When discussing ownership, I usually think of the typical things, like buying a car or a house or maybe a new fancy dress. When we talk about systematic ownership of people in history (or even present day situations), we discuss slavery and its evils. But we don’t tend to realize that women are the biggest victims of systematic ownership.
This topic of ownership comes up when discussing topics such as prostitution, which involves the physical exchange of money for sex (or sexual acts). You are buying someone for a period of time to do as you please with him or her. While both males and females suffer from the business of sex work, I’ve come to realize that women suffer in a completely different way.
In my women’s studies class, we had a discussion about how women have been and still are essentially treated as property. Though men may be treated as slaves, serfs, hustlers, etc., women are exchanged simply because they are women. In a sense, women are their own currency.
There is an anthropology theory called “The Gift,” introduced by Marcel Mauss, which states that the process of gift giving and gift exchanging is how we communicate as a social species. His example is that families who grow their own corn do not want to eat it, but instead want to give it to their neighbors so that their neighbors will now be indebted to them.
In applying “The Gift” theory to human life, it is usually women who are presented as the gift. The most popular way of exchanging women would be through marriage. Marriage itself was derived not as an institution about love, but one of profit. The selling of daughters has begun and ended wars, saved businesses and raised statuses of families.
It’s no secret that marriage has long been used as a way to get something more than just love out of the deal. In many situations, women used as the “gift” are valued by their education, looks or social status. For example, a more educated a woman may be, the more valuable she becomes to her husband and his family. This makes her exchange a bigger deal. While this may occur more often in third world countries, first world countries aren’t rid of their social oppression against women.
Here in the United States, events such as purity balls exist as a means of keeping young girls in check and reassuring that their value will remain intact. Purity balls, for those of you who may not know of the phenomenon, are events during which young girls and women (from the age of four to early twenties) pledge their virginity to their fathers or other significant male figures in their lives.
The girls dress in white gowns and walk arm in arm with their fathers as they make this sacred vow. Honestly, it’s quite frightening to watch these young girls pledge themselves to male figures, especially those who are younger and have no idea what’s happening. Why must women constantly pledge themselves to men? Because they become the property of their fathers and then of their husbands.
While it may be argued that men no longer own women in marriages, the practices that we’ve set in place seems to neglect that. At many weddings, the bride is still walked down the aisle by her father and “given away” to the husband. It’s almost symbolic to the idea of the gift exchange, where one woman is passed along from man to man.
So, how do we avoid such practices? It’s a struggle for us as a society to change our ways because they have been so deeply ingrained. I think the best first step is to always acknowledge that there is a problem. I’m not saying to throw away the whole institution of marriage, nor am I boycotting the gesture of fathers walking their daughters down the aisle.
What I would like to see, though, is that we acknowledge the meaning behind these institutions and practices. If we can understand how they came about and assert that we want to keep them around, it’s our duty to redefine them in a way that does not alienate and oppress women. As a woman and as a human being, I should not feel as if I’m an object or some sort of animal that can be willingly traded from man to man. In fact, no human should feel that way.
The sex and gender system as described by Gayle Rubin, an anthropologist and feminist, shows that oppression may not be avoidable but instead is a product of the specific social relations that organize it. I think that it’s time for us as a society to truly reexamine the idea that our social structures allow women to be exchanged simply because they are women.
