and community matters, such as who would marry and when they would do so, who would have access to land or other economic resources, and whose conduct was unacceptable and worthy of censure or punishment. These decisions were arrived at through a process of negotiation and discussion within the family, where the opinions of older male family members carried more weight than those of younger or female members. These two hierarchies – age and gender – interacted in complex ways dependent on the issue at hand, with older women sometimes having control of younger men on certain matters, especially with regard to arranging marriages
Polygynous marriages were common in many parts of world in a pattern termed “resource polygyny.” Rulers of states and villages had the most wives or other types of female dependents as a sign of status, and they used marriage as a way to make or cement alliances. Resource polygyny could lead to conflict between fathers and sons, as families had to decide whether resources would best be spent acquiring a first wife for a son or another wife for the father. Some scholars have seen this generational conflict as a source for harsh initiation rituals for unmarried young men as a precondition for marriage and joining the ranks of fully adult men. Marriage could also be used as a means of cementing military conquests and absorbing a defeated population. The leaders of both the Incas and the Aztecs, for example, married the daughters of rulers of the groups they had conquered, and in seventeenth‐century Virginia, the Algonkian‐speaking chief Powhatan reinforced his domination of other groups by marrying women from their villages and then sending them back once they had borne him a child. In contrast, African families lived in house‐compounds in which each wife had her own house; each wife also had her own cattle, fields, and property. This notion that a wife’s property actually belonged to her husband, while standard in Europe, was not accepted in most of Africa. In parts of the world in which women were secluded, all wives might live within the same household, in special quarters constructed for them, termed the harim (which means “forbidden area”) or zenana.
Many cultures in Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific were matrilineal, with property passed down through the female line. This did not necessarily mean that women were economically or legally autonomous, but that they depended on their brothers rather than their husbands. Their brothers also depended on them, however, for many of these cultures also had systems of marriage involving a brideprice. A man could only marry after his sister in order to use the money or goods his family had received as her brideprice to acquire a wife for him. This system encouraged close life‐long relations among siblings, with women relying on their birth families for support if they came into conflict with their husbands. In matrilocal groups, such as those in eastern North America, husbands came to live with their wives’ clans, while related women lived together. In these matrilocal groups, either spouse could initiate divorce. A man who wished to divorce simply left his wife’s house, while a woman put her husband’s belongings outside her family’s house, indicating she wished him to leave, but the children always stayed with the mother and her family.
Relatively easy divorce was an essential part of systems of temporary marriage that developed in some parts of the Pacific and Southeast Asia. These were cultures in which people were taught to have a strong sense of debt and obligation to their parents and family for having been given life, termed òn in Vietnamese and hiya in Tagalog, the language of part of the Philippines. This concept of debt extended beyond the family to the larger political and economic realm, so that people were enmeshed in a complex system of dependency, sometimes placing themselves or family members into “debt‐slavery,” as this promise of service and loyalty was known. Gift‐giving was another important way to make alliances, pacify possible enemies, and create links and networks of obligations among strangers. Since gifts of women were considered the best way to transform strangers into relatives, these unions were often accompanied by a marriage ceremony and the expectation of spousal fidelity, even if only temporarily. If the spouses disagreed with one another or the man was from elsewhere and returned to his home country, the marriage ended, just as marriages between local spouses ended if there was conflict or one spouse disappeared for a year or more. Both sides gained from such temporary marriages; the man gained a sexual and domestic and sometimes business partner, and the woman and her family gained prestige through their contact with an outsider and their repayment of a debt. Concepts of debt also structured marriage patterns in other ways; prospective grooms frequently carried out brideservice for their future fathers‐in‐law, understood as paying off their obligations.
Relations within the Family
Historical investigations into the emotional life of families has revealed many examples of affection and respect between spouses, but when we turn to formal legal relations the picture is quite different. In the majority of the world’s societies, marriage put women in a position subordinate to their husbands. Romans who purported to idealize spousal companionship nevertheless gave husbands great power over their wives, and fathers even greater power over their children. (The word “family” (famiglia) in ancient Rome actually meant all those under the authority of a male head of household, including non‐related slaves and servants.) In England, until the nineteenth century married women had no right to their own wages, and were not considered legal persons, but were completely subsumed under the legal identity of their husbands, a practice known as coverture. This subordination of women to men in marriage was often used as a symbol of other types of subordination, providing excellent examples of the way in which gender hierarchies can represent other social and political hierarchies and are intertwined with them.
Law codes do not depict reality, of course, so it has been important for historians interested in relationships within families to investigate actual practice as far as possible. They have generally discovered that even in the most patriarchal societies, women have opposed, subverted, and ignored restrictions; they have made more family decisions and controlled more of what went on in the household than the laws would indicate. In nineteenth‐century colonial areas, for example, the growth in mining and commercial agriculture led many men to leave their families for years at a time in search of wage labor, with women at home in the villages engaged in subsistence agriculture and caring for children and the elderly. This occurred within legal structures that were often patrilineal, with formal rights to land and other property held by men who were absent. In fact, laws regarding ownership and inheritance were often more patrilineal under colonial rule than they had been earlier, as colonial authorities did not understand or accept existing matrilineal or bilateral systems. Thus there could be a sharp contradiction between theory and practice regarding family power relationships, with men the official and legal head of the family but women actually making most of the decisions. This pattern is ubiquitous today in families and communities in the Caribbean and Latin America where men have traveled to cities, or to the US, in search of work, leaving behind female‐headed households and whole towns.
The disruption in traditional gender hierarchies, apparent in many parts of the world today because of widespread migrations, has been a key feature of societies since the dawn of industrialization. Industrialism brought new forms of work organization that had a significant effect on family life. Young women were often the first to be hired as factories opened, for they were viewed as more compliant, willing to take lower wages, and better able to carry out the repetitive tasks of tending machines. Likewise, it was also more difficult for them to move to distant frontiers in search of greater opportunities than it was for young men. Factory work removed young women from their parental households, leading to a lessening of paternal authority once the women had moved away from rural areas for factory work in distant towns and cities. Although they were encouraged to give most or all of their wages to their families, and in most countries married women were obliged to give all earning to their husbands, the very act of earning money provided a degree of autonomy for women and girls. Many girls viewed positively the chance to leave behind a life of stifling parental oversight and dull farm labor, only to end up in grueling and exploitative factory conditions.
In the later nineteenth century, and likely in response to the influx of women into the industrial workforce, opinion‐leaders in those societies emphasized the propriety of a distinction between the “private” world of home and
