Polygyny in Haiti

Review of the Literature

One notable exception notwithstanding (N’zengou-Tayo 1998), researchers and aid workers who focus on gender in Haiti typically portray the country as a patriarchic oriented society in which women are among the most repressed in the world (Bell 2001; Fuller 2005; World Bank 2002; UNIFEM 2006; Divinski et al. 1998; Francis 2004; United Nations Development Programme 2006).  Although Haiti is indeed poor and much of the population experiences extreme hardship, women have substantially greater status vis a vis their male counterparts than commonly acknowledged. At 62.5 vs 59.1 years, women in Haiti live longer than men (CIA 2010);  at 3.1%, the teen pregnancy rate is the lowest in the developing world, half or less that of any country in Latin America, almost one third that of the United States (8.5%), and about 1/8th the 23% rate in the neighboring Dominican Republic (UNDP 2018; NCHS, 2010). At 52% to 48%, Haitian girls have higher primary school attendance rates than their male counterparts (UNICEF 2008), at 21% to 18%, they have higher secondary school attendance rates (ibid), and at 87% to 76% they have higher overall youth literacy. rates (ibid). As for contraceptive use, it is true that more Haitian women, particularly rural women, eschew contraceptives. But generally not, as feminists often claim, (see for example Bell 2001) because of male domination. Not least of all, one of the most illustrative examples of how a Haitian social institution has been misunderstood as an example of male repression is polygyny.[i] [ii]

Polygyny in rural Haiti is significantly different from the “extramarital affair” and the “mistress” in that, 1) it is recognized by the community, 2) efforts are made to produce children in all of the unions, 3) the man provides a home and the capital necessary for his wife to engage in marketing activities and to invest in productive, labor-intensive activities centered around the household (working for wages, planting gardens and/or tending livestock), and 4) the woman/women are expected to remain sexually faithful to him (elaborated from Murray et al. 1998). The type of traditional marriage that makes polygyny possible is not sanctioned by the church and there is no legal registry for the union being described, but it is in fact legally recognized by judges in Haiti as a type of common-law marriage. It has a common name (plasaj). There are also multiple names that designate the relationship of the women engaged in union with the same man (koleg, matlot and rival). It does not matter if the man is legally married to one of the women or not. The only limit on the number of women in union with the man is his financial resources to invest in homesteads, the animals and gardens necessary to maintain a productive household, and to invest in each of the “wife’s” commercial activities.[iii]

The topic of polygyny is uniquely suited for the task of exposing androcentric (male-centered) assumptions in the anthropological literature regarding Haiti and how they have led to erroneous conclusions about patriarchy. Four generations of mostly male anthropologists have explained the institutions as specifically in the interest of men. As the argument goes, patriarchic Haitian males have multiple wives so they can tend to more gardens, a survival from African countries and Caribbean slave society where women were the principal field hands (Bastien 1961: 142; Courlander 1960: 112; Herskovits 1937; Leyburn 1966: 195; Moral 1961: 175–76; Simpson 1942: 656).[iv]  But as will be seen below, this is not now and probably never was true. Women in rural Haiti may sometimes work gardens on their own and their children’s behalf, but when a man is present the obligation to plant and weed falls to him. To reverse the situation would be, from the cultural perspective of a rural Haitian, absurd. Moreover, women as a gender depend on polygyny to accelerate their entry into a career of child rearing and marketing, activities that give them a high degree of economic autonomy and self-determination. On the other hand, polygyny places most men, particularly young men, at a disadvantage because women are able to incite higher level of competition in extracting material exchange for their sexual and domestic liaisons.  Below I examine the institution of polygyny more closely to show how it is better understood as an institution economically oriented toward women rather than men.[v]  [vi]  [vii]

Polygyny in rural Haiti

There can be no doubt that polygyny in rural Haiti is related to male wealth status. In my own studies I found that that at any given moment in time 11% of adult males living in rural areas are polygynyous. And when I looked specifically at men in high income groups, the incidence of polygyny dramatically increased: 33% of skilled workers were polygynous, as were 44% of spiritual healers, 27% of male school teachers, and 62% of fishermen. Farmers with relatively large landholdings also displayed a tendency to have multiple wives (20%).  If these groups are eliminated from the sample, rates of polgyny among the general population fall close to zero. Moreover, polygyny increases with age (also an indicator or increasing wealth): 45% to 50% of the rural men studied who were over the age of fifty had been polygynous at least once in their lives (Schwartz 2009: 184; see also Murray 1977: 263).

