Stealing a bride: marriage customs, gender roles, and fertility transition in two peasant communities in Bolivia

Abstract

This paper deals with changing marriage customs in a pre-transitional setting where nuclear households and relatively high female status have been dominant values. Two Bolivian communities are compared. In one of them, the persistence of early marriages is associated with a specialized agricultural economy where women play roles as wives and mothers as well as partners in agricultural production but are not engaged in autonomous income earning activities. Women maintain a relatively subordinate, even if highly valued, position within the family. Marriage customs are simple, with little parental opposition to early marriage. In the other, economic diversification and tertiarization of the economy, as well as the emergence of a youth culture, are producing a revolution in marriage patterns. Increase in female age at marriage is associated with an extension of spinsterhood, growing acceptance of courtship, and a decline in parental influence over the selection of marriage partners. These are processes promoting both nuclearization and an increase in the bargaining power of women within the nuclear family, conditions for the emergence of favourable attitudes towards birth control. Marriages are taking place later as a consequence of the increasing individualized capacity of females as income earners. Young men achieve independence much later today than in the past, and have to show individual resourcefulness in order to find a wife. Stealing a bride, a ritualized version of elopement, is a key aspect of marriage customs through which men show the ability to constitute a new household.