Wow, that's an insane perspective. So even your own daughters were thought of as a burden?
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]
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?
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.
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.
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.
Even after that she struggled to accept being a 'burden' on her daughters.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.