Introduction

• Author: Craig Jones
• Pages: 1-5

1

Introduction

For hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, human society was

almost universal ly polygamous. at is, in any given community, at least

some men could be expected to have several w ives simultaneously.

We will never know who original ly came up with the idea of monog-

amous marriage. I’m not referring here to the notion that a particular man

should have only one wife — most marriages are monogamous even in

polygamous societies. I’m speaking of monogamy as the idea that no man

should be allowed to have more than one wife, and the further innovation

that the community should have a role in ensuring that is so, through the

imposition of rules, norms, mores, and, eventually, laws. Monogamy in

this sense probably wasn’t the result of a single philosophical epiphany,

and it certainly did not result from theistic or prophetic revelation, but

it does appear to have developed rather quickly and, in terms of human

society, rather recently. e term “revolutionary” is apt as a description

of this “socially imposed universal monogamy” (as one expert witness

would later term it) whereby king and subject alike were lim ited to a single

reproductive partner, at least in theory.

Monogamy appears to have begun in the early democracies in ancient

Greece and spread through Rome’s military and, l ater, religious dominance

of Europe. It gathered momentum so that, although the majority of soci-

eties throughout history have been polygamous, this number is shrinking

today to the point where societies with state-endorsed polygamy number

only a handful. A round the world, even nations where the right of a man

to have multiple wives has the deepest cultural and religious roots seem

to be turning ocia l backs on the practice; and if there is an international

legal trend, it is one of, if not criminal izing, then at least of delegitimizing

and discouraging polygamy. So it is curious that in the West, and most

particula rly in Canada and the United States, many have been urging that

the laws should move in the opposite direction: these aspiring reformers

suggest that, in the rights-based, diversity-respecting nations of the