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The logic behind dowries was that women were a burden since they would be relying on the husband for food, shelter and protection.

They were leaving their original family, thus reducing the number of people who'd need to be fed and sheltered, while the husband's family was taking on that duty, thus they claimed to deserve compensation.

Such cultures suffered from similar other ills like mistreating or kicking out widows or, in India, the practice of having the wife burn alive on the husband's funeral pyre.

Their persistence nowadays (particularly in wealthier societal strata) is largely cultural inertia and greed, as of course nowadays in all wealth levels it is very normal for women to earn their own living too.

In my family, dowry for the current generation has been passed off as "gifts intended for the couple's married life", which although still doesn't sit quite right with me, is at least not as exploitative and not explicitly asked for. It mostly boils down to expensive gifts of clothes, kitchenware, makeup etc which can be useful when establishing a family.

> They were leaving their original family, thus reducing the number of people who'd need to be fed and sheltered, while the husband's family was taking on that duty, thus they claimed to deserve compensation

Wow, that's an insane perspective. So even your own daughters were thought of as a burden?

In many societies, women's labour was significantly undervalued compared to men's, so the more women, relative to men there are in your household, the more stress it puts on your resources.

Also, if women in a society inherit nothing (Because it all goes to sons), whomever they marry is going to expect a dowry, instead. Which puts further financial stress on the family, to save up for said dowry. Which is made more difficult by point #1.

Also, women often married at a younger age than men, which again, would make the dowry issue financially ruinous for a family. The longer you scrimp and save, the harder it will be for your daughter to get a good match...

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Here's another fun bit (from ancient Greece, but plenty of other parts of the world shared the same fucked-up dynamic.)

Women weren't allowed to own property. What happens when a woman is the only child, and her dad dies?

She'd be forced to marry one of her close male relatives - usually an uncle, to 'keep the inheritance in the family'. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epikleros

Inheritance rights play into this a lot. A flip side of Greece I think is Spain where a married women can inherit property in her own name. And dispose of it in her will. In those societies perhaps a dowry is really more the daughters share of the families wealth.

This is going to be a very western perspective, but I thought that historically women's labour has been mostly valued as a homemaker. Is that not the case in a lot of non-western societies?

I'm also wondering if beauty plays a role in dowries. If a woman is beautiful does that mean she might have a lower dowry, or they don't care about beauty at all?

> This is going to be a very western perspective, but I thought that historically women's labour has been mostly valued as a homemaker.

Homemaker labour didn't pay well. It still doesn't, and it didn't back then.

It's vital to the operation of a household, but it doesn't put food on the table, or earn money, which allow you to buy any of the things the household needs, but can't make for itself.

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Note: Spinning was a large component of household work - which did allow women to earn money, by selling any surplus textiles they produced. There's a reason that 'spinster' became a synonym for 'old, unmarried woman'.

Unfortunately, keeping your family clothed was a full-time spinning job to begin with - thousands of hours of work a year. And if you were to sell the products you produced outside the household, you wouldn't earn much with them - as a 'profession', spinning did not pay well at all.

The issue is that, as is also sometimes a common mistake in the West, homemaking was seen as a part of being a woman and not as valuable labor. Yes, it's hypocritical, but most of these practices are.

Yes, beauty and other circumstances would offset dowries, since of course if the husband was eager to marry her, he'd try to incentivize it.

>If a woman is beautiful does that mean she might have a lower dowry

Yes in practice this is what happens. There was a nasty rumor going around in my family that one of my distant uncles (a generally dapper guy) married the "ugly" daughter of a rich businessman because the dowry offered was high enough to set him up for life.

Yep, it was very messed up. It also went both ways, my maternal grandmother suffered decades of abuse from her son because she didn't consider her married daughters to be 'her' family. It took a plan of forcibly sneaking her out, moving her away and threatening her son with legal action to get her away.

Even after that she struggled to accept being a 'burden' on her daughters.

This is the first time I've heard of a cultural practice that I cannot fathom. Not "wow that was crazy for the time", but "I don't understand how this ever made sense".

I guess it's borne out of extreme resource scarcity? The idea that someone is a permanent burden regardless of what they do is hard for me to wrap my head around.

> The idea that someone is a permanent burden regardless of what they do is hard for me to wrap my head around

There are millions of such people, but it's not based on sex.

People from the bottom parts of intelligence distribution are a "burden", because no amount of labor they produce will generate more value for society than they consume (in food, housing, healthcare).