As will be seen shortly, the relationship between incidence of polygyny and male wealth goes beyond certain men being able to afford multiple wives.  It will be seen that the keys to understanding polygny in rural Haiti are, 1) the nature of particular sources of wealth, meaning whether or not men have a source of wealth beyond the control of their first wife, 2) the absolute poverty of most other men, particularly young men, and 3) the advantages that accrue to second or later wives and their families when they can access the wealth of those men who already have a wife but who go on to become polygynous. I will return to these issues shortly. For now, however, I want to finish examining wealth from the perspective of men for this relationship between male wealth and polygyny does not mean that men are in favor of the institution; on the contrary. [viii]

Myth of the Pro-Polygyny Male

Contrary to what might be the andocentric assumption, rural Haitian men often say that having more than one wife is immoral and wrong, that polygyny is cruel to the first wife, it causes her to starve herself (bouch li p’ap gou), to become emaciated (l’ap chèch), and sad (l’ap kalkile). When asked what a woman should do in the case her husband takes another wife, 71 percent of men in a random sample of 68 rural male farmers said the woman should leave him.[1] Men also tend to view polygyny as not in their best interest. When questioned about the advantages of polygyny for the husband, 95% of men said that there are no advantages. Typical were responses such as,

“Ahh, there is no advantage. Men don’t understand, it brings you down financially. It’s just one little wife who truly pushes you ahead.” (fifty-year-old father of twelve)

“When you have several wives it is a bunch of work. . . . Right now this morning, if you work this wife’s garden, you have to go work the other garden for the other wife. ” (seventy-five-year-old father of seven)

“No there are no advantages. Because you must plant gardens for both of them so you can send them both to the market. There is no advantage.” (fifty-three-year-old father of nine)

In probing the issue further, I interviewed a sub-sample of ten polygynous men and asked each of them, ‘why do you want more than one wife.’ Nine of the men explained that having more than one wife serves either to compensate for the absence of the first wife, such as when she is away on a marketing trip—which is common because most mature rural women in Haiti engage in some form of itinerant marketing–or to provide an alternative to spending time with an argumentative first wife. Typical were the following responses,

“When your wife is not getting along with you . . . you have somewhere else you can go eat and drink.” (fifty-five-year-old father of seventeen)

“If the first one is not good, you have to look for another.” (twenty-nine-year-old father of nine)

“If one wife is not there, the man he goes, he goes to the head of the other house who left a little food for him . . . he goes and eats it. It is this, and after this it is a drain.” (forty-five-year-old father of five children)

In summary, most rural Haitian men will engage in polygyny at some time in their life. But as seen, the men interviewed said that two or more spouses are not necessarily better than one, that multiple wives were a burden, and those who were engaged in polygyny could not offer much in the way of advantages. So why then do men have more than one wife? The answer, I try to show below, is best understood through an analysis of women, their interests, and why they tolerate–indeed, as will be seen, promote–the institution of polygyny. To understand the argument it is first necessary to understand the principal strategies that men, women, and children in rural Haiti depend on for survival: household organized production.

The All-Important Household

Throughout rural Haiti the basis of survival is farming and marketing activities organized  around the household. The significance of these strategies cannot be gainsaid. There is nothing secure in rural Haití beyond the limits of the household. There are no dependable State services to provide aid, no job security–indeed, very few jobs–and no unemployment insurance. The exception is foreign charities who have come to help impoverished Haitians. But aid distributed by these organizations is, at best, sporadic. At worse, charities in Haiti tend to deliver aid when it is no longer needed while often giving nothing during dire food shortages (see Schwartz 2000).[ix]

Thus, in rural Haiti the household and the associated productive activities that have evolved over the past two centuries are the most important medium of livelihood security. Land and livestock are the two principal ingredients the family needs to produce. The products of both are sold to purchase goods or to support the woman of the house in buying and selling other products—for example, baskets, produce, beans, salt, poultry and livestock, cloths. In these  endeavors, children are indispensable in making the household productive such that Haitian farmers commonly say, “It is children who save the household” and “Children are the wealth of the poor.” In the Opinion Survey (see footnote 1 above) both male and female farmers overwhelmingly emphasized that children are not just helpful, they are necessary; and they are necessary because they work. A  typical example is a 27 year-old father of 3 who said,

“Children are the biggest necessity.  If you need something you tell a child.  Like right now, I can say, ‘go look for some fire wood,’ or ‘some embers from the neighbors house.’  ‘Go to the market.’  ”

But if children are the most important labor component to the productive household, women are the most important ingredient in both producing children and in managing their labor. Women are also the most important individuals in processing and marketing the household goods and in extending the money earned from those goods by rolling it over in the market and generating additional income. By virtue of these attributes Haitian women are thought of as the owners of households.

People throughout rural Haiti say, gason dwe fe kay, min gason pa gen kay (“men have a duty to build houses, but they do not own houses”).The building of a house is the single most important event that occurs in the legitimization of a union. A couple may have several children but until the man has provided a house they are not considered in union nor is the woman bound to obligations of fidelity. Even legal marriage is dismissed and legally vacuous if the man has not provided a house for his wife.

Once a house has been built, inviolable rights and duties associated with the union begin and they carry the weight of both custom and law.  The woman must be faithful.  The man must work. He must plant gardens and he must tend livestock, he must work for wages and, the most significant point of all, he must give a substantial part of his income to his wife. Indeed, when it comes to the products of the household women have the customary right not to give the man an opportunity to do otherwise. As cultural rule, it is women who harvest, who oversee the processing of product, and who then sell the produce in the market. Even with sales of livestock, women tend to dominate sales. In the Opinion survey 50% of respondents reported that women of the house most often sell the livestock.

