One Man, Many Wives, Big Problems

Great article on monogamy and polygamy by Jennifer Percy in the Atlantic Monthly.

Extracts:

"On meeting a polygamous family for the first time, Ludlow’s reaction was shocked and bewildered: “I stared,—I believed I blushed a little,—I tried to stutter a reply; ‘How can these young women sit looking at each other’s babies without flying into each other’s faces with their fingernails, and tearing out each other’s hair?’”"

"Because divorce rates had increased six hundred percent since the Civil War, Cohn speculated as to whether polygamy might be what Americans were looking for."

"[Cohn] suggested that it was monogamy and not polygamy that bred instability—leading to divorce and leaving broken families in its wake."

"...when one man married four women, three other men would be left spouseless. This inequality would create a subclass of poor, unskilled, and uneducated men:

In a polygamous world, boys could no longer grow up taking marriage for granted. Many would instead see marriage as a trophy in a sometimes brutal competition for wives. Losers would understandably burn with resentment, and most young men, even those who eventually won, would fear losing. Although much has been said about polygamy’s inegalitarian implications for women who share a husband, the greater victims of inequality would be men who never become husbands."

"...historically speaking, monogamy is an aberration—polygamy has been the most common form of marriage since biblical times."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611u/polygamy