The Marriage Institution

83:3.1The an­cients mis­trusted love and prom­ises; they thought that abid­ing unions must be guar­an­teed by some tan­gi­ble se­cu­rity, prop­erty. For this rea­son, the pur­chase price of a wife was re­garded as a for­feit or de­posit which the hus­band was doomed to lose in case of di­vorce or de­ser­tion. Once the pur­chase price of a bride had been paid, many tribes per­mit­ted the hus­band’s brand to be burned upon her. Africans still buy their wives. A love wife, or a white man’s wife, they com­pare to a cat be­cause she costs noth­ing.

83:3.2The bride shows were oc­ca­sions for dress­ing up and dec­o­rat­ing daugh­ters for pub­lic ex­hi­bi­tion with the idea of their bring­ing higher prices as wives. But they were not sold as an­i­mals—among the later tribes such a wife was not trans­fer­able. Nei­ther was her pur­chase al­ways just a cold-blooded money trans­ac­tion; ser­vice was equiv­a­lent to cash in the pur­chase of a wife. If an oth­er­wise de­sir­able man could not pay for his wife, he could be adopted as a son by the girl’s fa­ther and then could marry. And if a poor man sought a wife and could not meet the price de­manded by a grasp­ing fa­ther, the el­ders would of­ten bring pres­sure to bear upon the fa­ther which would re­sult in a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of his de­mands, or else there might be an elope­ment.

83:3.3As civ­i­liza­tion pro­gressed, fa­thers did not like to ap­pear to sell their daugh­ters, and so, while con­tin­u­ing to ac­cept the bride pur­chase price, they ini­ti­ated the cus­tom of giv­ing the pair valu­able pres­ents which about equaled the pur­chase money. And upon the later dis­con­tin­u­ance of pay­ment for the bride, these pres­ents be­came the bride’s dowry.

83:3.4The idea of a dowry was to con­vey the im­pres­sion of the bride’s in­de­pen­dence, to sug­gest far re­moval from the times of slave wives and prop­erty com­pan­ions. A man could not di­vorce a dow­ered wife with­out pay­ing back the dowry in full. Among some tribes a mu­tual de­posit was made with the par­ents of both bride and groom to be for­feited in case ei­ther de­serted the other, in re­al­ity a mar­riage bond. Dur­ing the pe­riod of tran­si­tion from pur­chase to dowry, if the wife were pur­chased, the chil­dren be­longed to the fa­ther; if not, they be­longed to the wife’s fam­ily.