The current (June) issue of National Geographic features an article on child brides. Of particular interest to me was the first of the two locations the writer addressed: Rajasthan. As long-time followers of this blog know, I had the opportunity to live and teach for nearly five months in Rajasthan as a Fulbright Scholar (this was back in the pryorpostsindia.blogspot.com days). Cynthia Gorney does a reasonable job of describing the social setting in which child marriage takes place. Note that I said child marriage; it is not only brides who are married as children although Gorney focuses on girls in her piece.
By flipping from Rajasthan to Yemen, casual readers of Gorney's article may miss that there are two matters at issue: child marriage and plural marriages. From my limited observations and conversations, monogamous child marriages are less problematic for women than plural marriages. In other words, the graphic "elephant and rat" metaphor mentioned in the article happens when men have more than one wife, not when the husband has only one wife. There are, I imagine, exceptions both ways but the status of women in places dominated by a religion that advocates multiple wives will generally be more precarious than in places where monogamous child marriages are the cultural norm.
One might be interested to know that prohibition of child marriages and requirement of consent from both parties is not the product of Enlightenment autonomy but of the leavening effect of Christianity. For an excellent discussion of the long-standing efforts of the Church to place mutual party consent at the center of marriage take a look at John Witte's article Honor Thy Father (and Thy Mother): Child Marriage and Parental Consent in Calvin's Geneva.
By flipping from Rajasthan to Yemen, casual readers of Gorney's article may miss that there are two matters at issue: child marriage and plural marriages. From my limited observations and conversations, monogamous child marriages are less problematic for women than plural marriages. In other words, the graphic "elephant and rat" metaphor mentioned in the article happens when men have more than one wife, not when the husband has only one wife. There are, I imagine, exceptions both ways but the status of women in places dominated by a religion that advocates multiple wives will generally be more precarious than in places where monogamous child marriages are the cultural norm.
One might be interested to know that prohibition of child marriages and requirement of consent from both parties is not the product of Enlightenment autonomy but of the leavening effect of Christianity. For an excellent discussion of the long-standing efforts of the Church to place mutual party consent at the center of marriage take a look at John Witte's article Honor Thy Father (and Thy Mother): Child Marriage and Parental Consent in Calvin's Geneva.
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