In this way a man’s provision of a house, gardens, and animals can be understood as a type of contractual partnership in which in exchange for these basic means of production a woman shares her ability to reproduce, shares access to the labor of the children, and shares her own domestic labor. But she is still in control. Should a man fail to provide for his spouse and children, the woman has the right to cuckold him without being expelled from the house.

Myth of the Mellow Maiden

For outsiders who think that through physical intimidation and violence Haitian men can violate the rules of female dominion in the domestic sphere, the ethnographic reality is different, much different. Haitian women are far more disposed to violence than their spouses, both with respect to other women and to men.  In my own research I recorded seventeen violent incidences in one rural community. Only four involved men only; eight began with a conflict between a man and a woman. In only three of these latter cases was the woman injured—and then only slightly–and in four cases the man was severely beaten; in two he almost died (see Schwartz 2009; Chapter 16;p 209; endnote 2). This was true with regard to both individual confrontations and in soliciting the aid of brothers, fathers, and sisters, all of whom will, if it is clear that the woman’s rights are being abused by a man, join her in violently confronting him for they too have a stake in the economic success of their sister/mother/daughter.[x]

Myth of the Love Struck Maiden

The point cannot be overstated. The household is the most important mechanism of survival in rural Haiti, it is the domain of women, and community and family sanctioned control over the household imparts a power to women as a gender that is seldom documented in the Haitian ethnographic literature. This power is seen in the opinions of men and women regarding who is more important to the homestead and in female attitudes toward their spouses and the reasons they gave for accepting to engage in conjugal union with them.

When asked “does a husband need his wife more or is a wife in greater need of her husband?” only 3 percent of the 68 men responded that a woman needs her husband more; 28 percent responded that a husband is in greater need of his wife (the remaining individuals said that both needed the other equally). Women gave similar responses. Only 13 percent of 68 women reported that a wife needs her husband more, but 23 percent of women reported that a husband is in greater need of his wife. When asked, “can you get by without your spouse?” 96 percent of men interviewed said no; 77 percent of women interviewed said no.

Moreover, it is women, not men, who more commonly report thinking of their spouse in terms of economic value. Forty-five of 64 men (missing = 2) said they chose their spouse because of love; only twenty-seven of sixty-eight women said so. Twenty-six of the sixty-eight women said they chose their spouse because he was a good worker; only one of the 64 men said so. Thirteen of the 64 men said they chose their wife because it was the only one they could find; four of the 68 women said this. In summary, women report being more interested in their spouse not for love but for money and the work he can perform.  In other words, contrary to the image portrayed of polygyny in the traditional anthropological literature—where men collect women to work in gardens—women in rural Haiti are more practical and business-minded than the men who love them. Indeed, when asked to explain why they do not agree with the prospect of having a koleg (co-wife), it is not love and affection that most women point to: it is economics. Typical were responses such as a thirty-three-year-old mother of eight who said,

“I am gonna be angry because I will lose some of what he gives me. “(thirty-five-year-old mother of four)

“I will start stashing my money because he is going to be carrying it away.”  (thirty-year-old mother of two)

“I am not going to be comfortable because he is going to be giving the other woman money.” (thirty-three-year-old mother of eight)

“I am gonna cuss him because he is going to make me lose money.”
(twenty-seven-year-old mother of three)

Women and the Creation of the Sexually Aggressive Male

Haitian women say that “men are dogs” (gason se chyen); “men cannot get by without having sex” (gason pa ka rete san fi). Young women are badgered and cajoled by a relatively large pool of socially eligible, sexually active, and highly aggressive men.  But here too, there is a link to female economic dominion in the domestic sphere.

Women play a salient role in conditioning male sexual aggressiveness: they habitually fondle the genitalia of infants and boys, they encourage older boys to seduce girls, they ridicule the sexually timid. As adults, women assiduously exploit to their material advantage the male interest in sex that they helped instill. They ardently demand material support in exchange for sex.[xi]

What is being depicted is far more than what is usually seen in elite Haitian urban circles or Western middle class industrial societies. In what Richman (2003: 123) calls “gendered capital” and Lowenthal (1987: 22) calls a “field of competition” women in rural Haiti attach a price to their sexual acquiescence and they conceptualize their sexuality in terms of financial instruments.  They refer to their genitals as intere-m (my assets), lajan-m (my money), or manmanlajan-m (my capital), in addition to tè-m (my land); a common proverb is, chak famn fet ak yon kawo te–nan mitan janm ni (every women is born with a parcel of land–between her legs).[xii]

