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Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (1270)	9/8/1999 5:37:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6418

I tend to agree, BUT realize that you are arguing purely from a basis of enshrining "normal" human response. I don't know that very many people would enter plural marriages. But, that doesn't say why society should FORBID them even to the few who want them. At the time when men regularly went to war and women stayed home, plural marriage made a certain economic sense. If the men lost a lot of warriors, and only half the army came back, a lot of women would have to do without husbands, to the detriment of society. If the army won and killed the men and captured the women, often the societies would bring the women back to increase the numbers of women in their tribes and therefore the population -- it was better that these women become the wives of the warriors rather than slaves whose children couldn't be legitimate members of the tribe. And keep in mind that as civilization moved from pure hunter-gatherer to include pottery, weaving, etc., it might well require more than one women to keep a household going, since these chores tended to be womens chores, while one man could fulfill all the hunting and all the bs-ing around the fire. But in societies that didn't have the concept of paid servants, this meant multiple wives. And I don't agree that only the rich and powerful had multiple wives. My reading suggests that it was fairly common in some societies.