Bride prices - marriage & property

I work with LGBT asylum seekers who are from countries where being gay is criminalised.  I was going through one woman’s statement with her and asked her what it meant that she was “got” at a “knock down price”.  She explained to me that after being caught in school with her lover she was beaten and expelled, her father also beat her and she was kept a prisoner in the home just carrying out domestic chores - all because she is a lesbian.

Her father ‘found’ her a husband who was ‘willing’ to take her on, he was many years older than her; she was told she should be grateful that anyone would have her.  Because she was such a bad deal, the price the man’s family had to pay to her family was virtually nothing. She was forced into marriage and faced regular rape and beatings until she escaped to Britain.

I’ve met so many women who have been forced into marriage, sold off from father to husband; for them marriage is a prison, a constant torture.  The whole romantic notion of marriage for love is historically a relatively new phenomenon.  Historically marriage is more about controlling a woman’s sexuality (e.g. ensuring paternity through exclusive sexual access to one man) or about power and control (e.g. bringing together families for reasons of money or status).  It was in the 12^th Century that woman were obliged to take the name of their husband.

A bride price is an amount of money, property or wealth paid by the groom or his family to the parents of a woman upon the marriage of their daughter to the groom. The agreed bride price is generally intended to reflect the perceived value of the girl or young woman.

I can’t help but balk at the whole idea of marriage, I know for some it works and it has financial and practical benefits; but I can’t get away from the history and the implications, the fact that women still give up their name for their husbands (now through choice rather than necessity) and the competition to have the biggest, most expensive wedding is just repellent to me.  The fact that now gay marriage is being vaunted as the highest state of being for gay couples is really annoying, while I support the right to marry, I do not consider it an appealing thing!

All of this imbues ‘the wedding dress’ with so much symbolism and meaning.  In traveller communities the size of the dress seems to correspond directly to how much value is placed on the young woman getting married.  It seems that for all women entering marriage ‘the dress’ is one of the most important aspects of the process, why is this?