None of this is to say that rural Haitian women are practicing institutionalized prostitution. On the contrary, in contrast to folk myths in the neighboring Dominican Republic and elsewhere in the Caribbean, rural Haitian women respond to male sexual overtures with a conservativeness that should make most of their developed world and Dominican counterparts blush. Moreover, they counter balance their encouragement of male sexual aggressiveness with equally acerbic verbal attacks on men who violate the rules. They berate and smear the reputations of men who do not give women money (Li pa reme bay fanm lajan  “He doesn’t like to give women money”– tantamount to a sexual kiss of death for the Haitian man looking for love.) And those men who do not support their children are derided as vakabon, an insult that very specifically means a bum and a free loader who does not accept his familiar responsibilities, a concept so pervasive in rural Haiti, so successfully imbued in the system, that the word vakabon has become the ubiquitous Haitian putdown, equivalent in parlance to the American “asshole.”[xiii]

The source of this patterned ridicule of men is the obvious and ultimate objective of every rural Haitian woman: To make sure that men  plant, tend livestock, fish, labor and, if necessary, migrate to work on distant plantations or construction sites so that they can earn the money to take responsibility for a family; so that they build a house for a woman–or houses  for women; so that they provide land and livestock and money for female marketing endeavors, and so that they can help finance the rearing of the children that will make it all productive. As women in the Opinion Survey said, [xiv]

“He gives me money for the children, that is what makes me prefer having him around.” (twenty-seven year-old mother of five)

“What I am telling you is when you are young, you need a husband. What I mean is, if you haven’t had children yet. So you can make a child.”  (forty-two-year-old mother of three)

“If a person marries, why does she marry? She does not marry to be a big shot or anything like that. It is so she can have children… Why does a person want children? It is to help…to go to the water…to go get wood.”  (forty-year-old mother of five)

Myth of the Deadbeat Dead

Rural Haitian men are arguably more submissive than women. They are less violent both with respect to their own gender and arguably less violent toward women.. Haitian men rarely fight or even attempt to intimidate romantic rivals. It is not because they do not want a wife. It is because they know that it is not the other man, but the woman who decides who will be her spouse, a decision that will be heavily influenced by all those around her–family, friends and children–and that will be distinctly biased in favor of the man who had the greatest resources and economic opportunities to offer her.

Once a man has found a woman who will accept his overtures, and once he has invested in her by building a home and providing land, livestock, and gardens, it is excruciatingly difficult for him to walk away from her. To do so is tantamount to turning his back on his own social security. Tantamount to forsaking investments that likely took years to accumulate and, perhaps more importantly than anything else, tantamount to losing the children who make the household productive. The de facto gender-power relations that I am describing and primacy of women in rural Haiti by virtue of their power to give birth and control over the household economy, is manifest in myths and customs that preserve the peace of the home and help protect the woman from what might otherwise be irreconcilable violations of the rules of conjugal union.

Haitian women and men frequently call into play the fictive illness known as perdisyon, a disease in which women can carry a fetus for as long as five years. The belief is widespread in Haiti. Both men and women accept the disease as legitimate, allowing women to both dupe their husbands into accepting paternity for children that do not biologically belong to them (discussed at greater length shortly).

But even when the community knows that a woman has been unfaithful, rural Haitian men—unlike the typical Western male–often accept being cuckolded in silent shame. And they accept paternity for children commonly known to be sired by other men. In my own research I found that 13 percent of men (seven of fifty-two) had at least one child that their wife told them was their own but who friends and neighbors reported was actually sired and recognized by another man, something that sometimes takes ridiculous form. In the home where I first lived while conducting research in Haiti, I sat and watched as the “wife” lay in a bed stoically bearing her fifth child, a child well known to all of us was the biological offspring of a man other than her husband. Meanwhile, her husband—not the father—lay in another bed making a great display of sympathetic labor pains, moaning and holding his stomach.

In effect, most rural Haitian men want to be fathers. Paternity is seldom if ever denied. Court cases over paternity rarely if ever center on men not paying child support. Much more common is women and the parents of women refusing to allow a particular man to claim paternity.

This male longing to be a father and the submissiveness seen above is a manifestation of the importance of child labor, the importance of a women as the bearers of children and managers of the homestead and, not least of all, the importance of the economic dependency of men—rather than women and children–on the household. This dependency is evident in male behavior both toward their wives and other men, something that contrasts sharply with the expected violence of women seen earlier.

So returning to the issue of polyyny: in coming to understand it’s causes, it is helpful to first understand why, if women are so powerful, have such control over the most important unit of survival in rural Haiti, the household, and if they are so violent and men so submissive (in comparison), just how is that men are able to become polygynous in the first place?

