The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [38]
CHAPTER FOUR
The Price of Women
I SOMETIMES WONDER why polygamy has such a bad reputation. We frown upon it as a barbarous practice of the past, when rich men would amass harems to produce herds of children and women could be bought and sold like livestock. Ninety percent of Americans think polygamy is morally wrong, according to a Gallup poll, more than those opposing cloning humans, abortion, or the death penalty. In most of the world monogamous marriage is the norm.
But strict monogamy has been historically rare. In fact, polygamy—when men have more than one wife at the same time, or a wife and several concubines—has been popular across human history. It thrived in the great empires of the past, among kings and emperors who could afford many mates. It was common practice among the powerful in Zoroastrian Iran, the Egypt of the pharaohs, and in the Aztec and Inca empires. King Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Yet according to the Bible this troubled God only because many weren’t Hebrew but Moabite, Ammonite, Hittite, and so on, and had their own deities. Polygamy was banned from Ashkenazi Judaism only in the synod convoked by Gershom ben Judah around the year 1000 of our era.
From the 1960s to the 1980s the anthropologist George Murdock compiled a so-called Ethnographic Atlas, recording customs and practices in nearly 1,200 societies, both ancient and contemporary. Polygamy was prevalent in 850. Similarly anthropologists surveying 172 western North American Indian societies in the 1960s and 1970s reported that polygamy was only absent or very rare in 28.
Polygamy was legal in Japan until 1880 and in India until 1955, when it was banned for Hindus but not for Muslims. In the United States, the Mormon Church only disavowed the practice around the turn of the twentieth century under intense pressure from the United States Congress, which disincorporated the Church and seized its assets in 1887. Even in the 1980s, scholars estimated that about 10 percent of the world’s population lived in polygamous societies. Today, taking more than one wife is still common in parts of the Middle East, in much of Africa—from the Sahel in the north to a band crossing from Senegal in the west to Tanzania in the east—and among Mormon breakaway sects in the American West.
Polygamy is in our genes. Geneticists studying genetic variation in populations in China, France, Africa, and the South Pacific found that females passed down more genetic variety than males to their offspring, suggesting that more females than males managed to breed successfully. That fits a typical marker of polygamy: rich men mate a lot with lots of different women; poor men breed very little or not at all.
In his essay on polygamy and divorce, the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume blasted polygamy as unnatural: “This sovereignty of the male is a real usurpation, and destroys that nearness of rank, not to say equality, which nature has established between the sexes.” But in 1979, more than two hundred years later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that Iran’s “law of the four wives is a very progressive law, and was written for the good of women since there are more women than men.” Polygamy, he concluded, “is better than monogamy.”
IT MIGHT SEEM odd to bring the invisible hand of the market to bear on the most intimate transactions between men and women. But there is an economic rationale for these mating arrangements. It has to do with the relatively low cost of sperm.
Prices are on prominent display in the most intimate transaction that we know. In the market for mates, prices are attached to different things—husbands and wives rather than diamonds or sound systems. But they perform essentially the same task