I was thinking about the idea of the dowry recently. I was talking to a friend about the past and how today society views women as virtuous while in the past they were considered a burden. In most cultures women came with a dowry to ease the financial pain for the men and families they married into. The dowry is essentially a forced transfer of wealth from the brides family to the grooms family. You are paying someone else to take her away so to speak. It was a way for a woman's relations to essentially bribe the new family to take her from them. In recent history European culture they were called the hope chest or glory box. But they go back all the way to Babylonian, Greek and ancient Roman
times. And in most of the ancient world it was the brides parents and the brides husband that had the authority to control the assets found in the dowry. You can see why in that case many people can look back into history and say society must have been patriarchal if men were the ones controlling dowries. But we have to remember that the contents of the the dowry were earned by the brides parents and were there to help the husband cover the costs of starting a household. After-all it was the men that provided the majority of the economic support through agriculture up until the industrial revolution. The dowry, an asset that was created to help men offset the financial burden of marriage is considered by many of today's feminists as an asset that proves that men were trying to oppress women by not letting them control their own financial destiny. That's the equivalent of saying that parents are oppressing their children if they buy them clothing for Christmas instead of letting them buy nothing but toys. What most people feminists fail to recognize that a man had multiple daughters he had to setup multiple dowries for their future marriages. Seems to me like the fathers forced to pay out dowries were the ones that were being oppressed financially. And in Italy during the Renaissance the hope chests or dowry boxes were often worth more then the contents of the hope chests It was all about the illusion
that men had the means to pay outrageous dowries for daughters. Some of them looked so elaborately decorated that they resembled the arc of the covenant. I know in Indian culture that many dowries are quite literally full of real gold coins and jewelry. And that gold is often passed on from generation to generation. Which is one of the main reasons why India's gold consumption has gone up with it's population and economic prosperity.
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