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Women’s property rights are inextricably linked to a fundamental social institution: marriage. In long-reigning patriarchal societies, like China and India, the economic and cultural aspects of marriage have long favoured men over women. However, there is one surprising difference. While dowry norms dictate that a bride’s family must transfer money/property to the groom’s family in India, bride prices require grooms to pay for brides in China.
Marital payments have been extensively examined by social scientists due to their implications on women’s welfare and distribution of wealth.
Bride prices allow the bride’s family to be compensated for their loss of a productive agricultural input.
Variance in earning potential creates heterogeneity among men, while women remain relatively homogenous. Thus, brides compete to secure grooms of greater ‘quality’ or economic value by offering dowry.
The cases of India and China appear to be largely consistent with these theories. Despite differences today, it is important to note that, in the past, bride price and dowry have co-existed in both societies.
In the last century, a regional divide characterised the custom of marriage transactions within India: dowry was common in the North, while bride prices prevailed in the South. This could be explained by considerations of social class in marriage (1).
Thus, bride-givers paid dowry to bride-takers as compensation for the elevated social status.
Bride-prices were paid to compensate the bride’s family for the loss of labour. Over time, men were given greater economic opportunities than women in the South. Thus, increasing income inequality between men and women resulted in a shift toward dowry. This transition has also been attributed to a ‘marriage squeeze’, or an imbalance in the ratio of marriageable men to women (3).
Improvements in child and maternal health in the 1900s led to declines in mortality and an expansion of younger cohorts (3). As women typically married at a younger age, these changes affected women first. Health improvements also meant wives lived longer and the market for re-marriage shrunk. Due to these demographic changes, younger, marriageable women outnumbered eligible, older men, and dowry was used by brides to compete for grooms.
Transitions between bride prices and dowry have also occurred in China. The prevalence of bride prices in the past was linked to the relatively high participation of women in agriculture (1). Polygyny was also permitted in historical China, which implies a high demand for women in the marriage market and could explain why bride prices existed.
Due to a highly commercialised society in the Song dynasty, a more complex social order was developed and the dowry amount was often higher than the bride price.
The reasons behind this trend is complex. A relative scarcity of brides is an important factor determining the dominant role of the bride price norm in contemporary China. In 2005, men under the age of 20 exceeded women by more than 32 million (4). The rapid economic development in China has also increased the expectation of the amount of the ‘bride price’.
Marital payments are closely linked to women’s property rights. In China, the bride price culture requires the groom to present property as a prerequisite for marriage. Thus, Chinese parents would typically purchase family homes only for sons but not for daughters. This has important implications in contemporary China.
Yale sociologist Emma Zang, one of the authors of this article, examined the impact of this 2011 ruling (5). She finds that the reform initially led to the diminished well-being of women. It reduced their bargaining power, forcing many to stay in unhappy marriages, and causing women to spend more time on housework. These adverse effects were weakened over time, as couples resorted to adaptive behaviours in line with the Chinese tradition of sharing marital property such as transferring ownership to their children. However, women’s housework hours remained higher than before.
Despite the Dowry Prohibition Act (1961), dowries are prevalent and increasing in size in contemporary India (1,3).
It is unclear whether dowry or bride prices are ‘better’ for women’s welfare. The cases of India and China suggest that both have pernicious effects on women’s property rights. Importantly, the experience of these nations suggests that legal action cannot combat the evils of bride prices/dowries alone.
Policies regulating marital payments must be evaluated and re-designed keeping the social context in mind.
[Emma Zang is Asst Professor, Department of Sociology, Yale University, USA. She received her PhD in Public Policy and MA in Economics – both from Duke University. Her work has appeared in major social science and public health journals, and her research has been reported by major media outlets in the United States and in China, such as CNN, the Boston Globe, The Economist, and ThePaper.cn.
Drishti Baid is a social scientist in training with a keen interest in long-term health and socioeconomic inequality. She currently works as a Research Assistant at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, where she supports ongoing research on chronic disease prevention and patients’ end-of-life experience.
Harleen Kaur is a 2nd year undergraduate student at Yale College, USA. She is studying Economics and Mathematics, and wishes to pursue graduate study in Economics. She is currently working as an intern for the Observer Research Foundation in India, where she is conducting gender-related research.]
(This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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Published: 18 Nov 2020,01:45 PM IST