This post is really great and I hope it leads to further inquiry on this topic.
One thing that didn’t quite make sense to me:
If you’re a rich family, a son is a “safe” outcome — he’ll inherit your wealth, and your grandchildren through him will be provided for, no matter whom he marries. A daughter, on the other hand, is a risk. You’ll have to pay a dowry when she marries, and if she marries “down” her children will be poorer than you are — and at the very top of the social pyramid, there’s nowhere to marry but down. This means that you have an incentive to avoid having daughters, and if you do have daughters, you’ll be very anxious to avoid them making a bad match, which means lots of chastity-enforcement practices. You’ll also invest more in your sons than daughters in general, because your grandchildren through your sons will have a better chance in life than your grandchildren through your daughters.
The situation reverses if you’re a poor family. Your sons are pretty much screwed; they can’t marry into money (since women don’t inherit.) Your daughters, on the other hand, have a chance to marry up. So your grandchildren through your daughters have better chances than your grandchildren through your sons, and you should invest more resources in your sons than your daughters. Moreover, you might not be able to afford restrictive practices that cripple your daughters’ ability to work for a living. To some extent, sexism is a luxury good.
At first I thought, couldn’t you hack this with sufficiently large dowries? If one of your daughters seems like a better bet to produce quality grandchildren than any of your sons, you could just give her a dowry corresponding to most of your household wealth.
Then I realized that I was assuming a modern financialized paradigm which often didn’t hold. Possibly dowries have to be in cash and you don’t have liquidity. Possibly you could in principle make the family business the dowry, but women effectively can’t run the family business so you’d be transferring it to her husband. Possibly if gendered power imbalances are big enough, you don’t want to lose leverage over your son-in-law by making him richer than you, since he might then mistreat your daughter or simply redistribute some of his new wealth to illegitimate offspring.
On the other hand, medieval and early modern elite European Jewish culture seems like an interesting exception to the rule that patrilineal societies favor men more at higher levels. There’s a pattern where the best scholars often marry wealthy men’s daughters for the dowry and inheritance.
I think this is the result of a hybridization where the wealth hierarchy was largely independent of the scholarly prestige hierarchy, which depended more on pure individual merit than most prestige-allocation mechanisms. Definitely poor young men could become respected scholars and marry up in that circumstance. Monogamy probably also made the prospects of poor young women a bit worse, at least in relative terms.
It might also have to do with the fact that there was a matrilineal component to Jewish succession, but I’m not sure.
Possibly dowries have to be in cash and you don’t have liquidity.
Land dowries were common.
Dowries and inheritance are best thought of as the same thing, happening at different times; your sons have to wait until you die to come into full possession of your/their lands, but your daughters are ‘dead to you’ as soon as they get married. So the primary difference between sons and daughters is dynastic prestige; a son both maintains the wealth within the dynasty and accrues whatever dowry he can attract, whereas a daughter leaks wealth to another dynasty. (Indeed, when the mismatch was sufficiently large the man was typically forced to take his wife’s surname as a condition of being allowed to marry her, a sort of honorary swapping of the sexes.)
Interestingly, one of the things that happens here is that dowries are much more variable than male inheritance (which either gives almost all to the eldest son, or splits it almost equally, with deliberate splits being more rare); you can just send an unattractive daughter to a convent (tho this also typically required a dowry!) while giving your more promising daughters a larger share.
This post is really great and I hope it leads to further inquiry on this topic.
One thing that didn’t quite make sense to me:
At first I thought, couldn’t you hack this with sufficiently large dowries? If one of your daughters seems like a better bet to produce quality grandchildren than any of your sons, you could just give her a dowry corresponding to most of your household wealth.
Then I realized that I was assuming a modern financialized paradigm which often didn’t hold. Possibly dowries have to be in cash and you don’t have liquidity. Possibly you could in principle make the family business the dowry, but women effectively can’t run the family business so you’d be transferring it to her husband. Possibly if gendered power imbalances are big enough, you don’t want to lose leverage over your son-in-law by making him richer than you, since he might then mistreat your daughter or simply redistribute some of his new wealth to illegitimate offspring.
On the other hand, medieval and early modern elite European Jewish culture seems like an interesting exception to the rule that patrilineal societies favor men more at higher levels. There’s a pattern where the best scholars often marry wealthy men’s daughters for the dowry and inheritance.
I think this is the result of a hybridization where the wealth hierarchy was largely independent of the scholarly prestige hierarchy, which depended more on pure individual merit than most prestige-allocation mechanisms. Definitely poor young men could become respected scholars and marry up in that circumstance. Monogamy probably also made the prospects of poor young women a bit worse, at least in relative terms.
It might also have to do with the fact that there was a matrilineal component to Jewish succession, but I’m not sure.
Land dowries were common.
Dowries and inheritance are best thought of as the same thing, happening at different times; your sons have to wait until you die to come into full possession of your/their lands, but your daughters are ‘dead to you’ as soon as they get married. So the primary difference between sons and daughters is dynastic prestige; a son both maintains the wealth within the dynasty and accrues whatever dowry he can attract, whereas a daughter leaks wealth to another dynasty. (Indeed, when the mismatch was sufficiently large the man was typically forced to take his wife’s surname as a condition of being allowed to marry her, a sort of honorary swapping of the sexes.)
Interestingly, one of the things that happens here is that dowries are much more variable than male inheritance (which either gives almost all to the eldest son, or splits it almost equally, with deliberate splits being more rare); you can just send an unattractive daughter to a convent (tho this also typically required a dowry!) while giving your more promising daughters a larger share.