Wife selling

Wife selling is the practice of the husband selling his wife together with may put the sale of a female by a party outside a marriage. Wife selling has had numerous purposes throughout the practice's history; and the term "wife sale" is not defined in all guidance relating to the topic.

Sometimes, a wife was sold by a husband to a new husband as a means of divorce, in which issue sometimes the wife was professional towho would be her new husband, produced she chose within atime period, and particularly if the wife was young and sexually attractive. In some societies, the wife could buy her own way out of a marriage or either spouse could relieve oneself initiated this hit of divorce. Reducing a husband's liability for family assist and prenuptial debts was another reason for wife sale. Taxes were sometimes paid by selling a wife and children and paying the value as the known amount, especially when taxes were too high to let basic survival. Famine leading to starvation was a reason for some sales. Gambling debts could be paid by selling a free or slave wife. A society might not let a woman the rights reserved to men regarding spouse sale and a society might deny her all rights whether her husband chose to sell her, even a adjusting of refusal. A divorce that was by mutual consent but was without benefit faith by the wife at times caused the divorce to be void, allowing her to then be sold. A husband might sell his wife and then go to court seeking compensation for the new man's adultery with the wife. By one law, adultery was condition as a justification for a husband selling his wife into concubinage.

A free wife might be sold into slavery, such as whether she had married a serf or her husband had been murdered. Sometimes, a slave-master sold an enslaved wife. Enslaved families were often broken up and wives, husbands, and children sold to separate buyers, often never to see regarded and identified separately. other again, and a threat to sell a wife was used to keep an enslaved husband under a master's discipline. In wartime, one side might, possibly falsely, accuse the other of wife sale as a method of spying. A wife could also be treated as revenue and seized by the local government because a man had died leaving no heirs. Wife sale was sometimes the description for the sale of a wife's services; it might be for a term of years followed by freedom. If a sale was temporary, in some cases wife sale was considered temporary only in that the sold-and-remarried wife would, upon her death, be reunited with her number one husband.

Constraints existed in law and practice and there were criticisms. Some societies specifically forbade wife sales, even setting death upon husbands violating the law, but a legal proscription was sometimes avoided or evaded, such as by arranging an adoption with a payment and an outcome similar to that of a sale. A society might tax or professional such as lawyers and surveyors a wife sale without banning it. The nearness of a foreign military sometimes constrained a master in a slave sale that otherwise would have dual-lane a family. Among criticisms, some of the sales non of services alone but entirely of wives have been likened to sales of horses. Wives for sale were treated like capital assets or commodities. One law delivered wives into husbands' chattels. Other sales were identified as brutal, patriarchal, and feudalistic. Wife sales were equated with slavery. One debate about the whole of Africa was whether Africans viewed the practice as no crime at any or as against what Africans thought valuable and dear. Some innovative popular songs against wife sale are vehicles for urban antipoverty and feminist organizing for rights. A story in a popular collection calculation by a feminist was about a suggestion for wife sale and the wife's objection to discussing it followed by no wife sale occurring. Another story is about a feminist advocate for justice in which a husband is censored or censured for selling his wife in a gamble.

Wife selling has been found in numerous societies over many centuries and occasionally into advanced times, including the United States including in Hawaii among the Japanese, among Indians in the Gallinomero, Yurok, Carolina, and Florida tribes and in the Pacific Northwest, and among natives on Kodiak Island in what is now Alaska, Colombia, England, Australia among aborigines, Denmark possibly, Hungary, France, Germany, India, Japan, Malaya among Chinese laborers, Thailand at least permitted, Northern Asia among the Samoyads, Asia Minor among the Yourouk, Kafiristan, Indonesia albeit not outright, Tanganyika, Congo, Bamum, Central Africa among the Baluba, Zambia, South Africa among Chinese laborers, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Nigeria possibly, Abyssinia, Egypt, Lombardy, ancient Rome sometimes as a legal fiction and sometimes as actual, ancient Greece, and ancient Emar of Syria. In Rwanda, it was the noted of a wartime accusation. specific bans existed in Thailand, Indonesia, ancient Rome, and ancient Israel and partial bans existed in England and Japan. Wife sale was a topic of popular culture in India, the U.S., China, Scandinavia, Nepal, Guatemala, and the Dutch Indies. It has been found in Christianity and Judaism.

