The History of Marriage II
While polygyny, one man married to multiple women, was relatively common, polyandry, one woman married to multiple men, was relatively rare, usually practiced in areas that were poor in resources so that family land or property would not be divided up between son, but remain with the eldest surviving child. Polyandry has four basic forms: Successional polyandry, where the woman marries men one at a time; Associated polyandry, which is a blend between polygyny and polyandry, where a man with multiple wives marries a woman with multiple husbands as a way of forming alliances; fraternal polyandry, where brothers marry the same woman; partible paternity, where multiple men take part in raising children of a woman or may all be seen to be the child of all the men. This did not indicate that a society was matriarchal or matrilineal, though some were.
In Arabia in early history, polyandry was practiced as documented by Strabo, a Greek geographer from the 1st century BCE, who wrote of a daughter of a king who was married to a group of 'fifteen brothers all much in love with her' who tried to get time alone by 'getting sticks like her husbands' to put at the door' to mark the presence of one of the brothers in the room. She was nearly convicted of adultery when the rest of the family was at the market and one of her brothers saw the stick at her door but was found alone. So, although the woman has multiple husbands, she didn't have the right to refuse any of them. He wrote of other women with multiple husbands as he wrote of Arabia.
Many of Strabo's claims were verified by later marriage law, including the inheritance of a widow by the heirs of her husband, as well as if he divorced her. This is seen as a modification of 'the older right of kinsmen to share each other's marriages; and as soon as the exclusive right conferred on the husband by more modern law eases and determines, whether by marriage or divorce, the older right of the kin revives', so that the more modern laws are seen as fossils of older polyandrous customs. Another fossil is seen to be that the paternal cousins had first right to the daughters of a man while he lived.
Another location where polyandry was practiced was in Tibet, where it is still practiced in some communities. This was practiced mostly within the wealthier families and was related to the ideas of 'stem family', where 'a married child is inextricably linked to his natal family in a common household' and a 'mono-marital principle', which states that only one marriage is permitted among the male siblings to keep from dividing the family's holdings. Typically, there were only two brothers who shared a wife and other sons were encouraged to become a celibate monk, or was adopted as a bridegroom by a family that didn't have a male child to protect their holdings and possibly with the marriage to two daughters of the family. Another situation where polygyny might occur is if a father's wife dies before him and he remarries. To avoid creating a new stem family and dividing the family property, he and his eldest son might be married to his stepmother as well. Among the less wealthy, the peasant class that hand households of small plots, when a son married, 'he often established a new household and split off from the original family unit' so the maintaining of a family line was unnecessary.
There are some records by the Greeks and the Romans that other groups, such as the Spartans and the Britons, practiced polyandry, and even one account stating '[t]he matrons of Rome flocked in great crowds to the Senate, begging with tears and entreaties that one woman should be married to two men'. The Hindu epic the Mahabharata records that Draupadi married five Pandava brothers through her wish in a previous life, with several other examples within the text as well, indicating either a neutral or open attitude toward the practice.
