The price of a woman

Cynically speaking, women are producers of children. The demand for children roughly decides the market price of a wife

I often write about amazing things I read in books. But sometimes I feel the need to write about things I haven't read in a book, because I have failed to find a book that should exist.

The question why some societies require men to pay brideprices while other societies require women to bring a dowry to a union is one of those questions. There should be a good book somewhere that explains this. 

I haven’t found that good book. There is a book from 1971, Bridewealth and Dowry by Jack Goody and Stanley J Tambiah. It builds on economist Esther Boserup's theory that there is a strong correlation between dowry and plow agriculture (predominantly run by men) and brideprice and hoe agriculture (predominantly run by women). And there are a number of more or less obscure papers. But I miss the explanation to why resources sometimes flow from the families of women to the new household (dowry) and sometimes from the groom or the groom's family to the wife's family (brideprice). 

For that reason, I'm writing yet another blog post on a subject that really merits a book: The link between population density and marriage payments. It is a messy subject with loads of data and details. Giving it any justice would require a book. Since I don't have the time to write that book or any resources to market it, I only analyze the most obvious patterns.

I use the terms brideprice for the custom of buying a woman from her family for marriage. I use the term dowry for the custom that a woman's family makes a contribution to the household their daughter forms with a man. Historically, brideprice and dowry were not equivalents. A brideprice was paid to a woman's family. It was commonly used to buy wives for the bride's male family members. A dowry was a form of early inheritance paid at the time of the wedding. The purpose of the dowry was to enrich the household of which a daughter would be part to the benefit of the dowry-payers' grandchildren. 

Nowadays, the word "dowry" is heavily connected to modern-day India, where parents started to demand a kind of groomprice for the human capital invested in a son. This is a late-day phenomenon of a post-agricultural society that kept some agricultural customs. It is not at all typical in history, not even in the history of India itself.¹ More about that further down.

Supply and demand

First of all: According to economic theory, prices are set by supply and demand. For that reason I'm feeling a bit annoyed with the fairness assumption behind much of the thinking around the marriage transfer question. For example, it is said that virilocal societies where women do a lot of agricultural work tend to be brideprice societies, because losing the labor of a daughter is seen as a cost that needs to be compensated.² The way that theory is formulated makes me wonder: Since when do human societies strive for fairness? The reason why human societies tend to be unfair one way or the other is that people seldom give resources away when they can avoid it. If men pay for women, they probably do so because they need to make a bid to compete with other men for relatively scarce women.

Then the question becomes: Why would the supply and demand of women vary between societies? Why are there sometimes so few women that parents are paid to raise them, and sometimes so many women that parents need to sugar-coat them with resources to make them attractive enough as marriage partners?

As always, population density

There is no reason to question Esther Boserup's observation that hoe agriculture societies that rely on female agricultural labor mostly practice brideprice and plow agriculture societies that rely on male agricultural labor are more keen on practicing dowry. The interesting question is: Why do some societies practice hoe agriculture and other practice plow agriculture?

I think the answer is population density. As long as men can, they will employ women to do most of the hard and dirty work. As long as it is possible for a man to use martial prowess and social skills to amass a harem of wives who will sustain themselves and their children with their work, the men who focus on exactly that will win the evolutionary race. The men who peacefully focus on feeding the children they have with one woman will not be the most successful.

As long as mortality among adults and children is high enough, having too many children is not a problem. Sons can try their luck as warriors. Under very primitive conditions, they can raid the neighbors and steal a wife. Under somewhat less primitive conditions, they can raid the neighbors and steal cattle and buy a wife. Daughters, if they can be protected from those neighbors long enough, can be exchanged for new wives to their brothers or fathers.

As long as feeding children is not a major concern for men, they will benefit from having as many as possible. In such an environment they will want as many wives as possible. For that reason, there will be a great demand for women of marriageable age. They will be bargained for, kidnapped and sold, in every society with anything to buy and sell.

