Marriage

• 1. Introduction

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  Marriage appears in nearly every human society on Earth, yet no two cultures can agree on what it actually is. As legal scholar Evan Gerstmann observed, definitions of marriage have careened from one extreme to another and everywhere in between. The word itself surfaced in English around 1300, borrowed from the Old French mariage and tracing back to the Latin maritare, meaning to marry. Its cousin, matrimony, comes from a Latin root built on mater, the word for mother. So here is a custom found almost everywhere, with a name rooted in motherhood, that somehow refuses to hold still. How many spouses can a person have, and who decides? Who pays whom when two families join, and why does the money flow in opposite directions depending on where you stand on the map? When a woman in Sudan can take a wife, or a Zuni artist can be recognized as a husband, what exactly are we describing? The answers reveal an institution stranger and more varied than its quiet domestic image suggests.

• 2. Defining The Undefinable

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  Edvard Westermarck spent decades trying to pin marriage down, and even he could not settle on a single answer. In The History of Human Marriage from 1891, he called it a durable connection between male and female lasting until after the birth of offspring. By 1936, in The Future of Marriage in Western Civilization, he had rejected that, settling instead on a relation of one or more men to one or more women recognized by custom or law. The anthropological handbook Notes and Queries tried again in 1951, defining marriage as a union producing legitimate offspring recognized by both partners. That definition cracked under real-world pressure. Among the Nuer people of Sudan, women could act as a husband through a practice called ghost marriage, so Kathleen Gough revised the wording to a woman and one or more other persons. Gough then studied the Nayar, a polyandrous society in India, where the husband role split between a non-resident social father and the woman's lovers, none of whom held legal rights to her child. That left her defining marriage purely by the legitimacy of offspring. Edmund Leach found even that too narrow. In a 1955 article in the journal Man, he argued no single definition fits all cultures, and offered instead a list of ten distinct rights that marriage can establish, from sexual monopoly to control over property to a relationship of affinity with a spouse's brothers. The very next chapter shows how those rights multiply when a marriage holds more than two people.

• 3. Counting The Spouses

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  Of 1,231 societies catalogued in the Ethnographic Atlas, only 186 were strictly monogamous. Far more, 588, practiced frequent polygyny, where a man has multiple wives with no marriage bond between them. A smaller group of 453 allowed occasional polygyny, and just 4 practiced polyandry, where a woman has multiple husbands. Anthropologist Jack Goody traced a striking pattern across these figures. Intensive plough agriculture, dowry, and monogamy clustered together across Eurasia, from Japan to Ireland. Sub-Saharan societies practicing hoe agriculture instead paired bride price with polygamy. A survey of cross-cultural samples confirmed that the absence of the plough was the single best predictor of polygamy. Polyandry turned out to be rarer than the others but not as rare as once assumed. The 1980 Ethnographic Atlas listed only Himalayan societies, yet later studies found 53 polyandrous societies beyond the 28 in the Himalayas. In those mountains the logic was land. When all brothers in a family marry the same wife, a practice called fraternal polyandry, the family's land stays whole rather than splitting into plots too small to farm. Group marriage proved the rarest arrangement of all. Of 250 societies the American anthropologist George Murdock reported in 1949, only the Kaingang of Brazil practiced it. Robin Fox saw real social value in polygyny, noting that as the Mormons did, it could promise a home and family for every woman in a society short of men.

• 4. Marriages Beyond The Mold

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  We'wha, a Zuni lhamana, traveled to Washington as an emissary and met President Grover Cleveland. A lhamana is a male individual who at least some of the time dresses and lives in roles usually filled by women, and We'wha, a respected artist, had at least one husband generally recognized as such. Such arrangements were not unique to the Americas. Ancient Greek same-sex relationships resembled modern companionate marriages, in contrast to Greek different-sex marriages, where spouses shared few emotional ties and the husband was free to seek outside liaisons. The historical record holds darker turns too. The Codex Theodosianus, issued in 438 CE, imposed severe penalties or death on same-sex relationships, though how the law connected to actual practice remains unclear. Same-sex unions were celebrated in parts of China such as Fujian, and possibly the earliest documented same-sex wedding in Latin Christendom took place in Rome in 1581, at the San Giovanni a Porta Latina basilica. Time itself could bound a marriage. The Mosuo of China practice walking marriage, where male partners live elsewhere and visit at night. Among Germanic peoples in the Middle Ages there was handfasting, and the Muslim world developed nikah mutah, a fixed-term contract known as sigheh in Iran and mutah in Iraq. That last practice carried a striking modern application. In Egypt, Lebanon, and Iran, temporary marriage has been used to make the donation of a human ovum legal for in vitro fertilisation, though a woman cannot use it to obtain a sperm donation.

