The Changing Character of Marriage Payments

Marriage payments and marriage transfers were long expected to disappear with societal development. Yet bridewealth, dowry, and dower remain highly important in Africa, Asia, and parts of Oceania, although their characters have changed. African and Oceanian bridewealth has often shifted from its collective nature to individualized payments by grooms, reinforcing perceptions of wife purchase. In India, dowry remains a prerequisite for daughters’ marriages and places heavy financial pressure on parents. In Islamic cultures, financing dower and indirect dowry for sons is often a family’s largest economic commitment. In China, couples may demand substantial transfers from parents, raising marriage-payment expectations.

These practices have major consequences for intergenerational relations, marriage timing, and gender roles. Parents may spend decades organizing their economic lives around children’s marriages. Men’s temporary labor migration can increase as they need to accumulate marriage resources. Marriage may be delayed, or separated from starting a partnership, while still being needed to secure legal rights and responsibilities for couples and children. Marriage transfers are also a means to rapidly shift the status and material standards of a marital household. Dowries to grooms and individualized bridewealth strengthen perceptions of wife ownership by men, support understandings of husbands’ authority and wives’ obedience, increase fertility, cement traditional gender roles, and fuel domestic violence.

The open session will take a broad perspective rather than focus on one region or transfer type. It welcomes contributions addressing the changing character of marriage payments as well as its causes and consequences, preferably offering comparative or more general perspectives.