The great demand for females will make them difficult to protect. Which will make them costly to raise. Managing to protect a daughter until her reproductive years is rewarded with a brideprice. That brideprice can be used to pay for buying the protected daughters of other people.

Nuba woman farming on a hilltop, Nuba Mountains — southern Sudan. Wikimedia Commons

 

What did plowmen want?

The only reason why this system didn't last forever, everywhere, is that eventually, societies somehow got more peaceful. Mortality became lower and the population increased. Which made land a scarce resource. Extensive hoe agriculture by women was no longer efficient enough to sustain children - it required too much land. In such an environment, men face a choice: See their children succumb or work harder themselves. Those who chose the latter became evolutionarily successful. Plowing with animals is hard work and requires the upper body strength of a man. But it gives more output from a given area. When land became scarce, the men who were prepared to work their limited amount of land themselves got more surviving children.

For those plowmen, wives weren't as useful anymore. They still needed one wife to give them a number of children to provide for. But since they had to provide for all children with their own labor, they had no interest in having an infinite number of children. For that reason, most men stopped bargaining for additional wives. Women who gave birth to children and provided for those children themselves were simply much more desirable for men than women who gave birth to children the man had to provide for.

The great convergence

When men needed to provide for their children with their own labor, their tastes changed. From the quantity of women, to the quality of one woman. Actually, such scarce conditions made the interests of the sexes converge like never before. Men are physically capable of having many more children than any woman. But in a Malthusian society where land is scarce, they mostly need to forego such opportunities if they want any surviving children and grandchildren. Under Malthusian conditions, humans get heavily K-selected. The men who adapt to such conditions get selected for. 

All-in-all, this makes men and women more similar in their lifestyle and partner preferences. To the degree that women have been allowed to choose their partners, they have always stressed quality rather than quantity. Under crowded conditions where few people can realistically hope for more than a handful of children, men start doing the same. And in an economy where resources to feed one's children is the most crucial asset, a "high-quality woman" means a woman with resources. Enter the dowry economy.

A woman with resources 

In a population-dense society with rather low mortality levels, men know they will only be able to sustain a number of children. They will be able to provide an even smaller number of children with an inheritance, securing food for their grandchildren.

Marriageable women and their parents will look for one thing: A man who owns land. That gives men who own some land the power to choose. They will use that leverage to choose a woman who brings more land into the deal. Because essentially, both sexes are in the same situation: Land ownership is the great obstacle to their opportunity to have children and grandchildren.

In population-dense societies, men and their parents learn that a woman in herself doesn't lead to optimal reproductive success. Only a woman bundled with resources does. So they narrow down their choice of a wife to a suitably propertied class of women. Women of that class do their best to distinguish themselves from less propertied women through visibly wearing some of their property. The exhibition of resources in the form of jewelry and elaborate dress becomes a means for young women and their parents to show that their daughters are in the pool of resource-endowed women whose children are likely to have a future in a crowded society.

Not everyone could afford rabbit ears! Portrait of a young lady made in northern Italy between 1465 and 1475. Both artist and model unknown. Wikimedia Commons.

What happened in East Asia?

The above was what happened in Europe. At first, population was sparse and land was plentiful. In the northern parts of Europe, it remained so until a millennium ago or so. When larger military units were formed, peace and population increase ensued. More labor-intensive, less land-demanding agricultural practices took over. Peace decreased kidnapping risks, which made raising daughters less costly. The Christian church banned infantice and was more capable of actually enforcing the ban. By the 1000s, women of reproductive age had both become cheaper to raise and less in demand. In order to compete for grooms, parents started to sugar-coat their daughters with resources.

In East Asia, most of the above happened too. Larger political units were created. Which led to peace, which led to a Malthusian situation. And still, dowry payments did not become an important part of the culture in much of East Asia. Men actually continued paying for brides. 

