Polygamy

• 1. Introduction

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  Polygamy, a word rooted in Late Greek and meaning the state of marriage to many spouses, has never been a single, simple institution. Across 1,231 societies catalogued between 1960 and 1980 by researchers compiling the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook, 588 practiced frequent polygyny, 453 permitted it occasionally, and only 186 were strictly monogamous. Four societies practiced polyandry, though later research uncovered at least 53 communities worldwide with some form of women taking multiple husbands. What explains this spectrum? Why did most societies trend toward one form while others chose another? And why, after tens of thousands of years of varied practice, did life-long monogamy emerge as the legal norm in most of the world only within the last thousand years? The answers involve farming, inheritance, warfare, child mortality, theology, and the slow rewriting of legal codes from ancient kingdoms to the United States Congress.

• 2. A Word With Many Meanings

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  Ulrich Reichard and other researchers drew four overlapping definitions to show how contested the term itself is. Marital polygamy refers to being legally or customarily married to more than one person. Social polygamy describes sharing a household, resources, and a life with multiple partners. Sexual polygamy means having more than one sexual partner. Genetic polygamy is evidenced only in the DNA of children who carry signs of different fathers. Biologists and behavioral ecologists tend to use the term to mean any reproductive non-exclusivity, while cultural anthropologists restrict it to social or marital arrangements. This disciplinary split matters because it shapes how prehistory gets read. Anthropologists characterize human beings as "mildly polygynous" or "monogamous with polygynous tendencies," and the average pre-historic man with modern descendants appears to have fathered children with between 1.5 women around 70,000 years ago and 3.3 women around 45,000 years ago, except in East Asia. These rates are consistent with serial monogamy as much as with simultaneous multiple partnerships. A 2019 synthesis of physiology, genetics, and anthropology concluded that the weight of evidence supports a mating bond that may include polygyny or polyandry, but is most likely to have been predominantly serial monogamy.

• 3. The African Polygamy Belt

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  Burkina Faso, Mali, Gambia, Niger, and Nigeria are estimated to have the highest rates of polygamy in the world, a stretch of West and Central Africa that researchers call the "polygamy belt." In sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, 11 percent of the population lives in polygynous marriages, a figure that rises to 25 percent among Muslims and sits at 3 percent among Christians as of 2019. Pew data place polygamy at 36 percent in Burkina Faso, 34 percent in Mali, and 28 percent in Nigeria. Anthropologist Jack Goody's comparative study used the Ethnographic Atlas to trace a correlation between extensive shifting horticulture and polygamy across sub-Saharan societies. Drawing on economist Ester Boserup, Goody distinguished between male-dominated plough agriculture common in Eurasia and the shifting cultivation found in parts of Africa where women do much of the agricultural work. Goody concluded that men in such systems seek to monopolize the production of women valued both as workers and as mothers of children. However, Goody himself called the correlation imperfect, and pointed to the West African savanna where men do more farming and polygyny is still desired, but for the generation of male offspring whose labor carries economic weight. Anthropologists Douglas R. White and Michael L. Burton amplified Goody's position, citing Goody's own statement that "the reasons behind polygyny are sexual and reproductive rather than economic and productive." A 2012 analysis by James Fenske found that child mortality and ecological economic shocks were significantly associated with polygamy rates, while female agricultural contributions were not the primary driver in high-polygyny regions like the West African savanna and sahel.

• 4. When Women Take Multiple Husbands

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  Polyandry, the marriage of one woman to more than one husband, is specifically provided in the legal codes of some countries, such as Gabon. It is believed to be more common in societies with scarce environmental resources, where limiting population growth enhances child survival. In the Himalayan Mountains, the scarcity of arable land drove a distinctive solution: two or more brothers would marry the same woman, keeping family land intact and undivided. If every brother married separately, the plots would fragment into plots too small to sustain anyone. In Europe, the same problem was managed through impartible inheritance, where most siblings were simply disinherited. Fraternal polyandry was traditionally practiced among nomadic Tibetans in Nepal, parts of China, and parts of northern India. Among the Nayar tribe of India, a different arrangement applied: girls underwent a ritual marriage before puberty, with the first husband acknowledged as the father of all her children, even though the woman might never live with him and instead took multiple lovers, each required to formally acknowledge paternity. Property passed matrilineally and women remained in their maternal homes. A comparable arrangement appears among the Mosuo tribe of China in the institution of walking marriage. A 2012 study identified 53 communities studied between 1912 and 2010 with either formal or informal polyandry, indicating the practice was more widespread than earlier research had captured. Suspected contributors included fewer men due to high adult male mortality and higher male contributions to food production in societies where polyandry was most common.

