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By Root 707 0

the parents retain the right of bestowal in that life after the child matures. In societies that confer power upon women as well as men, the right of bestowal passes automatically to a woman as she becomes an adult, whereupon she, like her brothers, is free to bestow her own life where she chooses.* She may even carry a six-foot bamboo fighting stick if she wants. If, on the other hand, a woman does not receive the right of bestowal in herself, then she can never become an actor in her own right, and never an autonomous individual. This last is what is onerous to us in the idea that a woman may be given in marriage— not, I think, that people are sometimes treated as gifts, not even that there is such a thing as “the right of bestowal in persons,” but that that right passes to the son when he comes of age, but not to the daughter. For where men alone may give and receive, and where women alone are the gifts, men will be active and women passive, men self-possessed and women dependent, men worldly and women domestic, and so on, through all the clichés of gender in a patriarchy.

II • Big Men and Little Women

In a recent edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, which I shall be treating as a sort of textbook of domestic ethnography, we find that in a modern, capitalist nation the father still gives away the bride. Before he does so, if he knows his etiquette, he will have played out that famous man-to-man scene in which the groom asks him for, and he agrees to deliver, his daughter’s “hand.” No parallel customs exist for the bride: no one gives the groom to her; she receives no hand from her future mother-in-law.

In the society that Miss Post describes, not only is the bride given in marriage, but she is also the recipient of the marriage gifts. Miss Post is quite clear: “You seldom send a present to the bridegroom. Even if you are an old friend of his and have never met the bride, your present is sent to her … Rather often friends of the bridegroom do pick out things suitable for him, such as a decanter or a rather masculine-looking desk set, which are sent to her but are obviously intended for his use.” Finally, the bride not only receives the gifts but it is she, not her husband, who writes the thank-you notes.

The curious asymmetry of this institution suggests that while a man and a woman may be marrying each other, the woman alone is marrying a network of kin. If she receives the gifts and expresses the gratitude, then she is the one who is woven into the social fabric established by the commerce of marriage gifts. In a final note of advice, Miss Post tells her readers that once the wedding is over, the bride “must try to understand and accept the attitude of her future family (whatever it may be), and she must not stand inflexibly upon what she unwittingly considers to be her own family’s rights. The objective that she should keep in mind is the happiness of the relationship between her future in-laws and herself.” Again, no such suggestion appears for the groom.

A woman given in marriage in a modern, capitalist nation is not only a gift, then, she is actually expected to think and act in the spirit of the gift, to become the incarnation and voice of the hau. By attending to relationship and muting her individualism, she is supposed to become the active link that will unify the two families. The groom is asked to do none of this labor. In this particular ceremony, at least, to deal with gifts—to receive them, to express the gratitude, to intuit and act upon their spirit—is a mark of the female gender.

By “gender” I mean to indicate the cultural distinctions between male and female—not the physical signs of sex but that whole complex of activities, postures, speech patterns, attitudes, affects, acquisitions, and styles by virtue of which a woman becomes feminine (a man “effeminate”) and a man masculine (a woman “mannish”). Any system of gender will be connected to actual sexuality, of course, but that is only one of its possible connections. It may also support and affirm the local creation myth, perpetuate the exploitation