In East Asia just like in Europe, more peaceful and crowded conditions made women plummet in value. As always, the demand for women followed the demand for children. When fewer children were in demand due to lack of food and future prospects, fewer women were in demand as well. But the Asians took another measure than the Europeans: Infanticide. Instead of stimulating the demand for women through bundling them with resources, Asian families simply cut the supply. The families of sons then paid the families of daughters some compensation for not having killed their daughter.

For that reason, I wouldn't say that dowry payments is a law that comes with the Malthusian condition. Rather, they come when living conditions get crowded and the supply of women cannot be restricted in a socially acceptable way. 

Meanwhile in Africa

As many people have observed, Africa is the big brideprice economy of modern times. As Ester Boserup observed, since African agriculture centered around female labor, brideprice was the rule.

There is no reason to question that: Africa really is known for its female-led, non-plow agriculture. Geographical reasons have been cited, like soil quality and suitable crops: Maize is rather easy to hoe cultivate, and it suits the climate in much of Africa. But soil geography can't be the whole truth. It is not like European colonists gave their wives hoes and digging sticks when they arrived in South Africa because the soil was so suitable for female labor. Once upon a time, all agriculture was hoe agriculture, also in northern Europe. Ultimately, it is population density that makes societies take the step from less labor-intense female-led agriculture to more labor-intense male-led agriculture.

Before the 20th century, Africa never became densely populated. Wars, but above all nasty diseases kept population numbers down. Mortality remained high, so the population pressure that forced men into plow agriculture never arrived. 

One peculiar fact underlines the specific nature of Africa in population matters: African men father more daughters than European, Asian and Native American men. When the father is of African origin, sex ratios tend to lie around 103 boys for 100 girls, compared to 106-107 for other ethnicities.³ 

This could be a direct effect of genetic drift: The few hundred people who went out of Africa and became the ancestors of all non-Africans might have had a higher tendency to father boys. But given the advantage of more than fifty percent male offspring in many human societies, it wouldn't be entirely strange if a tendency to father more sons than daughters was selected for. The reason why such tendencies weren't as much selected for in Africa might have been malaria. Since malaria in itself was such a killer, the need for killer males decreased compared to the need for breeding females. Groups that could keep their numbers up in the face of disease pressure might have had more of an advantage compared to in the rest of the world, where nature allowed more people to grow up and kill each other.

During the 20th century, when modern medicine reduced the mortality in Africa, population numbers soared. Birth rates have decreased, but not nearly to the levels of countries of similar wealth in the rest of the world (for example, Nigeria has two and a half times the fertility rate of comparably affluent India). There might still be a mentality from the continent's empty history, reflected in the still widely practiced custom of brideprice: There are even reports of apps that help people calculate the right price for their daughter. 

And in India

Reports from India probably are what first taught most of us the word "dowry". The persistence of the custom of wealth transfers from the families of wives to the families of grooms gives the impression that the custom is very old. Surprisingly, it doesn't seem to be. Wikipedia cites several ancient sources claiming that dowries were not paid in India.⁴ Sarah Hrdy reports that in the lower castes, brideprice is still the norm: Low status men need to pay to get married.⁵

One important difference between India and Europe was the strong and formalized tradition of hypergamy in India. In Europe, two young persons of roughly equal class were usually brought together, each of them endowed with inherited wealth. In India, people were supposed to endow their daughters to buy them a place on a higher social level. In the 19th century in some Northern Indian high castes, all daughters were killed at birth, because where would they go?⁶

From India there actually seems to be some evidence of a groom-price custom. In most places, the dowry clearly went to the household of the daughter to the benefit of her children. However, in northern India Stanley S Tambiah found blurred lines between the dowry and the rest of the finances of the husband's extended family.⁷

When land was replaced by human capital as the most important asset, most societies abandoned explicit dowry payments. But not in India. Instead, the tradition of buying a place in a higher social class continued. Many parents of sons find it fair that they should get some of the money they invested in their son's education back. If they take in a woman into the social class where they have paid to be, shouldn't her family pay for an entry ticket too?⁸

Nowadays, dowry is genderless

They say that in the Western world, brideprice and dowry are lost traditions. Brideprice definitely is: Parents of young women are not paid when their daughters get married.