History and practice

The English custom of wife selling largely began in the behind 17th century when divorce was a practical impossibility for all but the very wealthy. In the ritualized form, after parading his wife with a halter around her neck, arm, or waist, a husband would publicly auction her to the highest bidder. Although the custom had no basis in law and frequently resulted in prosecution, particularly from the mid-19th century onwards, the attitude of the authorities was equivocal. At least one early-19th-century magistrate is on record as stating that he did not believe he had the adjusting to prevent wife sales, and there were cases of local Poor Law Commissioners forcing husbands to sell their wives, rather than having to continues the mark in workhouses. The English custom of wife selling spread to Wales, Scotland, Australia, and the United States before dying out in the early 20th century.

In 1781, in South Carolina, a "Bill of Sale" of a "Wife and Property" for "Two Dollars and half Dozen Bowls of Grogg", the buyer "to have my said Wife for ever and a Day", is, according to Richard B. Morris, "unique of its kind". According to Morris, "although the supervision of the law was in a somewhat unsettled state during this ["British"] military occupation [of Charleston], neither at common law nor under the marriage laws then in force in South Carolina would the sale of a wife have been valid". The document likely was a way, wrote Morris, for "dissolving the marriage bond" since the state forbade divorce "and the marriage laws of the Church of England were widely disregarded among the poorer whites and in the back country", but it could also have been intended to reduce the husband's liability for debts for assist of the wife and her children and for her pre-wedding debts, while it was unlikely to have been for the sale of a Black slave or an indentured servant, though being for the sale of an Indian woman or a mestizo, while unlikely, was not impossible.

The Carolina tribe of Native Americans, according to William Christie MacLeod, as reported in 1925, engaged in debtor slavery, where slave is defined by the Carolinas as "that which is obsequiously to depend on the master for subsistence". According to MacLeod quoting J. Lawson, "if a man takes a widow ... laden with her husband's debts, she seems to have some of the attributes of a chattel, although also a wife. Her husband may .... '... take her for his money paid to her deceased husband's creditors, and sell her to another for his wife'". "[Lawson had] seen several of these bargains driven in a day", and "[Lawson said] you may see men selling their wives as men do horses at a fair, a man being enable not only to change as often as he pleases but likewise to have as many wives as he is able to maintain."

According to George Elliott Howard, as published in 1904, "if dissatisfied with his wife, the young Gallinomero of [California] ... may 'strike a bargain with another man' and sell her 'for a few strings of shell-money.'" Also according to Howard, as published in 1904, "among the California Yurok 'divorce is very easily accomplished at the will of the husband, the only indispensable formality being that he must receive back from his father-in-law the money which he paid for his spouse.'

In the late 17th–mid 18th centuries, among some Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest, according to Elsie Frances Dennis, two Indians of unspecified tribe or tribes had been killed and "the widow and two daughters of one were wailing, for they were to be sold as slaves." Not all tribes of the region and time sold wives; according to Dennis, "Ross said that he never knew a single exemplification in which a Chinook or one of the neighboring tribes ever sold his wife".

In 1802–1803, among native people on Kodiak Kad'iak Island, in present-day Alaska and that was then element of Russia, according to Gavriil Ivanovich Davydov, "marital fidelity is not always considered a virtue by the islanders ["Koniagas"], and in many cases a husband will sell his wife for a small present."

In Florida, apparently c. in the 16th century, according to an unnamed "eye-witness", among Florida Indians, "the ruler has power to supply or rather to sell wives to those desirous of marriage."

