The consummation of marriage according to Weeks

According to both of John H. Weeks's accounts, after the oath on the bullet, the elders (Weeks 1914) or the witnesses (Weeks 1908) who enter the house of the newly married couple to arrange the hearthstones and instruct the bride also come to see whether the bridegroom can consummate the marriage.

If he cannot ("through impotency", Weeks 1908 specifies), the marriage is broken off; according to Weeks 1914, the money is returned. Sometimes, on account of shame, the marriage is not dissolved: the husband finds a suitable young man and permits him to have intercourse with his wife (Weeks 1908: so that she may have a child by him); should there be a child, the husband treats it as his own.

Weeks 1914 closes his description of the ceremony with this remark: where mother-right prevails, the whole purpose of the marriage arrangements is to increase the woman's family, not the man's; anything that helps to that end is sanctioned, and everything that stands in the way is used as a reason for breaking off the marriage. Weeks 1908, discussing the husband's claims on his wife's death, gives as the reason for these demands that the wife's children do not belong to the husband but to the wife's family; he is breeding children to increase another family than his own.