Why Women Accept Polygyny

First off, most rural Haitian women are not terribly worried about their spouses taking on another women. The common response women gave to, “does your husband have another or other wives?” was not a simple, “No,” but rather, “No, he is too poor” (Non, pase li malere). The average farmer’s wife knows her husband cannot afford another wife, but more importantly, she knows he needs her and the children, and that he will be loathe to give them up. This was evident in responses many women gave when asked what they would do in the event their husband took another woman:

“I would talk to him. I would not curse him because if the guy had something, if he had a good paying job, I would raise hell, I would have a serious little chat with him. But the guy has no job, he has no education, he has nothing.”  (thirty-two-year-old mother of five)

“Ah well, I would not do anything, it is not me who made him do it . . . He’ll be back, he’ll be sick and to the house he’ll be coming. There is not anyone before me. It is me who is first. ” (fifty-year-old mother of seven)

“If he finds a woman who is brave, he goes and spends a couple days with her, let him go with the girl because he is not a child, you can’t beat him.”  (thirty-four-year-old mother of three)

“If it is strength he feels, if he feels strong, I won’t stop his strength.” (sixty-five-year-old mother of nine)

“I would not do anything. If he listens to me, if I tell him “No, times are not good, you can not have two wives. For example, like today, it is only a single two dollars you have there, and if there are two of us, you can not give us each only a dollar.” Ah, he can’t do it. (twenty-seven-year-old mother of five)

“He cannot abandon me completely. He has to come sit there and help me chape [raise] the children.” (forty-year-old mother of four)

“Just so long as I have a path to go down I would not pay any attention. I would look after my children. Especially with him, I can’t leave him. We are married, I cannot leave him. It is an engagement we have together. I have a bunch of children with him. ” (sixty-five-year-old mother of nine)

As seen above, the three points that women emphasize with respect to their husbands taking another wife are his poverty, his dependency on the household, and her own independence (by virtue of having children to help her), all of which brings us back to this issue of male wealth and the assumed dependency of women on patriarchic males as a cause of polygyny.

Men, Polygyny and Independent Sources of Income

In all the professional categories seen earlier, those that seemed to explain polygyny with male wealth, men had more wealth than other men, but the sources of wealth were independent of control of the first wife. Skilled workers build houses and collect their pay with no participation from their wives. Spiritual healers do not depend on their wives to help serve their clientele. Schoolteachers instruct students and collect their pay independently and fishermen are not dependent on their wives for fishing or even for the sale of fish in the market.

The most productive male farmers were also found to often maintain multiple families, but a closer look shows that here too the issue is not only the increased wealth of the man, but wealth beyond control of his first wife. A large landowner typically cannot and does not plant all of his land. More often, the man rents and sharecrops parcels of the land to less fortunate individuals, something that allows him to move beyond the influence of, and dependency on, a single wife. Even men who report owning irrigated and “fat” land—high-yield garden plots of which even a small parcel places a household in the category of economically elite farmers—were not found to be unusually polygynous, not until the amount of their reported landholdings reached levels beyond the control of a single household.

So once again, why polygyny? The best answer, the point that I’ve been driving at, is because of the interest it serves women, but not the women already in union.

Women and Polygyny

All too often in assessing the impact of  polygyny on women what researchers think about is the interest of the first wife. What is overlooked is the interests of the additional wives and the advantages that accrue to her, her parents, her brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and her children (a living average of some 145 people), all of them pressuring her to choose the dude with the most to offer. Indeed, advantages of making the ‘right choice’ accrue to everyone in rural Haiti. Even first wives who will almost invariably have daughters that find themselves compelled to take advantage of resources only available from a man who already has a wife. To understand what I am saying requires a look at male poverty and the scarcity of ‘marriageable’ men for in rural Haiti the scarcity of eligible bachelors has both an artificial and a physical dimension, both caused by poverty.

An “artificial” scarcity of men is caused by the fact that many of the young men who remain in Haiti do not have the money necessary to enter into a union, and to build the house, plant the gardens, and purchase the livestock that are necessary to establish a conjugal union. The “physical” scarcity is a direct consequence of a disproportionate number of men going to the city and overseas, primarily in search of the money to meet these obligations. Male wage migration causes the proportion of males to females in Haitian to drop by 7 to 10 percent for the twenty- to thirty-nine-year age group (see Schwartz 2009:194).

Thus, a typical Haitian man would very much like to have a wife, but for the majority of young men the associated financial demands make it impossible. And so, rather than delay the onset of childbearing while waiting for male age cohorts to come back from the city or to become financially mature at home, many Haitian women enter into unions and begin bearing children with men several years older than themselves, a trend that is evidenced by the fact that 48 percent of women versus 18 percent of men are in union at the age of twenty-four. At least 15 percent of women’s first unions are with men who already have a wife.

Why women would want to bear children in the first place has to do with the importance of the household and their career choices. As seen, there really are not any choices. Not for men or women. The household is the mechanism of survival in rural Haiti and it is children, as seen, that make the household productive. What remains to be seen now is how this process unfolds not only more in the favor of women, but also largely at their behest.

Women as Determinants of Polygyny

In the Opinion Survey of 68 rural Haitian men and 68 rural Haitian women we asked about preference for large families. To avoid misunderstanding I posed the question as follows: ‘a man and woman who have three children and a man and woman who have six children, who is better off.”  Respondents had no problem understanding the question, 52% chose the larger family, and the explanations always centered on the labor that children perform on behalf of the household, always.