In developed countries we are able to collectively shoulder such a burden, because we do not live an a resource-scarce environment like you mentioned (when it comes to basic necessities)

> The idea that someone is a permanent burden regardless of what they do is hard for me to wrap my head around.

Don't get fixated on the "permanent" part of this. Some people can generate positive and negative value through different periods of their lives. Kids < 16 years of age are typically consumers of value. So are seniors of 80+ years.

This is not a bad thing, just a natural cycle of life.

Yes, that's true but like you say most societies try to socialize some of that burden. There seem to be no such socialization in this case.

> Some people can generate positive and negative value through different periods of their lives. Kids < 16 years of age are typically consumers of value. So are seniors of 80+ years

I understand that, which is why I specified "permanent". In this case, women are permanent burdens regardless of how old they are. That's the fucked up bit.

Actually, archeological evidence shows that even in extremely harsh environments, many early humans took care of people who were unable to work.

From the article linked below:

"...an idea of what it must have taken to keep Burial 9 alive. Paralyzed from the waist down and with severely limited arm and neck movement, he depended on others to provide food and water, clean him and move him to prevent pressure sores. 'From the bones alone, we can say this person lived with a disease that required help from others to survive,'...

The people who took care of Burial 9, for example, scratched out a precarious existence using stone tools to fish and raise pigs in prehistoric Vietnam. Signs of malnutrition in the bones of people buried nearby suggested famine was a constant threat. 'In a small society which was very stressed, that means somebody who couldn't contribute or go out hunting or undertake a lot of tasks was supported, accommodated, and adjusted to,'"

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/17/8788963...

I can't really fathom it either, it feels somewhat like a self-reinforcing cycle which may have started from the earlier hunter-gatherer days. I'm just satisfied that in our recent generations we've quickly started to abandon a lot of these malignant ideas.

Lol, is this some sort of act? Having to take care of aging parents and thus them being a burden on their children is a fairly common trope in western film and literature. Common worldwide.

I actually typed out an addendum about children and elderly being burdens but adults not being, but deleted it because I thought it was extraneous since I was specifying "permanent burden regardless of what they do".

Children/elderly are not permanent burdens because they grow up/die and they can sometimes do useful things.

The difference here is that women are classified as burdens regardless of what they do. Cook, clean, take care of the house, your family, your husband, etc. Doesn't matter, you're still a burden. That's fucked up.

> Wow, that's an insane perspective. So even your own daughters were thought of as a burden?

Well, sons too, but they were a net positive because they worked and brought money home.

If women were allowed to work for (non-trivial) money in traditional indian culture they'd be a net positive too.

> the practice of having the wife burn alive on the husband's funeral pyre

known as "sati"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice)

I'm in India, looking to get married to someone I have known and loved for a while now. Our families are not too happy about it. Both of us are about 30. We are working professionals with decent finances and fair amount of independence, so despite them not being too happy about it, they're talking among themselves and setting up things.

This context was important given the topic, because a topic that frequently comes up in these family discussions is that

1. the girl's parents insist that if I decide to marry their daughter, they wouldn't "give us anything". This has been said a few times to my face, to my partner, and to my parents too. 2. they've asked a few times subtly if there are any "demands" from my side of the family (most likely to bring it up as another obstacle towards peaceful proceedings). 3. they've offered that they would give some small stuff like a bed, a cupboard, etc. to us as a "blessing for our married life" despite both of us politely declining for it.

It's honestly humiliating and disgusting. Both of us consider ourselves to be educated ("woke", if you will) and quite self sufficient. Not once have I or any member of my family expressed any wishes or expectations of receiving anything from the girl's side.

I've been quite against such practices for years now, from even before I met my partner. I'm even ready to the extent of disavowing my parents if they indulge in any such activity.

But what both of us have ended up realizing is that none of it matters. Society around us is accustomed to doing things in a certain way and it's not just hard, but very very hard for people to let go of such things.

And mind you - it's not just generational. I know of people from my age group, school mates, colleagues, college mates, what have you, who are totally okay with such things and consider it a "norm". Some even go to the extent of supporting their parents and upfront ask the girls for it. And it's not just males, it's all over the place. Females are mostly okay with this, if not encouraging of it. They demand stuff from their parents to "help them start a new life". Maybe don't start a new life if you and your would be partner cannot afford to do so, or come to a solid understanding with your partner on where they stand on such issue?

> In my family, dowry for the current generation has been passed off as "gifts intended for the couple's married life",

I married twice[1] and neither times was the issue of dowry even considered[2]. Nor for anyone I know (close family, extended family, just about every indian person in South Africa).

