This is not so frequent as was once supposed.

With better knowledge it was found that the seeming brutality once thought to take the place of courtship among various peoples in a low state of culture was really itself courtship, a rough kind of play agreeable to both parties and not depriving the feminine partner of her own freedom of choice.

This was notably the case as regards so-called "marriage by capture." While this is sometimes a real capture, it is more often a mock capture; the lover perhaps pursues the beloved on horseback, but she is as fleet and as skilful as he is, cannot be captured unless she wishes to be captured, and in addition, as among the Kirghiz, she may be armed with a formidable whip; so that "marriage by capture," far from being a hardship imposed on women is largely a concession to their modesty and a gratification of their erotic impulses.

Even when the chief part of the decision rests with masculine force courtship is still not necessarily or usually excluded, for the exhibition of force by a lover,--and this is true for civilised as well as for savage women,--is itself a source of pleasurable stimulation, and when that is so the essence of courtship may be attained even more successfully by the forceful than by the humble lover.
The evolution of society, however, tended to overlay and sometimes even to suppress those fundamental natural tendencies.

The position of the man as the sole and uncontested head of the family, the insistence on paternity and male descent, the accompanying economic developments, and the tendency to view a woman less as a self-disposing individual than as an object of barter belonging to her father, the consequent rigidity of the marriage bond and the stern insistence on wifely fidelity--all these conditions of developing civilisation, while still leaving courtship possible, diminished its significance and even abolished its necessity.