But when respondents were broken down by sex and age group, it was overwhelmingly women, and specifically middle-age and elder women, who most favored large numbers of children. Fully 87 percent of women over fifty chose the couple with six versus three children. The reasons have to do with the economic benefits that accrue to older women. With greater numbers of children, women begin to plant their own gardens and to raise more animals, activities that free a woman from dependency on men (see Schwartz 2009: 195-196). Women who in another question said they could live without a man were precisely those with children in the ages when they were making contributions to the household.

Equally or more important than livestock and gardens, children free a woman to enter more fully into a career in marketing. A Haitian woman with four to eight children is four times more likely to be engaged in commercial activity than a woman with zero to three children. Freed by the help of children, the most successful women sometimes build their trade revenue up to several thousand Haitian dollars per month. They buy agricultural land and animals, invest in a wide assortment of business ventures and sometimes even hire men to work gardens for them. Houses that have a woman in her 40s, 50s, and 60s are almost invariably known, not by the husband’s name, but by the name of the woman, as in Madam Jean’s house, or Lili’s place. As women themselves explained:

“What makes me say I can live without a man? What I need to do to come up with a sack of food I can accomplish with my four children.” (thirty-year-old mother of four).

“If I have children, I don’t need my husband at all. Children, hey! hey! I would like to have ten children. I don’t need my husband.” (forty-one-year-old mother of seven).

“Why can I live without a man? I arrive at an age like this. All my affairs are in order. I don’t need my husband anymore. ” (fifty-six-year-old mother of eight).

So we can see that sociologically, given the advantages of children and the importance of household in the regional economy, the analytic advantages of polygyny are arguably more to the favor of women, as a gender, than to men. For this reason women are more accepting of the institution. They object violently to their own husband taking another spouse, but they accept it in general and they even promote it in their own interest or the interest of their daughters, granddaughters, and nieces. Indeed, they not only encourage men who are not their spouses to engage in polygyny but as I showed earlier on, they are arguably the principal agents in inculcating male sexual aggressiveness and a sense among men that male sexual bravado is a good thing..

There is, however, one catch to all this:  for whatever reason, whether it is fear of maternal mortality, not wanting to end childhood, or simply not wanting the physical strain, younger women often do not see these advantages.

Getting Girls to get Pregnant

Rural Haitian girls pregnant for the first time often disavow their condition right up until the time their bulging stomachs make denial impossible. Others tie ribbons around their stomachs to conceal their condition. Others try to abort pregnancies, taking desperate measures that sometimes end in death. In my first experience with this in the summer of 1996, I took a convulsing 16 year-old rural girl to the hospital.  Unbeknownst to everyone, including her siblings and parents, she was 8 months pregnant, a condition she had concealed by tying torn strips of cloth around her stomach. The French doctor who treated her reported the stomach tying almost killed the young woman.    In May 1997, while I was in a village, a 15 year-old girl tried to abort an unwanted pregnancy by popping 14 anti-malaria pills (chloroquin) into her mouth and washing them down with kleren (raw rum). An hour later, while she was at the spring waiting to fill a water bucket for the household, she fell dead.

But entrance into a childbearing career is not something that women decide by themselves. As seen, it is elder women in control homesteads who most favor children. And they are in a position to powerfully influence the decisions of their daughters and younger cohorts.

Elder women are keenly alert not only to the importance of her daughter bearing children relatively early on in life for the sake of the younger woman’s household and marketing career, but also to the advantages that accrue to herself, as the grandmother or elder female guardian. Older woman controls the activities of her nubile daughters frame the conditions that make pregnancy likely or, to put it another way, almost impossible to avoid.

First off, they keep their daughters ignorant and even misinformed regarding the mechanics of pregnancy. Young women are taught by their mothers or other female elders that pregnancy occurs most readily during or just after menstruation, and many young women believe they cannot become pregnant as the result of a single sexual encounter. They also bring pressures to bear on young women reluctant to begin childbearing.   A 25 year-old woman explained, “my mother said that if she caught us taking birth control pills she would club us to death” (mama-m di si li jwenn nou pran gren li tap tiye nou anba baton).  Social pressures against abortion are equally strong.  Mothers, grandmothers, sisters and female friends are quick to condemn abortion as the “greatest of all sins” (pi gwo pech) and counsel young girls against abortion by explaining that it will rot their vaginal canals, making them disgusting to men.  By law, women are supposed to be imprisoned for aborting pregnancies.  In reality imprisonment is rare, but woman are, nevertheless, ridiculed and publicly disgraced.

With a back drop of ignorance, parents, especially mothers, subsequently take a keen interest in the suitors of their daughters. At first glance this interest appears to the outsider as a promotion of chastity. “Good girls” do not flirt with men while away from the homestead. Many prenuptial daughters who are not in school do not leave the homestead at all, not for any reason, not even to go for water. Some mothers physically probe their daughters’ genitals to see if the hymen has been perforated. Girls who see men in secret may suffer severe whippings at the hands of their mothers. But while parents may appear to be discouraging sexual contact it is actually something quite different.

