It’s been a long time since I sat down and gave this blog the attention it deserves but that’s going to change. I know I usually write about gender itself but today I’d like to spend a little time on looking at polyandry – the world’s rarest type of marriage and a total reversal of normal Western gender roles.
Most of us are aware of what polygyny is – the marriage of one man to several women but far less of us know about it’s complete opposite polyandry which is the marriage of one woman to several men. Part of the reason for this is because it flies in the face of patriarchal Western culture and makes many of us uncomfortable in its presence but another reason it has remained such a well kept secret is because it has always been the least common type of marriage on a global scale making up only less than two percent of all marriages ever recorded. But that’s not to say it hasn’t popped up somewhere. In fact it’s been found in all time periods and in cultures that span the globe.
As with all forms of marriage polyandry likely came about to address the needs of the communities that fostered it. There are indeed a lot of economic reasons why a culture might take it on. The first is probably the most obvious. Peoples living with scarce resources might use it as a form of both birth control and easy way to keep inheritances intact. This is generally the historic reasons given by Tibetans in Nepal and Northern China who still sometimes practice it. Usually in these cases the eldest daughter of the family is the only one allowed to marry so she can inherit her mother’s land. This creates a gender imbalance with there being far less available women than men so fraternal polyandry seems to be in many ways a type of compromise. A woman marrying one man generally also marries all his brothers. Since there is only one woman involved the number of children in these blended households stays small which is perfect when there are so few resources to go around.
Fraternal Polyandry may be the best understood because it’s still being practiced but it’s not the only reason or form of polyandry. It may have also been used in the upper classes of certain cultures to signify the status of high ranking women – queens and chieftains in their own right may have even been gifted successive men by other leaders to use as husbands in the same way female concubines were exchanged in more patriarchal societies.
At other times it may have just been used as a problem solving method for childless couples. In some ancient societies a woman who was not bearing children may have been allowed to marry a second man. This may or may not have been particularly beneficial to the second husband economically as any children he may have sired would still have been considered the offspring of the first husband and given all his inheritances. This is not uncommon as many of the peoples who practiced polyandry believed in the concept of having multiple fathers. Whether or not they believed this in a literal sense or just in a practical sense (it takes a village to raise a child) is probably up to some debate but what is known is that families with an extra parent had a 15% increase in childhood survival.
Of course none of these touches on religious influences which may be strong in some cultures. In some parts of India there are still some minority Hindus who cite they are the descendants of Draupadi, an influential figure in their religious book the Mahabharta. In it she took on five brothers as her husbands and these people carry on this tradition in her honor.
Interestingly polyandry today can sometimes be a response to a patriarchal society gone haywire. In some cultures where men are the sole breadwinners families may resort to a brutal sort of birth control to limit the births, or successful rearing, of too many daughters who are a drain on the family resources. However, if female infanticide becomes too widespread it alters the ratio of men to women and leaves it drastically imbalanced. With not enough women to go around perhaps polyandry is the answer.
But this isn’t to say polyandry is always a form of female power. In many cases it simply isn’t. Some of these marriages might be arranged, others are sometimes created after the first marriage at the behest of the first husband. It wasn’t uncommon in Biblical times for a man to arrange for his brother or some other male relation to marry his wife if he died but some cultures take this a step further – allowing for a type of substitute husband while the first was away on hunting expeditions or various other adventures. This was most common in hunter-gatherer societies.
Today in Western culture polyandry continues to be rare in part because marrying multiple people of any gender remains illegal in most Western countries. That isn’t to say there are plenty out there who have chosen this particular pattern of love without the fancy paperwork and just like their historical predecessors it continues to appear in numerous forms. The most recognizable variation might be a woman who marries and lives with two men as the hinge of a V. Or perhaps the same combination could be considered a triad if both the men are also romantically involved with each other as well as the woman. Or perhaps a woman who lives alone can take on successive overlapping (but informed and consenting) male lovers as a form of ethical non-monogamy. The results are much the same.
In the end I think this form of relationship may be far more common than once suspected, especially in modern society where it usually exists only behind closed doors. Sadly, our social histories as a people have often been written by monogamous men, blind to other possibilities and not looking for them either. Maybe it’s time to change that.
