Monogamy wasn't invented for the benefit of women [View all]

[shaayecanaan]

it was invented for the benefit of men. Specifically, it was pioneered about three thousand years ago by the Greek city states who found it was necessary, for the sake of social stability, to minimise the number of discontented, socially unattached men. This was best done by maximising each man's prospects of marriage by limiting all men to one wife each. Of course, it was still perfectly fine for men to sleep with other women on the side (and it still is). But such women only had the status of concubines, floozies, prostitutes or slaves. They needed to marry to obtain any sort of station in life.

In a society without any kind of government safety net (which remains the case for three-quarters of humans living today) women typically need to marry in order to survive. Given that men die more often from infant mortality, war and famine, this means that generally women have a relatively limited pool of men from which to make their selection. It also means that in a society with strictly enforced monogamy, every man, no matter how violent or impoverished has a decent shot at obtaining a spouse.

Polygamy naturally affords women a greater variety of choices. A prospective bride doesn't necessarily have to resign herself to being the first wife of a destitute and desperate alcoholic if she has the alternative of becoming the second or third wife of a more stable and prosperous partner. It also means that in the event of war or famine depleting the pool of available men, that a woman will not necessarily have to resign herself to a life of solitude on society's margins. It is for these reasons that even the mainline Christian churches in Africa endorse polygamy, realising that it is the only viable social solution for these women.

Polygamy also tends to function as a crude form of socialism. It enables the more prosperous to have more children, which results in wealth being divided amongst more people and a tendency to avoid the over-concentration of wealth that has occurred in western societies.