Where'd We Get This Zany Idea?
'The Marriage Bargain', Harrington Park Press
Original Link of this Article http://www.hinduism-today.com/2000/5/

Dowry didn't evolve from India; Hindus got it from the Europeans. According to several sources, the present dowry practice in India can be traced only to the 19th century--likely because that is when Indians observed the full-fledged practice of dowry among the British rulers. Here are some excerpts from a wonderfully enlightening book, The Marriage Bargain, Women and Dowries in European History.

"In Western societies, the dowry has been a payment made by the bride's family in cash, goods or property to the groom."

"Equipped with a substantial dowry, a young woman could expect to have her marriage arranged for her. Formal arranged marriages, with rare exception, were unions including dowry. Although the prospective bride and groom were invariably asked if they found their intended partner suited to them, before the turn of the 19th century it was the rare individual who answered in the negative. 'That would have been a gross insult, for in truth one married into a family,' wrote an 1870 commentator."

"At least until World War I, saving for her dowry was an important aspect of a young working woman's life. In parts of Europe, a dowry was even required by law. After the War, the expectation that a woman would continue to earn a wage during the early years of her marriage relaxed the need for her premarital saving. But the dowry was not abandoned entirely. The German peasantry continued the tradition at least until World War II [1945]."

"In France, the dowry was almost a universal institution, even among servants, laborers and tenant farmers, until the interwar era [1918-1939]. Only the poorest urban industrial workers had no dowries, and as a result many of them did not marry at all. 'For the great majority of the bourgeoisie [middle class], marriage is the greatest financial operation of their lives,' wrote an observer of the French scene [in 1927]."

"Only when women began to reenter the economy as paid workers on a large scale in advanced capitalist societies did the pursuit of dowry decline. Still the dowry system is in evidence today in less industrialized areas of Europe, such as Greece."

"What was the status of the daughter whose birth 'filled a father's heart with fear' [Dante, Renaissance poet, 1265-1321 ce] because of the large dowry which her marriage would require?"

"Girls from very poor families often worked as maids to earn money for dowry [in Sicily] and their mothers worked as laundresses to enhance the same fund."

The Marriage Bargain, Harrington Park Press, 28 East 22 Street, New York, New York 10010 USA.