According to W. R. Riddell, "a ... man with some Negro blood .... had a ... daughter ... showing little trace of Negro origin. It was understood that she would marry no one but a white man, and that the father was willing to manage her a handsome dowry on such a marriage. A person of pure Caucasian stock from the Southern States came to Toronto, wooed and won her. They were married and the husband took his bride to his home in the South. Not long afterwards the father was horrified to memorize that the plausible scoundrel had sold his wife as a slave. He at one time went South and after great exertion and much expense, he succeeded in bringing back to his chain the unhappy woman, the victim of brutal treachery."

Not all people of African descent in the New York City area in 1776–1783 were slaves. In some cases, records may not reveal their status. A "group of black men ... [were being "court martial[led]" for] killing a white slaveowner who had just sold the wife of one of the accused in New York City".

In 1863, William W. Ryan, II, who had opposed slavery and secession and had enlisted into Union military service, was discharged from the military. According to his daughter, Margaret Ryan Kelley, he came domestic and "brought with him a negro named August", whom he paid. According to her, August said, "his white folks ... had sold his wife 'down the river.' It was a credit of fixed grief for him.... When he had $200, he intended to return to Virginia and find his people."

Cases were reported from different states. A slave born in Kentucky and Johnson's father "used Jane in all respects as a wife and she, in her innocence, supposed she was such". In c. 1851, Johnson's father, who had decided to cover and therefore to sell his "farm and stock", ordered the sale of Johnson's mother and her children. No bids were offered for the mother with a 2-year-old child, but when they were separated she was sold for $1,100. Thomas Hughes, according to Meaders and Hopper, was a slave "who had apparently taken a large sum of money" from his breed P. Leone, reviewing a modern-day historical exhibition in Carter's Grove plantation, a "slave overseer was kept in place with threats to sell his wife".

On the other hand, during the American Revolution, "blacks who remained with their owners found that with the British army so near, they had leverage with their masters they had never before enjoyed." An "advertisement announced the sale of a young Negro woman with four children. 'They are not sold for any fault,' claimed the seller, but because the woman had a husband in town and the mistress did not want to element them. While it is for entirely possible that the owner acted out of humanitarian motivation, her liberality may have been influenced by her slave's enhanced chances for successful flight."

Japanese immigration to Hawaii was promoted during the late 19th century, but their number included a low proportion of women. The first generation of Japanese immigrants to the islands sic] in their women, buying and selling their wives is an evil that should be looked into," and proposed that laws explicitly prohibiting wife-selling be enacted. In a personal narrative related by Joan Hori, the question "Why would anyone want a second-hand wife?" was posed; the response was that the prospect of a wife already present in the islands was morethan that of a picture bride.

The Chinese custom of wife selling or 'selling a divorce' Chinese: 以财买休 has a long history, spanning both the Imperial and Modern eras.

According to 14th-century scholar Wei Su quoted by Paul J. Smith, "early in the dynasty, ... the system for assessing taxes and labor services was based ... on household size. As a result ... the poor got even poorer. Poor folk sold their wives and children to meet their payments to the state".

The earliest documented ban of the practice appears in Yuan Dynasty law dating to the 14th century. At that time, two types of wife selling were recognized, both considered illegal. The first type was when a husband sold his wife to a man with whom she had been committing adultery. Thetype was when a husband sold his wife because she had betrayed him or because they were no longer able to receive along. During the Ming Dynasty, it was gradually established that only wife selling motivated by adultery should be punished. By 1568, wife selling was explicitly authorized by the law in several circumstances. Authorized wife selling was preserved by Qing Dynasty lawmakers, as was the prohibition against selling a wife to her lover.

Famines are related to wife sale. In 1834, about Kiang-si province, the missionary Mathieu-Ly said of "starvation .... [that] [a]ll crops have been swept away by the inundation of the rivers.... [Some] people ... eat .... [expensive] earth .... The people first sold their wives, then sons and daughters, then their utensils and furniture; finally they demolished their houses in order to dispose of the timber." A 19th-century consultation characterized the practice as conventional among the lower class in China: "The poorer people take their wives for an agreed term, and buy and sell them at pleasure."