Prenuptial girls are carefully watched, not with an antagonism toward suitors, something that might thwart the approach of gift-bearing men and potential sires of grandchildren, but with intent to maintain a grip on the girl’s flirtations. The girl is severely rebuked for encouraging the interested vakabon but suitors who parents find acceptable are promoted. The daughter, of course, has to consent, but if with the encouragement of her parents she does consent, the man is welcomed. He is invited to the house and in good humor teased for not stopping by more frequently. When he does visit the house he is joked with, fed, given a place to relax, and he is deliberately left alone with the daughter for increasingly lengthy intervals. If all goes well, he may eventually begin sleeping over at the girl’s house. The girl is then watched carefully for signs of pregnancy. At the smallest indication that she is pregnant the matwon (mid-wife) or another specialist in these matters is summoned to the house to make a diagnosis, a diagnosis that often comes up positive even when the girl is not pregnant; i.e., perdisyon. Thus, while it was seen earlier that perdisyon functions as a rationale for pregnancy in the physical absence of a woman’s husband, it’s principal function it to tag the next child born to the woman as the offspring of that particular man, whether or not she is still in union with the man, and whether or not she continues to have sexual relations with him—unless a more eligible man comes along, in which case the perdisyon may pass to spontaneous abortion or the girl and her mother may profit from the opportunity to assign multiple fathers, one secret and one public. It is also worth emphasizing however, that the man, his parents, and other family members will spend more time thinking about the joy and benefits of acquiring a new family member than they will dwelling on the question of whether the child is really a biological relative.

Everyone, especially the mother’s mother, is able to benefit. In the event a daughter becomes pregnant while living in mother’s home (as with most first and second births), it is her mother, the child’s grandmother, who assumes the role of mother. While the real mother only breastfeeds the child or does mundane tasks such as cleaning up after him, the grandmother refers to the child as her own. The child is taught to call her manman (mother), not gran (grandmother), while the mother is called by her first name as if she were the child’s sister. Even after the mother has moved out to plase with a man, the grandmother often keeps the grandchild or several of the grandchildren.

I want to make clear that the concern parents display regarding the sexual activities of their daughters and the emphasis I have put on the economic aspects of paternity should not be interpreted as intrusive or even unusual. Like parents elsewhere in the world, parents in Haitian want their daughters to make practical decisions regarding mates, and they encourage them to bear children with men who can support the young women economically and who will help pay for the cost to chape offspring. Moreover, daughters are a critical source of labor for the household. They tend to be the most productive, they can take over the role of mother, and both mothers and fathers significantly favor daughters over sons. A daughter’s pregnancy represents a critical disruption in her life in that it reduces her labor contributions to the household. Yet, in my own studies of fertility in rural Haiti 49 percent (1,046 of 2,135) of women over fourteen but under thirty years of age and still living in their mother’s home had born at least one child; and twenty-two percent (237 of 1,078) of young women under the age of thirty who were reported being in the formative phase of a conjugal union—meaning they identified themselves as being in union with a man but had not yet acquired an independent homestead—were in fact still living in the home of their mother, father, or another relative. It is at this juncture that parents, particularly mothers, play a determining role in polygyny. As a civil judge in Haitian explained:

A lot of the time it is the parents themselves who plase girls. Sometimes the parents, they are so interested in money, their daughter loves a young man who is the same age as her, they could marry, but the parents don’t accept it. They see that at that time in the young man’s life he can not do anything. He cannot give money. Then the parents see by the way the girl is acting that she is going to plase with a married man. But the fact that the married man can give money causes them to close their eyes so the daughter can take the money from him. It is like this. Adults are behind it. (Civil judge in Haitian)

Conclusion

Gender relations in rural Haitian are not at all what most researchers and feminist activists have portrayed them to be. Rural Haitian women are anything but submissive pawns in man’s world. Men are more dependent on their wives than vice versa. After obtaining a homestead and entering a union, it is the woman who dominate domestic affairs of the household. Women are more aggressive, they violently attack other women who try to engage in relationships with their husbands, and, while male violence against women does occur, the ethnographic reality is that Haitian women—through their own efforts or a coalition of family members—more often hurt men than vice versa. As for polygyny, men might have the socially condoned option of having multiple wives but many women engage in outside relations, and they most often convince their husbands to accept as their own children sired by other men. Why men accept them is because they too are heavily dependent on the child labor that makes households productive.

As for why men take other wives, and why, if women are so powerful they are able to do so, it was seen that men in Haiti are not really sure why they take other women. The best answers any of them could come up with had to do with neglect by their first wife. Women, on the other hand, understand very well why they chose their husbands. Whether the man already had a wife or not, the principal reason women gave was to obtain labor, financial support, and children. As one woman explained, “He gives me money for the children, that is what makes me prefer having him around” (twenty-seven-year-old mother of five).

