What marriage is like in poor countries | Judith Bruce | Big Think

What marriage is like in poor countries

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Financial concerns can take much of the sentimentality and romance out of marriage, says Judith Bruce, the senior associate and policy analyst at the Population Council. In poorer countries especially, marriage becomes more of an arrangement by which women’s time, labor, and fertility are ceded as an essential economic exchange.

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JUDITH BRUCE:

Judith Bruce joined the Population Council in 1977. She is a senior associate and policy analyst with the Council's Poverty, Gender, and Youth program. Through policy analysis, evidence-based intervention design, advocacy, and capacity building, Bruce leads the Council's efforts to develop programs that protect the health and well-being and expand the opportunities of the poorest adolescent girls in the poorest communities.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Judith Bruce: When I decided to do this work—obviously I’m a female and I was an adolescent once—I began to think about the shape of females’ lives and I became very interested in knowing more about the most excluded girls in the most excluded and poorest communities.

Obviously all women face some difference in their experience (regardless of where they are) as what men experience, but it was much more dramatic when I went to the poorer places and saw how desperately dependent females in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East (where I lived and worked for a long time), Central America, Asia—how much more tied explicitly their futures were to the process that was called “marriage” and child-bearing.

I was also struck that the words that were used to describe the experience gave a very false impression. These were not sentimental marriages—though many of them succeeded mind you—they were made as an economic calculation of families. Girls accepted from an early age that without agreeing to their family’s wishes they would not have a place in society; there were cautionary tales of the girls who didn’t marry or who didn’t bear children, stories of little girls thrown in the fire, “young brides,” as they’re called, thrown into the fire because they didn’t produce a child—really dramatic consequences.

At the same time wherever you went you saw the women and girls working, but nobody called it “work,” they said they’re “helping their partners.” When we started looking into the data we saw that female income was rededicated to others at a rate of ten to 20 times that of male income.

So if a woman makes a dollar that dollar is ten times more powerful than a dollar in a man’s hands.

So the language—not only were the conditions under which they were forced into marriage represented as something sentimental and normative, but also the tremendous economic contribution they made and indeed their dominance in providing for older and younger dependents was consistently named something else.

I was once in India with a very well known expert in agricultural development, which is very, very male dominated and at that time a really technologically-focused field, and he turned to me and said, “I see! Women can be farmers too!” The assumption was that “farmer” meant male.

And language is like that all the way through.

So when a woman is doing it, “Oh she’s helping her children, she’s not earning.” Women themselves, girls themselves will describe what they do in minimizing and denigrating terms: “Oh I just help out.” There’s even an issue of their feeling like they have higher status if a man is supporting them, which is rare enough. So one African country I was working in, I remember they were having trouble with the census because women would claim that their husbands were supporting them (because it was seen as a status that he was supporting them rather than the reverse). Females themselves saw being dependent on a male as a goal, because the society would not acknowledge the extremely diverse and heavy burdens that females carry economically from a very young age.

I think one of the really important differences between male and female experience is that—pretty much everywhere, especially in the developing world but I think pretty much everywhere—sexual and marital markets and labor markets for females are completely connected and aligned. To put it kind of bluntly, who you have sex with, inside or outside of marriage, determines in many cases whether you’re socially included in your economic prospects, and not because you’re necessarily being support...

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