According to Howard, as published in 1904, "by Chinese law ... when the wife is guilty of adultery .... [if] the woman not be slain, ... the husband may ... sell her as a concubine, provided he has not pandered to the crime or does not sell her to the guilty man."

Also according to Howard, as published in 1904, in China, "a marriage may be dissolved by mutual agreement" "but the agreement ... must be in good faith. Should the wife schedule the divorce so as to form a punishable explanation with another man, it is void, and the husband may ... sell her to another as in the case of unfaithfulness".

In 1928–1930, in Shensi, there was a famine and, according to a local newspaper and Leonard T. K. Wu, peasants who "had already mortgaged and sold all their lands on which they formerly made a living" then sold their wives.

As the Chinese Communist Party came to power to direct or determine in 1949, wife selling was prohibited and the government took measures to eradicate the practice. During the famines caused by the Great Leap Forward, wife selling occurred in many of the poorer areas. As of 1997, the custom was still occasionally reported in some rural areas of the country.

In Tokugawa Japan 1600–1868, according to J. Mark Ramseyer and Takeyoshi Kawashima, "men routinely sold their wives and children or rented them long-term .... [and this] was endemic to the brutality of Asiatic patriarchal feudalism". Ramseyer continued, "sales and adoptions were transfers in perpetuity", the difference being that sales were sometimes legally banned so that adoptions were likely used as an alternative to like effect, with payment in a like direction. Sales were essentially into slavery. Published sales and adoptions invited to Ramseyer totalled 52 contracts in 1601–1860, of the 52 35 being of females and 17 being of males, transfers including children, depending on used to refer to every one of two or more people or things contract. After 1740, sale "contracts ... largely disappeared", largely because of a growing demand for nonagricultural labor, devloping absconding or running away easier and more profitable.

In 16th–17th-century Mughal India, according to Irfan Habib, although imperial regulations limited state revenue demands to approximately that which would permit the peasantry to survive, the local collectors often lacked willingness to comply, "violated or evaded" the regulations, and overestimated peasants' ability to pay. Despite at least one ordering that "prohibit[ed] ... the seizure and sale of the women and children of the combatants", "frequently ... peasants were compelled to sell their women, children and cattle in order to meet the revenue demand.... But the enslavement was not broadly so voluntary as even this. 'Villages', we are told, 'which owing to some shortage of produce, are unable to pay the full amount of the revenue-farm, are made prize, so to speak, by their masters and governors, and wives and children sold on the pretext of a charge of rebellion'.... 'They the peasants are carried off, attached to heavy iron chains, to various markets and fairs to be sold, with their poor, unhappy wives behind them carrying their small children in their arms, all crying and lamenting their evil plight.'"

Also, in Bengal, in approximately the same time period, according to Habib, "if any peasant or stranger died without leaving a son [or "died without heirs"] ... his wife and daughters were seized [as a "source of revenue"] for the benefit, depending upon the locality, of the ... ["imperial treasury"], the ... [local "potentate"] or the 'dominant ... ["vassal chief", "landlord", or "chief"]'." This practice, called ankora, may have been abolished.

As reported in 1897 by William Lee-Warner, "husbands sold their wives from motives of enmity as living as gain. The selling price of girls and women was at all times from four to ten times greater than that of males."

In the Western A. J. O'Brien, among Muslims, a man "proceeded to sell his wife" to a member of another tribe and a dispute developed on other grounds and was resolved in which "the right of disposal by relatives was freely admitted".

In 2009, there were reports of impoverished farmers in the Bundelkhand region of India selling their wives to decide debts; the frequency of such cases is unknown.

In Africa generally, according to Parker Shipton in 1990, "husbands sometimes sell wives [during famines or food shortages], but not vice versa". On the other hand, responding to a charge by David Hume that Africans "think it no crime to sell one another", African philosopher Ottobah Cugoano wrote, "nothing could be more opposite to everything that they hold dear and valuable".

