Sharing husband makes family richer and healthier, research says

In times of free love, talking about polygamy is not exactly astonishing, but it is curious to see how the concept works in some cultures and is even interpreted as absolutely normal, within expected behavior patterns, although in many end up putting women at risk and vulnerability.

This discriminatory issue with women has to do with the fact that it is the man who has more than one wife in the cultures where polygamy exists, not the other way around. In fact, speaking of a man who marries more than one woman, the correct term is "polygyny", not "polygamy."

A recent study released by the San Francisco Gate found that such relationships can even be beneficial, especially if we consider families living in poor and resource-poor countries.

The research was conducted by Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, an anthropologist at the University of California. Basically, Mulder collected information that would allow her to compare monogamous to polygamous relationships in 56 villages in northern Tanzania, where famine and drought are common and where polygamy is practiced in particular ethnic groups as well.

What she noticed was curious: in polygamous families, survival conditions were better. In these households, the anthropologist realized that people had more access to food, children were healthier, herds were larger, and even these families had more land to grow some food. This, of course, compared to monogamous families in the same region.

But calm down there! Before you go around defending the idea of ​​polygamy (or polygyny) or trying to marry already married people, Mulder warns: these benefits, say, of sharing a husband need to be assessed according to cultural, social and social contexts. of locality, of course.

Other studies have shown that when a man marries more than one woman, he always loses, in every way, it is the woman - for this reason, the UN Human Rights Committee recommends that the practice be prohibited. The benefits of Mulder research should therefore only be taken into consideration for the northern region of Tanzania.

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