Female Husband Research Articles

Revisiting ?Woman-Woman Marriage?: Notes on G?k?y? Women

Studies of women who marry women in Africa are relatively few in number and generally dated, with few recent contributors. Based on interviews in central Kenya with Gikuyu1 women involved in “woman-woman marriages,” this study critiques the extant literature, focusing on two key issues. Most authors have perceived narrow conditions and functionalist purposes for explaining woman-woman marriages. Our interviewees typically express complex reasons for marrying women, suggesting that woman-woman marriage is a flexible option within which women may pursue a range of social, economic, political, and personal interests. We also critique the concept of “female husband,” suggesting that while the “husband” role can be male or female, the term is not so easily separated from the male connotations it implies in western contexts.

Revisiting "Woman-Woman Marriage": Notes on Gikuyu Women

Studies of women who marry women in Africa are relatively few in number and generally dated, with few recent contributors. Based on interviews in central Kenya with Gikuyu women involved in "woman-woman marriages," this study critiques the extant literature, focusing on two key issues. Most authors have perceived narrow conditions and functionalist purposes for explaining woman-woman marriages. Our interviewees typically express complex reasons for marrying women, suggesting that woman-woman marriage is a flexible option within which women may pursue a range of social, economic, political, and personal interests. We also critique the concept of "female husband," suggesting that while the "husband" role can be male or female, the term is not so easily separated from the male connotations it implies in western contexts.

Woman-to-Woman Marriage: Practices and Benefits in Sub-Saharan Africa

This article examines the various forms of woman-to-woman marriage in sub-Saharan Africa and discusses how each form can or could have been used by a woman to advance her social and/or economic status in society. Woman-to- woman marriage may also be beneficial to the persons involved other than the woman who initiates the marriage (the so-called female husband). The motivations of the other participants are also examined. Cross-culturally, women take wives under three circumstances, all of which enhance the status of the female husband: 1) barren women take wives to gain rights over children produced; 2) rich women accumulate wives to gain prestige and wealth in the same way men do through polygyny; and 3) in societies where women possess the right to have a daughter-in-law, a woman without a son may take a wife to give her a non-existent son.

女性夫概念と家財産複合

Ethnographic literature on woman-marriage in patrilineal societies in eastern and southern Africa shows a lot of confusion about ethnographers' assessments of this type of marriage due to the misuse of analytical terms. This paper aims to examine the validity of two guiding concepts in the writings of woman-marriage: female husbands and the house-property complex.The term female husband refers to a woman who takes on the legal and social roles of husband and father by marrying another woman in accordance with the approved rules and ceremonies of her society. There are two major types of female husband. A surrogate female husband is a woman who acts as a substitute for a male kinsman in order to provide offspring for the latter's agnatic lineage. An autonomous female husband is one who marries independently, without any reference to male kin, and who is always a pater to children born by her wife or wives.The house-property complex is a system of property holding and inheritance in which all property held by a polygynous family in patrilineal societies is divided and held separately by the nuclear family, or ‘house’, of each wife. This institution is thought of as an important factor in practices of woman-marriage. Its distribution is from the southern Sudan through East Africa to the east of Victoria Nyanza and into the eastern part of southern Africa.Problem arises if an ethnographer encounters a practice of woman-marriage in a society in which the house-property complex exists. Because both concepts which are built on different principles conflict each other in such a situation. I suggest three criterions for deciding which concept is more efficient explanation of woman-marriage in question, namely a source of bridewealth, the legitimacy of a child, and the appropriateness of the application of the term female husband.A case study of woman-marriage among the Mbeere, one of the Northeastern Bantu-speaking peoples, is more cogently analyzed in terms of the house-property complex rather than the idea of female husbands in the light of those criterions. (i) There is a principle of internal segmentation of a polygynous family, in which each wife attaches much importance to keeping a single ‘house’. (ii) After woman-marriage, a sonless married woman stands as mother-in-law for the young woman, and as a grandmother for the latter's child, which is clearly manifested in the modes of address and naming of a child.

