the right to marry, could not be bought and sold. The only "gray" area is debt bondage, and anecdotal evidence such as exists deals only with sons (possibly daughters). I don't know how to make it any plainer that "wife selling" did not exist in ancient Rome, and the example of Theodosius is the definition of WP:UNDUE: the point of the tale is that it was a trick to embarrass him because he habitually signed stuff without reading it. The contract to sell his wife is meant to represent an outrageous thing, an anomaly, in order to show he wasn't paying attention. Now, there's a sort of trope of emperors selling difficult individuals of high status into slavery that this anecdote may draw on, but its illustrative value depends on being shocking: the sale of a free person is bad enough, but selling one's wife was unthinkable. Cynwolfe (talk) 21:30, 20 July 2013 (UTC)