• 5. The Price Of A Wife

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  In some parts of Iran, the mahr owed by a husband can climb past a million US dollars, the equivalent of 4,000 official Iranian gold coins, more than a man could ever hope to earn. If he cannot pay, current Iranian law lets him pay in installments, and failure can lead to imprisonment. The mahr is the woman's portion of the groom's wealth, set deliberately high in some places to discourage a husband from divorcing. Money in marriage moves in opposite directions depending on the custom. A dowry transfers parental property to a daughter at her marriage rather than at the holder's death, creating a fund to support her in widowhood and eventually provide for her children. Bridewealth runs the other way, paid by the groom or his family to the bride's parents, common in Thailand, Cambodia, parts of Central Asia, and much of sub-Saharan Africa. In anthropological literature, bride price has been explained as compensation for the loss of the bride's labor and fertility. Other arrangements protected the woman directly. In the Jewish tradition, rabbis in ancient times required a prenuptial agreement called a ketubah, which set an amount payable to the wife on divorce or from the husband's estate at his death. It replaced the older biblical bride price and discouraged a husband from divorcing. The Germanic custom of the morning gift, given the morning after the wedding night, survived for centuries in morganatic marriage, a union where the wife's lower social status barred her children from inheriting a noble's titles or estates. Dowries also carry real danger. In India, thousands of dowry-related deaths occur yearly, prompting laws against the practice, and Nepal made dowry illegal in 2009.

• 6. Walls Around The Altar

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  From 1913 until 1948-30 of the then 48 United States enforced laws banning marriage between racially defined groups, known as anti-miscegenation laws. Though an Anti-Miscegenation Amendment to the Constitution was proposed in 1871, again in 1912-1913, and once more in 1928, no nationwide ban was ever enacted. The walls fell in 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional, ending them in the 16 states that still had them. Nazi Germany built similar walls in September 1935 with the Nuremberg Laws, formally the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour. Those laws classified Jews as a race and forbade marriage and sexual relations across that line, later extended to others, with violations marked as Rassenschande and punishable by imprisonment or death. South Africa enforced the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Act of 1950, which made interracial sexual relations a crime. Age has been its own contested wall. In 1880 in the United States, the minimum age of consent for marriage ranged from 7 to 12 years old. Feminist activists in late 1800s England and America pushed to raise it, and by the 1920s it had risen to between 16 and 18. Yet as of 2017, over half of the 50 states had no explicit minimum marriage age, and several set it as low as 14. Child marriage remains most common in rural sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with Niger reporting the highest rate at 75 percent.

• 7. When The State Steps In

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  Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that men and women of full age have the right to marry and found a family, and that marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. A civil marriage, performed by a government institution without religious content, creates those rights and obligations in the eyes of the state. The relationship between civil and religious ceremonies varies sharply by country. Belgium, Bulgaria, France, the Netherlands, Romania, and Turkey require a civil ceremony before any religious one. In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, and Spain, both can be held together, with the officiant also serving as agent of the state. Some countries leave no room for civil marriage at all. In Saudi Arabia, governed by a religious legal system, civil marriage does not exist, and marriages contracted abroad may not be recognized if they conflict with Saudi interpretations of Islamic law. Lebanon and Israel, with mixed secular-religious systems, host no local civil marriage either, which blocks interfaith unions within their borders, though Israel recognizes civil marriages performed abroad, including overseas same-sex unions. Civil unions opened another path. Beginning with Denmark in 1989, they spread through several countries to give same-sex couples rights similar to marriage, and in places such as Brazil, New Zealand, France, and the US states of Hawaii and Illinois, they are open to opposite-sex couples too.

• 8. The Quarrel With Marriage

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  Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in the 18th century, called marriage legal prostitution. She was not alone in that comparison. Bertrand Russell, in his book Marriage and Morals, wrote that marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and that the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution. Angela Carter, in Nights at the Circus, asked what marriage is but prostitution to one man instead of many. These critiques rest on a long legal history. In most cultures, married women had few rights of their own, considered along with their children the property of the husband, unable to own property or represent themselves legally under doctrines such as coverture. Since the late 19th century, primarily Western reforms gave wives legal identities, abolished a husband's right to physically discipline his wife, granted property and reproductive rights, and required a wife's consent for sexual relations. Feminist theory frames opposite-sex marriage as rooted in patriarchy, casting men as providers in the public sphere and women as caregivers in the private one. The writer bell hooks argued that within the family structure individuals learn to accept sexist oppression as natural. Yet research points toward a different model. Studies in the US show married couples report the highest satisfaction in egalitarian relationships and the lowest in wife-dominated ones. Egalitarian or peer marriage, where power and labour are divided equally rather than by gender, has drawn rising attention, even as fewer than half of US respondents described their opposite-sex relationships as equal in power.