[1] Serially, not in parallel :-)

[2] Nor "expensive gifts" as a euphemism for dowry.

That's nice to hear.

I had been pretty naive to the euphemism since it seemed to be entirely the wife's family's call (and to an extent the extended family avoided those conversations guessing that we would be opposed to it, having grown up in the West). I only managed to piece it together when it came to marriages in my immediate family. They just claimed that it was stuff that their daughter would end up needing to buy anyway and for the most part that is how it turned out, but I have also heard plenty of gossiping about how someone's daughter-in-law didn't bring X or Y thing.

I still have a few years before I think I'll be ready to deal with relationships, but of course will definitely be making it clear that I have no expectations of 'gifts'.

What I've heard is that it was to ensure that a household was set up for success. Similar to the idea of a hope chest - a girl would assemble all the necessary linen components a house would need by sewing them herself. Once she had accumulated the requisite skills and equipment to run a household, she'd be eligible for marriage.

Because obviously, the only thing a household needs for success… is linens

> Because obviously, the only thing a household needs for success… is linens

I think you take for granted just how difficult and time-consuming it is to produce cloth and material for clothing.

If a woman got married and had one child, there'd be little to no time to make clothing for the second child that followed almost immediately after[1].

[1] Contraceptive, while being an ancient invention, was never widely used until recently (past 50 years, maybe?)

Cloth goods were expensive up until quite recently. People generally didn't have nearly as many outfits as we do now. Being able to repair and manufacture your own clothing and linens was a huge deal.

In a time, not so long ago, before we could have all the clothes for cheap in super markets, yes, it definitely helped.

And a place to store them!

My wife came with a dowry. When I asked her about it, the rationale she gave was that it's a bit like child support and a bit like insurance.

It's like child support in that her parents wanted to be sure that her needs were met, and the money can be used directly for that.

It's like insurance in that if her health declines or for any other reason I start to view her as a burden, I'm agreeing to keep caring for her anyway rather than divorcing her. They're paying for that.

(I have no idea how much the dowry was -- I just handed her the envelope and she deposited it in her own accounts. I'm an American and accepting a dowry of course seemed weird and foreign, but she insisted that declining it would be improper.)

Well the article paints a pretty clear hypothesis, if you read it -- dowries are rooted in the idea that in a particular kind of society (not the ones where a household is losing out on a woman's labor and hence needs a bride price), the woman who is married off into her husband's household is seen as a burden, an outsider, one more mouth to feed.

Therefore a dowry is both compensation, and a demonstration of value (i.e. take my daughter because she has a high dowry, and is thus more desirable to marry than other girls with less dowry).

Yes, but then it isn't "rooted in the idea that women are property", it's more rooted in the idea that women are a burden, which is maybe worse.

From the article:

> "Dowry usually emerges in highly stratified societies, like caste-structured India and colonial Latin America, whereas the reverse convention, bride price, is more likely to appear in communities with less socioeconomic differentiation, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Some critics object to the way “paying” for a bride seems to commodify women, but there is little evidence that bride price harms women’s well-being. Dowry, in contrast, encourages two forms of violence."

Occam's razor says that while bride price does, in theory, objectify women, it also places an objective metric ($$$) on her value – you must pay $$$ in order to receive this precious artifact. Whereas it seems that dowry places the opposite objective metric (-$$$) on her value, i.e., please, take this burden off our hands and we will pay you $$$.

EDIT: An afterthought, it seems what might also be at play is that doing work on something (or, paying a lot of hard-earned money for something) makes us value it more. This is borne out in the Ben Franklin effect, where doing someone a favor makes you like that someone more, not the other way around. [1]

1 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2011/11/16/do-me-a-favor-so...

It was like that in India too. Some social critics and authors back in late 19th and early 20th century changed that practice. Dowry started as a pocket-money for the girl, when she leaves her parent's house to go with her husband, because woman is "their" property now. Parents worried about her daughter's well-being there, would do that in consolation that it might help her, should things go south. That generousness was "expected" as time rolled on.

By labor you mean indentured servitude?

From the article it looks like the dowry is a form of extortion - keep us well paid or something bad will happen to your daughter.

> Not sure how dowries are rooted in the idea that women are property

> in a sense were literally selling their daughters

> pay the bride's family enough money to replace the "lost labor" of having one of their workers moving away

You answered your own question.

That's a "bride price"; the opposite of a dowry.