The Institution of Woman-Marriage in Africa: A Cross-Cultural Analysis

Woman-marriage, the legal marriage between two women, included the roles of husband and wife. A comparison of these roles within and between the Igbo, Fon, and Lovedu cultures illustrates not only the availability of social and political power to women, but also the relationship between power and the construction of gender. Woman-marriage, fictive kinship, gender roles, Africa) The institution of has been documented in approximately 40 precolonial African societies and has endured to the present in some cases. This practice, whereby a woman could legally marry one or more women, had two general forms. The first form existed if a woman created and controlled her own economic surplus. She could then pay the bridewealth necessary to marry a wife, in the same manner as a man. In the second form, a woman married another woman in order to augment kinship ties (e.g., a wife bore children for her female husband; a wife bore children for deceased, suppositious, or childless kin of her female husband; a woman married her brother's daughter and further strengthened the ties between a uterine brother and sister, etc.). Woman-marriage varied greatly and differed according to the circumstances that surrounded its existence, as will be demonstrated here. Woman-marriage deserves attention because, first, the presence of this institution can be explained not only by structural demands, but also by women's access to status, rights, and authority: by studying we can more accurately understand women's significance in the social structure. While ethnographic accounts offer valuable information about woman-marriage, these records often fail to extend beyond merely furnishing documentation of observable circumstances. Studying marriage as an institution of social, political, and personal regard necessitates an itemized description of details and an acute analysis of these details to address questions such as: what does the institutional presence of imply about women's position within different societies? Second, the institution of exposes the construction of gender. The cultural circumstances from which arose are more easily understood by studying the diversity of this institution. Its variations illustrate how gender concepts served as an ingenious response to structural vacancies (e.g., positions in the sociopolitical structures that were unoccupied), and how the construction of gender, as expressed through the institution of woman-marriage, affected women's access to power. The relevant data gathered here are from ethnographic sources dating from the first decade of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s, with some contribution from contemporary sources related to reconstructing African history.(2) The data permit doing a comparative analysis of three groups of African people. Cultural comparison as a method of analysis contextualizes the superficially similar phenomena brought together under the Single term woman-marriage and reveals the intricacies of its varying forms and functions. It does not, however, lead to an exhaustive study of cultures, since in the act of comparison extensive detail is omitted. After first providing a structural analysis of by considering the institution of as a form of positional succession, this article then evaluates the relative power of female husbands and their wives by making a cultural comparison of the Fon of Benin (formerly called Dahomey), the Igbo of present-day Nigeria, and the Lovedu of what is now northeastern South Africa. The variations of the roles of the female husbands and their wives, within and between cultures, indicates a continuum of women's status; this continuum hinged on the construction and acquisition of these roles, as outlined by the principles of positional succession. BACKGROUND Woman-marriage was a logical outgrowth of creative kinship practices characteristic of African kin structures. …

Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned: Fielding's The Female Husband

Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned: Fielding's The Female Husband

Is the Female Husband a Man? Woman/Woman Marriage among the Nandi of Kenya

Is the Female Husband a Man? Woman/Woman Marriage among the Nandi of Kenya

Fielding's "Female Husband": A correction

Fielding's "Female Husband": A correction

Henry Fielding's The Female Husband: Fact and Fiction

The female husband (published 12 November 1746) is an anonymous pamphlet so obscure and so nearly pornographic that its few acquaintances have passed it by, almost in complete silence. I know of only four copies, one each in the British Museum, the Bristol Public Libraries, the Huntington Library, and the library of Charles B. Woods, of the State University of Iowa. It purports to be the biography of one Mary Hamilton, who was in fact tried for fraud at Taunton, Somerset, on 7 October 1746. It has long been acknowledged, on external evidence, as Henry Fielding's. But among themselves scholars remain skeptical. The pamphlet has remained in limbo, listed for immortality but ignored, not quite accepted and not quite damned. I hope to demonstrate beyond all doubt that The Female Husband is Fielding's, and to suggest that this pamphlet, though of slight literary worth, is an interesting exhibit of Fielding at work upon meager journalistic fact, a somewhat discomforting glimpse of the comic moralist trying to sustain his principles and his comedy within recalcitrant material.

Fielding's Pamphlet, 'The Female Husband.'

Fielding's Pamphlet, 'The Female Husband.' Get access J. Paul de Castro J. Paul de Castro 11 Essex Court, Temple Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s12-VIII, Issue 151, 5 March 1921, Pages 184–185, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s12-VIII.151.184 Published: 05 March 1921