TOWARD A FEMINIST VIEW OF ARRANGED MARRIAGES

The overwhelming majority of people marry or participate in long-term, marriage-equivalent relationships (Zeifman and Hazan 1997; Hazan and Diamond 2000). Within these relationships, people bear and rear children, provide and are given emotional support, companionship, and instrumental support. Arranged marriages represent one class of procedures for forming such alliances, and by anthropological accounts, they are in widespread use. As many as 80 percent of cultures outside the Western sphere employ arranged marriage practices, although relatively few of these cultures rely exclusively on arranged marriages (Small 1993).

Because the procedures involved in arranging marriages lead to differences in the autonomy with which individual women can choose their spouses, those procedures bear some scrutiny from a feminist standpoint. Do arranged marriages give women an unfair share in their own self-determination? Arranged marriages could pose a particular problem if (1) they are arranged with less input from women than men; (2) they produce inequities of power between women and men; and (3) they are an integral part of a host of other practices reflecting and maintaining women's lower societal status, permitting treatment of women as commodities or property. If arranged marriages mean denying women choice and power and treating them as commodities, then arranged marriages are obviously a feminist nightmare. And if movement toward more choice in marriages would combat clear injustices of other types (less schooling for women, for example), then it is also clear that arranged marriage practices might be a target for feminist reform.

But the evidence, as I note below, suggests a more complex reality for several reasons. First, because of historical changes in arranging marriages and because of the variability of the practices in the modern world, it is difficult to generalize about arranged marriages in terms of their consequences for women's status. Certainly, not all arranged marriages

---

involve less self-determination on the part of the bride as compared to the groom. Even in extreme cases, arranged marriages may simply result in different modes of self-determination and spouse selection than those Western women employ (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1993b). Arranged marriage practices are not monolithic rituals with no loopholes that provide the possibility of subversion and resistance. Second, when examined from a psychological perspective, differences between arranged marriages and other marriages are sometimes difficult to demonstrate, whether at the level of what sorts of people are chosen as mates or at the level of what ingredients make up a good marriage. Different procedures for forming alliances may not, in the end, produce different alliances. This similarity makes it difficult to argue that arranged marriages present special difficulties for women. Third, the degree to which arranged marriages produce inequity among men and women, or to which they are an integral part of the oppression of women and control of women's sexuality, is debatable; this is an issue to which I return at the end of the chapter.