dowries

• dowry was once reward for sex services

82:3.10Many tribes al­lowed mem­bers of the rul­ing group to have sex re­la­tions with the bride just be­fore she was to be given to her hus­band. Each of these men would give the girl a pres­ent, and this was the ori­gin of the cus­tom of giv­ing wed­ding pres­ents. Among some groups it was ex­pected that a young woman would earn her dowry, which con­sisted of the pres­ents re­ceived in re­ward for her sex ser­vice in the bride’s ex­hi­bi­tion hall.

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.

• upon divorce, repayment required

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.

• man could take wife, children after paying bride price

84:2.5At first, it was the cus­tom for the man to go to his wife’s peo­ple, but in later times, af­ter a man had paid or worked out the bride price, he could take his wife and chil­dren back to his own peo­ple. The tran­si­tion from the mother-fam­ily to the fa­ther-fam­ily ex­plains the oth­er­wise mean­ing­less pro­hi­bi­tions of some types of cousin mar­riages while oth­ers of equal kin­ship are ap­proved.

• often collected by temporary temple prostitution

89:7.5Tem­ple har­lotry even­tu­ally spread through­out south­ern Eu­rope and Asia. The money earned by the tem­ple pros­ti­tutes was held sa­cred among all peo­ples—a high gift to pre­sent to the gods. The high­est types of women thronged the tem­ple sex marts and de­voted their earn­ings to all kinds of sa­cred ser­vices and works of pub­lic good. Many of the bet­ter classes of women col­lected their dowries by tem­po­rary sex ser­vice in the tem­ples, and most men pre­ferred to have such women for wives.