• 5. Agriculture, Inheritance, and Monogamy

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  Genetic evidence has demonstrated that a greater proportion of men began contributing to the human genetic pool between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, suggesting that reproductive monogamy became more common at that time. This period corresponds to the Neolithic agricultural revolution, when formerly nomadic societies began claiming and settling land for farming. The advent of property ownership created a direct interest for men in controlling the sexual activity of their reproductive partners, so that accumulated land would pass to direct descendants. The modern concept of life-long monogamy, according to recent anthropological data, has been in place for only about the last 1,000 years. The "honeymoon period," a phase of intense interest in a single sexual partner, lasts 18 months to three years in most cases when reciprocated, roughly matching the time needed to bring a child to relative independence in the small communal societies of pre-Neolithic humans. Some genetic datasets show regional exceptions. A 2019 investigation by Musharoff et al., using the 1000 Genomes Project Phase 3 dataset, found a male bias in the Southern Han Chinese, a population known for its lack of a concept of paternity and a sense of female equality or superiority. The same study found a male bias in Europeans during an out-of-Africa migration event. Typical female biases were confirmed in Yorubans, Europeans, Punjabis, and Peruvians.

• 6. Theology and the Marriage Contract

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  Martin Luther, in a document referred to simply as "Der Beichtrat" or "The Confessional Advice," granted Landgrave Philip of Hesse a dispensation to take a second wife, on the condition that the double marriage be kept secret to avoid public scandal. Some fifteen years earlier, in a letter to the Saxon Chancellor Gregor Brück, Luther had written that he could not "forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict Scripture." Saint Augustine read Old Testament polygamy differently. He argued that the patriarchs had taken multiple wives not from lust but to produce more children, and that as tribal populations grew, this justification no longer held. Augustine saw the first union in the garden as God's original plan: one man, one woman. The Council of Trent went further, declaring that anyone asserting that Christians may lawfully have several wives simultaneously "let him be anathema." Islam took a distinct position. The Quran, in verse 4:3, permits up to four wives under strict conditions of equal financial treatment and fairness, while also advising monogamy for any man who fears he cannot deal justly. Muhammad was monogamously married to his first wife Khadija for 25 years until her death, after which he married multiple women, eventually having 11 wives in total, exceeding the four-wife limit that applied to other Muslim men. The 1988 Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion ruled that a polygamist who wished to join the Anglican Church could be baptized and confirmed with his believing wives and children, provided he promised not to marry again while any of his current wives remained alive. Mswati III, the Christian king of Eswatini, has 15 wives, a detail that encapsulates the gap between official doctrine and lived practice in sub-Saharan Africa.

• 7. Latter-Day Saints and American Law

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  Joseph Smith indicated that a revelation instructed plural marriage, and the practice was instituted among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1840s, even as the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants publicly condemned polygamy. The Nauvoo Expositor criticized Smith for plural marriage on the 7th of June 1844. Smith was killed by a mob on the 27th of June 1844, after which the main body of Latter Day Saints followed Brigham Young to Utah. In 1852 Young publicly acknowledged plural marriage through a sermon. Congress responded with the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act in 1862, clarifying that polygamy was illegal in all US territories. The Republican Party's 1856 platform had already called for prohibiting "those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery." The unanimous 1878 Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. United States declared that polygamy was not constitutionally protected, drawing on the principle that laws govern actions, not beliefs. LDS Church president Wilford Woodruff issued a Manifesto in 1890 announcing the discontinuation of new plural marriages. The Smoot Hearings in 1904 prompted a second Manifesto. By 1910, the LDS Church excommunicated those who entered into new plural marriages, though many existing plural households continued until the deaths of their members in the 1940s and 1950s. Enforcement drove the formation of splinter groups now called Mormon fundamentalists. The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2005 that as many as 37,000 fundamentalists existed, with fewer than half living in polygamous households. In December 2013, federal judge Clark Waddoups ruled in Brown v. Buhman that Utah's anti-polygamy provisions prohibiting multiple cohabitation were unconstitutional, though the state's ban on multiple marriage licenses remained in force. In 2020, Utah voted to downgrade polygamy from a felony to an infraction, except where force, threats, or other abuses are involved. Today, about 30,000 people live in polygamous communities in Utah.

• 8. Legal Landscapes Today

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  In 2000, the United Nations Human Rights Committee reported that polygamy violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, citing violations of women's dignity and the absence of equality of treatment regarding the right to marry. That covenant does not apply to countries that have not signed it, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Malaysia, Brunei, and Oman. In Canada, polygamy carries a prison sentence of up to five years, and anyone who assists or celebrates a rite that sanctions a polygamist relationship is equally guilty. In 2017, two former bishops of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints were found guilty of practicing polygamy by the Supreme Court of British Columbia. In the United Kingdom, bigamy is illegal, but de facto polygamy involving multiple informal partners is not a criminal offence so long as no more than one marriage is registered. UK immigration rules have generally prevented the formation of polygamous households since 1988. The 2010 UK government decided that Universal Credit would not recognize polygamous marriages, though a House of Commons briefing noted the unintended consequence that treating additional spouses as separate claimants could in some situations result in polygamous households receiving more than the current rules intended. In Sudan, the government encouraged polygyny in 2001 to increase the population. In Kuwait, polygamy remains legal with no restrictions imposed. In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, polygamy is constitutionally restricted to monogamy but permitted under specific conditions, including where a wife cannot fulfill her obligations, has an incurable physical disability, or cannot bear children. The gap between law on paper and practice in daily life remains wide across many of these jurisdictions, a pattern that Lorin C. Woolley, the dairy farmer excommunicated from the LDS Church in 1924 and later founding figure of the Council of Friends, would have recognized from his own era of legislative battles.