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How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

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Re: How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

#71

Post by dotnet00 »

spoonjim wrote: post #22
sonofhans wrote: post #2

Dowries are a plague on humanity. They’re rooted in the idea that women are property. I lived in India in the 1970s as a child. At that time the shorthand was “cooking accident” when new brides were killed. As in, “The bride’s father couldn’t pay the dowry. Too bad she had that unfortunate cooking accident.” The local man who did our laundry had four daughters, and it was considered a curse. He killed himself because…

Does the dowry get paid after the marriage? Why wouldnt' it be paid at the time of the marriage? Or do they keep asking for money?

It can be a mix of all sorts of cases. Sometimes the expectation is for it to be paid by marriage, but, especially for daughters of wealthier families it has also been a common thing to marry and then use the marriage as leverage because divorces are also often blamed on the woman.

Re: How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

#72

Post by hef19898 »

abc_lisper wrote: post #59
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of my friends had trouble finding brides Could you elaborate on this? Maybe set some context in terms of "what culture" because this means something very different in America/Europe than it does in India I think based on the wording.

Yeah. Majority of marriages even today are arranged by the family and it becomes impersonal and somewhat crassly practical. Choices are sorted by their family's net worth, social standing, color(darker complexion is looked down), age and education. Choices usually belong to the same caste. Color has nothing to do with race, like in US. People come in all sorts of colors, even in the same family, like Mendelian flower…

One thing that steuck me as odd, and out right bizarre, was reading some English language newspaper in Delhi like a decade ago. My assumption, as a liberal European, was a) an English language paper most likely was read by more educated people and b) youth problems, I come to that, are more or less the same. The odd thing so was a whole bunch of readers letters, in a kind of advice collum of sorts, around the question of what to do if your parents haven't found a marriage partner for you yet! I, maybe naively, expected the problem to be the opposite. My impression was, that the younger generation seemed to more conservative regarding arranged marriages then their parents. I might be mistaken so. Back then I made a comment about how us Europeans have a probpem with arranged marriages in the Muslim world, but upheld, at the time, India as this huge, free democracy. And I made a mental note about cultural differences.

I do wonder so, what this does with the people involved. Marriage is hard enough sometimes, and yes feelings don't make it easier, but spending your whole life with a person you don't love or care about sounds horrible. As does being kind of forced to spend your live alone, if that is not your choosing.

Re: How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

#73

Post by hef19898 »

LanceH wrote: post #41
moffkalast wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goes to show that supply and demand theory doesn't really work in practice.

Or that it does. There is a limited supply of highly successful men.

Success measured how? There seems to be a limited supply of decent men so it seems.

Re: How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

#74

Post by ZephyrBlu »

dotnet00 wrote: post #65
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They were leaving their original family, thus reducing the number of people who'd need to be fed and sheltered, while the husband's family was taking on that duty, thus they claimed to deserve compensation Wow, that's an insane perspective. So even your own daughters were thought of as a burden?

Yep, it was very messed up. It also went both ways, my maternal grandmother suffered decades of abuse from her son because she didn't consider her married daughters to be 'her' family. It took a plan of forcibly sneaking her out, moving her away and threatening her son with legal action to get her away. Even after that she struggled to accept being a 'burden' on her daughters.

This is the first time I've heard of a cultural practice that I cannot fathom. Not "wow that was crazy for the time", but "I don't understand how this ever made sense".

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.

Re: How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

#75

Post by dotnet00 »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #69
vkou wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many societies, women's labour was significantly undervalued compared to men's, so the more women, relative to men there are in your household, the more stress it puts on your resources. 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 d…

This is going to be a very western perspective, but I thought that historically women's labour has been mostly valued as a homemaker. Is that not the case in a lot of non-western societies? 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?

The issue is that, as is also sometimes a common mistake in the West, homemaking was seen as a part of being a woman and not as valuable labor. Yes, it's hypocritical, but most of these practices are.

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.

Re: How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

#76

Post by vkou »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #69
vkou wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many societies, women's labour was significantly undervalued compared to men's, so the more women, relative to men there are in your household, the more stress it puts on your resources. 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 d…

This is going to be a very western perspective, but I thought that historically women's labour has been mostly valued as a homemaker. Is that not the case in a lot of non-western societies? 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?

> This is going to be a very western perspective, but I thought that historically women's labour has been mostly valued as a homemaker.

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.

----

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.

Re: How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

#77

Post by roncesvalles »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #69
vkou wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many societies, women's labour was significantly undervalued compared to men's, so the more women, relative to men there are in your household, the more stress it puts on your resources. 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 d…

This is going to be a very western perspective, but I thought that historically women's labour has been mostly valued as a homemaker. Is that not the case in a lot of non-western societies? 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?

>If a woman is beautiful does that mean she might have a lower dowry

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.

Re: How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

#79

Post by dotnet00 »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #74
dotnet00 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it was very messed up. It also went both ways, my maternal grandmother suffered decades of abuse from her son because she didn't consider her married daughters to be 'her' family. It took a plan of forcibly sneaking her out, moving her away and threatening her son with legal action to get her away. Even after that she struggled to accept being a 'burden' on her daughters.

This is the first time I've heard of a cultural practice that I cannot fathom. Not "wow that was crazy for the time", but "I don't understand how this ever made sense". 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.

I can't really fathom it either, it feels somewhat like a self-reinforcing cycle which may have started from the earlier hunter-gatherer days. I'm just satisfied that in our recent generations we've quickly started to abandon a lot of these malignant ideas.

Re: How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

#80

Post by elil17 »

zabzonk wrote: post #10

the whole dowry thing is dreadful, but it is not going away onless better articles (and documentaries) are done on it than this one - write clearer, write shorter, and despite the horrible subject, use some wit.

>Use some wit

The author's aunt was brutally murdered.

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