Being in Burkina has made me realize how virulently anti-polygamy Americans are. Polygamy is legal in Burkina Faso and is fairly widely practiced; in theory it should be limited to Muslims, but I know of Christians who do it too. Reactions I've gotten from Americans on the topic have ranged from laughter to "...oh." to "DISGUSTING" and "so wrong." Coming from the other side, trying to explain to Burkinabes why Americans hate polygamy so much has been an interesting challenge.
Why do we hate polygamy so much? We say it's anti-feminist, and it disagrees with our general notion of marriage as between a man and a woman. (At the risk of offending readers, I won't try to bring in parallels to reactions to gay marriage...) I think its image is of a big chauvinistic man collecting objectified women for sex and/or excessive babies. If my husband is spouse enough for me, then if he really cares about me, I should be enough for him too, right?
Whatever your views may be on the issue, the fact is that I need to pick my battles here, and there are a lot more horrible things that this society does to women than to marry more than one of them at a time. I'm thinking about excision here specifically, which is practiced on at least 95% of the women in village. There are also the more mundane things, like the amount of work that women have to do compared to men, and their general lack of power or worth.
In any case, I do not see polygamy as the root of any of those problems, and at its best I can see its value in their context. Men are only supposed to take more than one wife if they have the means to fully support a second plus the children she will have, and they are supposed to love and respect all wives equally. The reality is that a lot of men here don't have the means to support even one wife, so if you have someone who can support and be good to two of them, I can see how it would benefit the women. Which is worse, being the only wife of a terrible husband, or the second wife of a good one? Further, having more wives means that when one woman is unavailable for whatever reason, there's still the other one to sleep with, so it lowers the chances of extra-marital affairs and HIV risk that comes with it.
Well, you argue, if his wife is in a late stage of pregnancy or whatever, that's no excuse for the man to be amusing himself with other women, and that's offensive that society is building things to support that. But that's the reality of the relationship between men and women here. For us, (or at least for me,) marriage is supposed to be a partnership between two equals who will support and trust each other, but for them, the ideal is much more basic. The man is supposed to provide housing, food, protection, and social standing for their wives, and the women are in turn supposed to take care of all household labor and make a lot of babies. It sucks, and it's changing slowly, but in the meantime I can see where polygamy has its place when it's done right. Development is not about changing everything in their practices at once to make them conform to what Westerners do; it's about taking small steps that make life a little better, even if those steps are in a different direction from our own.
Not that polygamy is done right most of the time, or even half the time, but how many monogamous Americans get marriage right, either? (Hah, it always comes back to that.)
Some practicalities of polygamy that I hadn't thought about before: what do you call your husband's other wives? How does the paperwork work, legally? The other wives are called co-spouses, and whether they get along or not depends on the family. I once heard someone saying "your first marriage is out of duty; your second wife is the one you marry for love." Uh, whatever. When people get married legally, they have to specify whether it's a monogamous marriage or whether there will be possibilities for polygamy in the future. If a man gets a monogamous marriage and decides later to take a second wife (hawkward) they have to get legally divorced and remarried as a polygamous couple.
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