The Price of Everything (14 page)

Bride prices, of course, are rarely paid to the brides; payment is usually made to their parents, who often turn around and use them to purchase brides for their sons. Yet even in the most patriarchal cultures, parents who expect to get cash for their daughters are likely to appreciate them more. Theodore Bergstrom, an economist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, developed an economic model of polygamy that concluded that when families use the money they get from marrying off their daughters to buy brides for their sons, a family with at least one son would gain more grandchildren if its additional children were daughters. This makes women valuable.

In many monogamous societies, daughters often represent nothing but a cost. Bride prices are rare among them. Instead, they feature dowries, payments from the family of the bride to the groom that are virtually unheard of in polygamous cultures. That’s probably why many traditional monogamous societies have been prone to female infanticide and feticide.

Polygamy faded over the past two thousand years, first in Europe and then across much of the world, pushed by European colonial expansion. But it doesn’t seem to have been due to the opposition of women. The more likely reason is that men turned against it. One theory posits that economic development fostered monogamy because of the way it changed the reproductive goals of rich men. In less developed societies where wealth was mostly inherited, it made no sense to invest in educating one’s children. The purpose of mating was to have as many children as possible to improve the odds that a man’s genes would survive into the next generation. This suggested maximizing the number of mates regardless of their quality.

As economies developed and work became the main path to wealth, investing in children’s human capital started to make sense. In this new richer world more children survived into adulthood, reducing men’s need for a harem of wives to sire as many as possible. Instead, it paid off to have a smart wife who could educate them. This change encouraged women’s education. In poor, primitive societies it was pointless, let alone potentially destabilizing, to educate women. But once men’s purpose shifted from having many children to having a few better-educated kids, educating mothers to rear them became a useful investment. These shifting priorities changed the economics of the mating market too, pushing up the price of higher-quality women and thus making polygamy less affordable.

Perhaps the most compelling hypothesis, however, is that polygamy succumbed to the need for social cohesion in larger, more developed societies, which had a competitive advantage over less organized neighbors. A 1999 study comparing 156 states found that monogamous societies were more populous, less corrupt, less likely to use the death penalty, and richer than polygamous ones.

Polygamy entrenches disparities, allowing the rich to hoard all the women and bumping the poor out of the gene pool. This doesn’t make for very harmonious social relations. Throughout much of the 2000s, hundreds of teenage boys were ejected from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a breakaway Mormon settlement straddling the border between Utah and Arizona, to allow its religious leaders to hoard dozens of brides. The argument suggests that for big democratic states to survive, polygamy had to go.

Polygamy was common among the elites in the Homeric world. But classical Greece and Rome, from the tenth century before the Christian era, were monogamous in an important way: citizens were allowed only one wife and were not allowed to cohabit with concubines, but they were allowed to have as much sex as they wanted with their slaves, mostly taken in war against other cultures. Researchers have suggested this arrangement allowed even poor, weak men to have a wife and reproduce, yet also allowed the powerful to plant their seed in many gardens.

From Greece and Rome through the medieval church, monogamy spread across the Judeo-Christian world. In the fifth century of the Christian era, Saint Augustine called monogamy a “Roman custom.” One hundred twenty-five years later, the Emperor Justinian said “ancient law” forbade husbands from having both wives and concubines. Christianization spread monogamy across the ancient world. Except for a few outbursts of polygamy—among the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century—monogamy became the established mating institution of the West.

The economist Gary Becker won the Nobel Prize in economics for a body of work started in the 1960s about human behaviors and interactions beyond simple market transactions. Paramount among them was his analysis of the family. Becker described it as a little factory in which husband and wife are specialized producers of complementary household goods: women equipped for rearing children trade home production with men, who will specialize in bringing home the bacon from the labor market. Together they profitably provide communal goods and services—among which the most important are kids. The power of Becker’s economic formalism explains more than just the nuclear family. It sheds light on an array of institutions governing the entanglement of men and women, tracing them to transactions in markets for mates and family goods.

The economic nature of the marriage bargain explains why most societies have codified special protections to ensure wives’ access to resources. In a Darwinian world in which men’s optimal strategy is to plant seed in as many women as possible, this ensures that women have the needed resources to successfully carry their offspring. More than two thousand years before the Christian era, the Sumerian code of Ur-Nammu set a price for divorce. A man had to pay his ex one mina of silver, about enough to purchase three slaves, or only half if she was the widow of a previous marriage. The Babylonian code of Hammurabi demanded that a man who left the mother of his children restore her dowry and provide her sufficient income to ensure their sustenance.

But if laws were deployed to guarantee women’s access to men’s resources, so they codified strict standards to ensure that men would not rear someone else’s child. Harsh penalties for female adultery have historically protected men from women’s optimal reproduction strategy: to choose an okay man to marry and provide resources, and have occasional affairs with other mates with superior genes.

Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski documented that in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, husbands had the right to kill their wives if they committed adultery, while wives were entitled only to leave their adulterous husbands. Sumerian law established that while a willingly adulterous wife should be killed, a philandering male merited death only if he deflowered the virgin wife of another man. If a wife was accused of adultery, she had to prove her innocence by jumping in the Euphrates. If she drowned, she was guilty. If she survived, her accuser had to pay her husband twenty shekels of silver, or about seven ounces.

Vestiges of these institutions remain with us today. Until the 1970s, family law in the United States obligated men to support their wives up to their own standard of living. Today, alimony payments to the spouse with lower earnings are still a standard feature of divorce. But the terms of the marital transaction have changed, and the main driver of the transformation has been the transition of women into paid work.

In
The Theory of Economic Growth,
published in 1955, the development economist W. Arthur Lewis of the Caribbean island of St. Lucia wrote, “It is open to men to debate whether economic progress is good for men or not, but for women to debate the desirability of economic growth is to debate whether women should have a chance to cease to be beasts of burden and to join the human race.” The raw Darwinian marketplace values women as wombs, selling reproductive services and household service in exchange for men’s sperm and economic resources. But development changed the terms of the transaction. It gave women another function, as producers in the market. It thus increased their value, both in the household and in society at large.

 

 

THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH
century, economic growth offered women in industrializing societies new opportunities to produce outside the home, which transformed their contribution to the household and improved their bargaining status. Work changed women’s perspectives—offering new careers and lives. Lewis argued that “woman gains freedom from drudgery, is emancipated from the seclusion of the household, and gains at last the chance to be a full human being, exercising her mind and her talents in the same way as men.”

But if development opened a new set of options for women, the addition of women to the workforce contributed to shape the path of development. Women brought to the workforce a different set of skills that eased the shift from heavy industry to service-based economies in the rich nations of the West. Of equal importance, as women increased their clout over decisions about household investments and expenditures, they helped usher in vast social and economic changes that profoundly altered Western civilization.

The economic historian Claudia Goldin argues that women’s labor supply follows a sort of U-shape as countries develop. In preindustrial societies, such as colonial America, women worked a lot, from caring for children to making soap and candles, while the men tilled the family plot. Families were little production units. The family economy wasn’t productive enough to allow anybody not to contribute. But as economies grew, rising family incomes took pressure off women to contribute to household production, leading them to retreat from the workforce and focus more on child care. Facing a strong cultural bias against taking the dirty “guy jobs” that are typical of early stages of development, women reemerged into the labor force only after countries became rich enough to provide secondary education for women and white-collar clerical jobs that they could do without incurring social stigma.

In West Bengal, India, the first leg of this dynamic occurred during the green revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when the introduction of high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and other crops ushered in a burst of farm productivity that raised household incomes and changed the type of work needed in the fields. Herbicides reduced the demand for weeding, traditionally a female occupation. The increased use of tractors and other farm machinery provided exclusively guy jobs. As a result, households became more specialized. While the men remained in the fields, women moved into the home to take care of the household. Unsurprisingly, West Bengali fertility increased.

The pattern also showed up in the United States of the late eighteenth century. Textile mills offered jobs to unmarried girls, who used their pay to supplement the family income and accumulate a dowry to make them more attractive partners in marriage. But as soon as they married, they left the workforce to care for their families.

American women remained in the home for a long time. By the end of the nineteenth century, only 5 percent of married women in the United States worked outside the home. Indeed, until the late nineteenth century, husbands had legal claims to their wives’ earnings and property. States started passing laws granting women property rights only in the final few years of the nineteenth century. Economists suggest this is because women had very few chances to get a paid job or accumulate assets. But as industrialization opened more opportunities for women in the workplace, this arrangement started getting in the way of development, inhibiting women’s incentives to work.

The pattern described by Goldin fits the curve of economic development in the world today. In extremely poor countries like Rwanda and Tanzania, nine out of ten women of ages forty-five to fifty-nine work. Women’s labor supply declines as countries progress, reaching a low point around the stage of development of Mexico and Brazil, and then bounces back as countries reach the stage of Sweden, Australia, or the United States.

 

 

SOCIAL DYNAMICS BEYOND
the workplace have evidently contributed to shape the evolving role of women around the world. Between the early 1900s and the 1970s American women gained the right to vote and to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy as part of broad egalitarian movements. Technology helped. From the washing machine to the frozen dinner and the microwave oven, new inventions made it easier for women to seek opportunities outside the home. The mass distribution of the birth-control pill made it cheaper for men to have sex, reducing their incentive to marry. But it also allowed women to take control of their own fertility, delay marriage, and start a career. Women lost a traditional source of material support but gained economic autonomy.

The linchpin of these changes, however, was work. Work increased women’s leverage and impelled them to push for gender equality in the workplace, the home, and beyond, driving broader legal and political changes. Institutional changes then encouraged more women to work, producing a positive feedback loop. For instance, women’s growing clout contributed to the spread of the no-fault, unilateral divorce in the 1970s. The change, which lowered the cost of ending a marriage, increased women’s incentive to work as a form of economic insurance in case it ended.