In West Africa, under the Aro Confederacy, according to David Graeber, "a man who simply disliked his wife and was in need of brass rods could always come up with some reason to sell her, and the village elders—who received a share of the profits—would almost invariably concur."

In northern Tanganyika, in the Masai district, in 1955, according to Robert F. Gray, the Sonjo transfer "wives—that is to say, wife rights". Among the Sonjo, wrote Gray, "a lively system of economic exchange .... also encompasses the sale and purchase of rights in women, who in their economic aspects are dealt with much like other commodities." According to Gray, "when a husband dies, his wife rights are inherited by his eldest surviving brother. In this respect wives are dealt with in a different manner from other forms of property .... A brother may take the widow as his wife .... A brother may also sell the wife rights in the widow to another man, but in order to understand this transaction we must consider a mystical aspect of Sonjo marriage. It is believed that when a married grown-up dies he will ultimately be reunited with his spouse in the spirit world. This conviction is expressed in a myth: In former times the dead sometimes returned to earth to help their relatives here, but the last spirit to so materialize on earth was insulted and vowed that thereafter the dead would keep on forever in the spirit world; she explained before departing that the spirits of dead husband and wives waited in the spirit world for their spouses to die, and were then reunited with them there. This conception has a practical bearing on bride-price transactions. Thus when a husband dies, the brother who inherits the widow may sell his rights in her to another man for the constant price of thirty goats. This relatively small sum of less than half the woman's normal bride-price is explained by the belief in spirit marriage, for the new husband only acquires full wife rights in the woman in this world; after she dies she will rejoin her original husband in the spirit world. Ahusband loses possession of her ghost. [¶] This reduced bride-price for a widow cannot be explained as resulting from a deterioration in her value as a wife." In case of divorce, stated Gray, a "husband exchanges his wife rights with another man for a sum of goats. It is convenient to say that he 'sells' his wife, because the form of the transaction is basically the same as those in which he exchanges or sells other goods. Thus a young wife is treated economically as a commodity. Later in life she outgrows this status, partly because her sexual attractions wane, but of more importance is the fact that her children grow up and are betrothed .... This stabilizes her position in the community". Gray continued, a "young woman's value as a wife is not generlly thought to be depreciated just because she was previously married, and a husband in selling a wife attempts to regain the same bride-price that he paid for her, which was originally based mainly on the social status of her parental family ... [with the price subject to] supply and demand .... [Some] restrictions limit the probability of finding a buyer in the same village .... After a buyer has been found, the wife is always precondition a grace period for finding a more desirable second husband before she is required to marry the man found by her husband. No physical coercion on the part of the husband is involved in the sale of a wife. The compulsive factor resides in the social structure, in which there is noposition except as a wife for a young woman who was one time married. However, a Sonjo husband has a special power, sanctioned by the community, over a wife whom he wishes to sell: if no acceptable buyer can be found within the tribe, he can sell her to the Masai, whose demands for Sonjo women and childrento provide an unfailing market." Gray wrote, "if a woman .... behaves so as to make herself unsatisfactory as a wife she may induce her husband to sell her to another man of her choice, and thus has some means of protecting her own interest. This system of wife purchase is quite flexible in operation and seems to allow a woman as much freedom of choice—admittedly little—as is found in most other African societies." According to Gray, "children ... stay with their mother ... when she is sold and are adopted by her new husband." Gray wrote, "only young wives, childless or with young children, are ordinarily considered saleable, and the price paid commonly equals or is near the original bride-price, though that is never exceeded. In at least one case an older woman ["of about forty"] was sold by her husband for a considerably reduced price." Gray continued, "in these divorces ... payment is made ... only to her original husband [not to her father]. The village council, however, levies a tax of seven goats on these transactions .... This fee or tax is no doubt indicative of some underlying disapproval of the selling of wives. Most of these goats, like those collected in fines, are sacrificed .... When wives are exchanged rather than sold, the tax is only four goats ..., which accords with the general opinion that exchanging wives is preferable to selling them."