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from the how-do-you-keep-multiple-wives-happy dept.
A study conducted by a team of researchers from the U.K., Tanzania and the U.S. has found an example of polygynous marriage that does not appear to be harmful to women or children. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers outline their study of people living in villages in Tanzania, and why they believe organizations such as the UN need to modify their stance on the practice to better take account of cultural practices.
Polygny is a term used to refer to marriage systems where males can have more than one wife, while polygamy refers to the actual practice of it. In this new study, the researchers looked into the question of whether a polygnynous marriage is in fact harmful to women or children as has been assumed by many in the international community. They looked at 3,500 households in villages in Tanzania, noting the occurrences of polygnynous marriage versus monogamous marriage and the standard of living for those women and children.
In looking at their data, they found that first wives—women who were the first to marry a man with several wives, tended to have better nutrition as did their children, than women in monogamous marriages and their children. Later wives and their children fared on average as well as monogamous wives and their children, but not as well as first wives. This, the team claims, shows that not all instances of polygynous marriage are harmful to women or children—it shows that in some cases, it can actually be a practice that women can use to better their lives and that of their children. It is a matter of wealth and the rules that govern a society—if women cannot own land or other resources, for example, or take a job, as was the case in the Tanzanian villages, they will likely do better in life if they are able to attract and marry a man with some degree of wealth, which in some cases may mean, a man with multiple wives.
How do the husbands fare?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday October 29 2015, @03:47AM
>Having 1 husband and multiple wives or 1 wife and multiple husbands definitely doesn't work in a stable society.
Actually, that's only an issue if you assume that one of those arrangements dominates. If instead 10% of the women have 3 husbands (30% of the men) and 10% of the men have 3 wives (30% of the women), then 40% of the population is involved in polygamous relationships, and the remaining 60% if evenly split between men and women. (Well, not dramatically more imbalanced than the normal 49/51% anyway). You also ignores the possibility of gender-balanced polygamy (i.e. 3 husbands AND 3 wives all bound into a single marriage)
Where things *may* break down though are in the biological and economic fronts, which may easily bias such relationships towards a higher woman-to-man ratio within marriages.