Wife selling has been found in many societies over many centuries and occasionally into modern times,[1] including the United States (including in Hawaii among the Japanese, among Indians in the Gallinomero, Yurok, Carolina, and Florida tribes and in the Pacific Northwest, and among natives on Kodiak Island in what is now Alaska), Colombia, England, Australia (among aborigines), Denmark (possibly), Hungary, France, Germany, India, Japan, Malaya (among Chinese laborers), Thailand (at least permitted), Northern Asia (among the Samoyads), Asia Minor (among the Yourouk), Kafiristan, Indonesia (albeit not outright), Tanganyika, Congo, Bamum, Central Africa (among the Baluba), Zambia, South Africa (among Chinese laborers), Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Nigeria (possibly), Abyssinia, Egypt, Lombardy, ancient Rome (sometimes as a legal fiction and sometimes as actual), ancient Greece, and ancient Emar (of Syria).
At least one early-19th-century magistrate is on record as stating that he did not believe he had the right to prevent wife sales, and there were cases of local Poor Law Commissioners forcing husbands to sell their wives, rather than having to maintain the family in workhouses.
[5][a] The document likely was a way, wrote Morris, for "dissolving the marriage bond"[6] since the state forbade divorce[7] "and the marriage laws of the Church of England were widely disregarded among the poorer whites and in the back country",[8][b] but it could also have been intended to reduce the husband's liability for debts for support of the wife and her children and for her pre-wedding debts,[9] while it was unlikely to have been for the sale of a Black slave or an indentured servant,[10] though being for the sale of an Indian woman or a mestizo, while unlikely, was not impossible.
"[15] According to George Elliott Howard, as published in 1904, "if dissatisfied with his wife, the young Gallinomero of [California] ... may 'strike a bargain with another man' and sell her 'for a few strings of shell-money.
'"[16][d] Also according to Howard, as published in 1904, "among the California Yurok 'divorce is very easily accomplished at the will of the husband, the only indispensable formality being that he must receive back from his father-in-law the money which he paid for his spouse.
A slave born in North Carolina who moved 50 miles recalled that, while she was between 5 and 8 years old, "'[w]hile here, he [unspecified who] sold my mother to New Orleans, leaving my father at home.' ....
Her master moved to Alabama, and died ..., leaving behind unpaid bills and seven slaves, all of whom a sheriff sold, save for her father", according to Daniel Meaders.
"[43] According to Mark P. Leone, reviewing a modern-day historical exhibition in Virginia of Carter's Grove plantation, a "slave overseer was kept in place with threats to sell his wife".
According to 14th-century scholar Wei Su quoted by Paul J. Smith, "early in the dynasty, ... the system for assessing taxes and labor services was based ... on household size.
"[53] A 19th-century source characterized the practice as conventional among the lower classes in China: "The poorer people take their wives for an agreed term, and buy and sell them at pleasure.
Mark Ramseyer and Takeyoshi Kawashima, "men routinely sold their wives and children or rented them long-term .... [and this] was endemic to the brutality of Asiatic patriarchal feudalism".
'Villages', we are told, 'which owing to some shortage of produce, are unable to pay the full amount of the revenue-farm, are made prize, so to speak, by their masters and governors, and wives and children sold on the pretext of a charge of rebellion'.... 'They (the peasants) are carried off, attached to heavy iron chains, to various markets and fairs (to be sold), with their poor, unhappy wives behind them carrying their small children in their arms, all crying and lamenting their evil plight.
"[79] In the Western Punjab, in or before 1911, according to A. J. O'Brien, among Muslims,[80] a man "proceeded to sell his wife" to a member of another tribe[81] and a dispute developed on other grounds and was resolved in which "the right of disposal by relatives was freely admitted".
[86] In West Africa, under the Aro Confederacy, according to David Graeber, "a man who simply disliked his wife and was in need of brass rods could always come up with some reason to sell her, and the village elders—who received a share of the profits—would almost invariably concur.
"[92][k] Gray wrote, "if a woman .... behaves so as to make herself unsatisfactory as a wife she may induce her husband to sell her to another man of her choice, and thus has some means of protecting her own interest.
[95] In Bamum, a kingdom, in what is now Cameroon, in the 19th–20th centuries,[96] according to Aboubakar Njiasse Njoya, "in rare cases, ... when a husband was no longer on good terms with his freeborn wife, for whom he had paid a very high brideprice, he simply sold her without informing his parents-in-law.
[99][l] Wolf continued, "since the Baluba have come into contact with the Kioque and Bangala, trading tribes from the Lunda country and from Kuango, they are getting provided with guns and powder, for which they barter children, girls, and even their own wives.
)[100] In Southern Zambia,[102] among the Toka,[103] in the early 20th century,[104] according to Gisela Geisler, "often women were ... hired out or even 'sold' against payment of cash to interested men by their own husbands.
"[105] Geisler continued, "migrant labourers and African public servants ... had a particular interest in 'temporary marriages ....' ... [which] granted them unlimited access to the domestic and sexual services ... [and they] must have been ... fairly common in Livingstone".
"[111] In South Africa, among Chinese laborers in 1904–1910, according to Gary Kynoch, gambling was "prolific"[112] and unpaid debts often led to suicide and sales of wives and children.
[112] In what is now western Burkina Faso, in Souroudougou,[113] in the 1890s,[114] "household heads often resorted to selling their wives and children to passing merchants for cowries or millett, with no option for re-purchase.... [K]in became actual commodities that were bartered (not loaned) away.
"[167] In Northern Asia, according to an 1895 report by Arthur Montefiore, among Samoyads (or Samoyedi) (who are part of the Ural-Altaic Mongoloids), "[the husband] may commerce with his wife, for marriage is not considered a binding tie.
It is not uncommon for a Samoyad to sell his wife to another for the consideration of a few teams of deer, and he sometimes barters her for a lady whose husband may be willing to accept the view that exchange is no robbery.
[178] According to Theodore Y. Blumoff, Genesis describes "some pretty deplorable characters who do dreadful things to each other ... [including a] candidate for future sanctification selling his wife—not once but twice—to save his own skin and make a buck".
[247] According to Gokhale, in 1935–1985 ("55 years") ( [sic]),[252] "every middle-class home in Maharashtra is said to have possessed a copy of Shyamti Ai and every member of every such household may be assumed to have read it.... [and it] was also made into a film which instantly received the same kind of adoring viewership.
[257] In Indian literature, Mahabharata, a story of Gandhari, according to Jayanti Alam, includes the "censor[ing] [sic]"[259] (or censuring) of "Yudhishtira ... for 'selling' his wife in the gamble".
[260] According to Jonathan Parry in 1980, "in the famous legend of Raja Harish Chandra, it was in order to provide a dakshina that, having been tricked into giving away all his material possessions in a dream, the righteous king was forced to sell his wife and son into slavery and himself become the servant of the cremation ghat Dom in Benares.
"[261][an][ao] In China, according to Smith, a "possibly well-known tale"[262] about the Song dynastic era[262] (A.D. 960–1279)[263] told of a wife invited to a prefect's party for wives of subordinate officials, from which she "was kidnapped by a brothel-master",[262][ap] who later "sold her ... [to] her husband's new employer ... who reunite[d] ... the couple".
[272] According to Debra Skinner and co-authors, "this genre ... has been recognized by urban-based political and feminist groups as a promising medium for demanding equal rights for women and the poor.
[286] Schmidt argued that teachers of Judeo-Christian tradition who teach on this commandment "without drawing attention to the property concept of woman"[284] "might [be] ... unknowingly contributing to sexual inequality".