But I'm not so sure the dowry tradition has been lost. Actually, parents still invest quite a lot in the social standing of their children. But they invest in other things than in pre-modern times. Instead of transferable assets like land, they help their children build up their individual human capital.

The pre-modern dowry system was adapted to an environment where women moved away from their kin while men stayed at the family property. Today, both men and women are supposed to move away from their parents and create entirely new households. In that sense, both boys and girls are in the same situation as girls were a few hundred years ago.

Parents are still doing their best to support their children, both directly and indirectly. Direct help in the form of financial aid to buy a house or other capital goods is not unheard of although still somewhat frowned upon. But indirect help in the form of the best education the parents can buy and the best upbringing they can provide is more or less seen as the norm. Parents might not even be aware of it themselves but what they are doing is helping their children secure the best possible spot on the marriage market . Just like during the times when dowries were paid out at the occasion of a marriage, people know that the best way to form a family with high social status is to combine a high-status man and a high-status woman. Two high salaries simply buy a nicer inner-city apartment than only one high salary.

For that reason I wouldn't say that the dowry tradition is dead. It has rather been extended to both sexes. Now, just like before, young people who have not received help from parents or kin to rise socially have a much harder time rising to new social heights and finding a mate on that higher social level.

Marriage market mixed with Tinder

The main difference compared to the agricultural society of yesterday is that far from all people in the marriage market are there with the aim of breeding. In crowded societies there is always a market for sex-without-breeding, usually in the form of prostitution. Through prostitution, men got an outlet for their no longer success-bringing instinct to have sex with as many and as fertile women as possible. As such, prostitution harks back to an even more ancient time when men earned gene-spreading opportunities through appreciating all fertile women, regardless of social status.

As social norms regarding sexuality and reproduction were loosened, the two systems got blurred. We still have a very obvious dowry economy, where richly endowed men and women form even more endowed couples. But we also have a market of lust, where the focus lies on lust for naked beauty, like it did in ancient, uncrowded societies. The first, dowry-based, system is supposed to result in children. The latter, lust-based, system is not. Nonetheless, people in the two systems mingle freely on a common relationship market.

This makes life difficult especially for those in the dowry section of the relationship market. The lust-focused section does not mind very much if they catch a lust-based or a dowry-based individual from the market pool. But a dowry-focused participant does not want to waste time on someone only in it for the lust. 

Yesterday, amassing a fortune big enough to marry was the main  difficulty for men and women who wanted to form families. Today, amassing the earning power is only the first step. The second step is to avoid squandering it on people who do not even intend to form families. On that point, we might be experiencing cultural evolution in real time: Families and communities whose young people are able to avoid such pitfalls are at an advantage compared to families and communities where the kids spend their time and resources dating their way into reproductive dead-ends.

The cultural evolution of uncrowded, high mortality societies favored families that amassed resources and used them to pay the brideprice for women. The cultural evolution of crowded agricultural societies favored families that amassed resources and used dowry payments to combine them. Today's cultural evolution favors families that both endow their children and help those children use their endowment to maximal reproductive effect.

1. Siwan Anderson, The Economics of Dowry and Brideprice, 2007, 13/24 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.21.4.151

2. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry

3. Muin J. Khoury, David Erickson, Levy M James, Paternal Effects on the Human Sex Ratio at Birth: Evidence from Interracial Crosses, 1984, Link

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry_system_in_India

5. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature, 1999, page 339

6. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature, 1999, page 326

7. Wikipedia on Dowry

8. This article, Dowries are illegal in India. But families — including mine — still expect them, by Kavya Sukumar explains things in more detail https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/2/6/14403490/dowry-india-bride-groom-dilemma