Dowry Customs

Modern Variety among Cultures

In several communities, most notably the Hindu community, payment of a larger dowry can enable a girl to find a better groom. In this paradigm, the groom is reduced to the status of an “object,” an individual bought at a price, the dowry. Some poor girls commit suicide at puberty because their parents cannot “purchase” even an ordinary groom for them. Because of the prevalence of dowry, the birth of a daughter is widely greeted with a gloomy silence. The antipathy for daughters is strong enough that some couples have sought out quack doctors willing to prescribe potions to guarantee them a baby boy, and other couples have sought to learn the sex of their fetus as soon as possible, choosing an abortion if it turns out to be female. To curb this activity, the Indian government passed the Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act in 1994, which they modified in 2003. Any person, including a doctor, found engaged in determining the gender of an unborn baby faces the possibility of a long jail sentence.

Among Jews, especially during the Middle Ages, a shadkhan was a marriage broker or “matchmaker,” whose job was to gather and evaluate information on the personal qualities and background of potential spouses to ensure a felicitous and holy union. Their fee, fixed by custom, was often a percentage of the dowry. Shadkhanim still exist today, but in greatly reduced numbers.

Among Muslims, where marriage is a contract between the husband and wife, the husband pays the dowry to his wife. The two parties agree on the amount, known as “dower” or meher. The size of the meher depends on the couple's socioeconomic status and is usually payable at the time they enter into the contract. They may defer payment by mutual consent. In India, women generally forgo the meher, but women in Persian Gulf countries do not.

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