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Historically parents have played a major role in choosing marriage partners for their children, and the custom continues in the world’s developing countries today. Parental influence is greatest when the parents have a large stake in whom their child marries. Traditionally, marriage has been regarded as an alliance between two families, rather than just between the two individuals. Aristocratic families could enhance their wealth or acquire royal titles through a child’s marriage. Marriage was also used as a way of sealing peace between former enemies, whether they were kings or feuding villagers.
The most extreme form of parental influence is an arranged marriage in which the bride and groom have no say at all. For instance, in traditional Chinese practice, the bride and groom meet for the first time on their wedding day. In some upper-caste Hindu marriages, children are betrothed at a very young age and have no voice in the decision. In a less extreme form of arranged marriage, parents may do the matchmaking, but the young people can veto the choice. Some small cultures scattered around the world have what social scientists call preferential marriage. In this system, the bride or groom is supposed to marry a particular kind of person—for example, a cousin on the mother’s or father’s side of the family.
In many traditional societies, marriage typically involved transfers of property from the parents to their marrying children or from one set of parents to the other. These customs persist in some places today and are part of the tradition of arranged marriages. For example, in some cultures the bride’s parents may give property (known as a dowry) to the new couple. The practice of giving dowries has been common in countries such as Greece, Egypt, India, and China from ancient times until the present. It was also typical in European societies in the past. Although the giving of dowries has been part of the norms of marriage in these cultures, often only those people with property could afford to give a dowry to the young couple.
Families use dowries to attract a son-in-law with desirable qualities, such as a particularly bright man from a poor but respectable family or a man with higher status but with less money than the bride’s family has. In societies in which the giving of dowries is customary, families with many daughters can become impoverished by the costs of marriage. For this reason, in Europe in earlier times some families sent “extra” daughters to convents. In India and China, where it is expected that every woman will marry, families have sometimes tried to limit the number of daughters born to them through infanticide (the killing of infants).
In some societies, the groom’s family gives property (known as bridewealth or brideprice) not to the new couple but to the bride’s relatives. Particularly in places where bridewealth payments are high, the practice tends to maintain the authority of fathers over sons. Because fathers control the resources of the family, sons must keep the favor of their fathers in order to secure the property necessary to obtain a bride. The custom of giving bridewealth occurs primarily in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Anthropologists characterize bridewealth as compensation to the bride’s family for the transfer to the groom’s family of the bride’s reproductive capacities or her ability to work. They debate whether the practice should be seen as the actual sale of a daughter or whether it is a ritual—that is, a symbolic act—rather than an economic transaction.
Although arranged marriage persists in many cultures today, as modernization proceeds and many areas become part of the global economy, parental influences on marriage continue to decline. Young people who work for wages rather than on the family’s land no longer depend as highly on their parents’ resources. As Western popular culture—including motion pictures, television, music, and fashion—spreads around the world, many young people are drawn to Western notions of love, romance, and individual choice. In some places, such as Japan, people combine modern Western and older cultural practices. For instance, parents and computer matchmaking services help find prospective mates, and the individuals can accept or reject the proposed match