It is children and the labor they provide, more than husbands and wives, who are the most important component of household livelihood strategies. And it is here that both an understanding of the superior control of women and the female role in determining polygyny in rural Haiti begins to become apparent; for in the gender and age division of labor there is another critically important difference between men and women: By virtue of woman’s ability to reproduce, her control over children, and the sharing of that capacity with men, she is able to gain institutionalized control over homesteads.

 

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Bell, Beverly, 2001 Walking on Fire. Cornell University Press

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CARE 1997  An Update of Household Livelihood Security in Northwest Haiti   Monitoring Targeting Impact Evaluation/Unit  December.

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Courlander, Harold, 1960  The Hoe and the Drum:  Life and Lore of the Haitian People. Berkeley:  University of California Press.

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Ember, Melvin. 1974 Warfare, sex ratio, and polygyny. Ethnology, 13, 197-206.

Fuller, Anne 2005 Challenging Violence: Haitian Women Unite Women’s Rights and Human Rights Special Bulletin on Women and War. ACAS website: http://acas.prairienet.org.  accessed 10-19-2006. Originally published in the Spring/Summer 1999 by the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars.

Herskovits, Melville J. 1937 Life in a Haitian Valley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Leyburn, James G. 1966 (originally 1941)  The Haitian People. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Moral, Paul 1961 Le Paysan Haitien. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose.

Murray Gerald F.  1977. The evolution of Haitian peasant land tenure: Agrarian adaptation to population growth. Dissertation, Columbia University

Murray, Gerald !976  “Women in Perdition: Ritual Fertility Control in Haiti”  In Culture,  Natality, and Family Planning,  eds.  John F. Marshall, Steven Polgar,  Chapel Hill:  University of Florida.

Murray, Gerald, Matthew McPherson, and Timothy T. Schwartz.  1998. Fading frontier: An anthropological analysis of social and economic relations on the Dominican and Haitian Border. Report for USAID (Dom Repub)

N’zengou-Tayo M.-J.  1998 ‘Fanm Se Poto Mitan : Haitian Woman, The Pillar Of Society (Fanm Se Poto Mitan : La Femme Haïtienne, Pilier De La Société Centre For Gender And Development Studies, University Of The West Indies, Mona, Jamaique

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Schwartz, Timothy T.  2009 Fewer Men, More Babies:  Sex, family and fertility in Haiti. Lexington Press. USA

Simpson,  George Eaton 1942  Sexual and Family Institutions in Northern, Haiti.  American Anthropologist 44:655-674.

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UNICEF 2006. Fertility and contraceptive use: Global database on contraceptive prevalence. At www.childinfo.org/eddb/fertility/dbcontrc.htm, accessed May 3, 2006.

UNIFEM 2006  UNIFEM in Haiti: Supporting Gender Justice, Development and Peace  UNIFEM Caribbean Office Christ Church Barbados Accessed October 18th 2006  http://www.womenwarpeace.org/haiti/haiti.htm

United Nations Development Programme 2006  Human Development Indicators 2003

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UNOPS 1997 Ministère de la Planification et de la Coopération Externe (MPCE)  Direccion Departmental du Nord-Ouest  July) Éléments de la Problématique Déparetmentale (Version de Consultation) Programme des Nations Unies pour le Développement (PNUD),  Centre des Nations Unies pour les Établissements Humains (CNUEH-Habitat), Projet d’Appui Institutionnel en Aménagement du Territoire (HAI-94-016)

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NOTES

[1] Hereon called the Opinion Survey and also included 68 women all randomly selected from an original 1,586 household baseline survey on which much of this research is based.

[i] Even if we take figures from 1986 showing Haiti it a 9.5 % of women 15 to 19 bearing children, there are 17 countries with higher rates than Haiti (Wulf 1986).

[ii] Beverly Bell, author of the acclaimed book, Walking on Fire (2001), illustrates how feminist activist-scholars have tended to obfuscate gender issues in Haiti when she writes,

“Haitian women place at the absolute bottom in female-male life expectancy differential,  incidence of teen marriage, contraceptive use, primary school enrollment, secondary school enrollment, and ratio of secondary school teachers.”

Not unusual for feminist scholarship in Haiti, Bell is wrong on every count (see main text). Other feminists, in the zeal to show Haiti as repressive, cite the commonality of domestic, political, and criminal violence against women as well as discriminatory legal codes (Fuller 2005). Others cite high levels of maternal mortality (World Bank 2002) and even the overall deterioration of economic and political conditions as unfair and specifically repressive to women (UNIFEM 2006). Others point to female involvement in onerous and labor-intensive economic endeavors (Divinski et al. 1998). Female repression is also highlighted in the Haitian feminine struggle for identity illustrated in creative literature (Francis 2004). Summarizing these views, the UN’s Gender Development Index (GDI) ranks Haiti at the very bottom in the Western hemisphere, making it seem to observers who do not carefully interpret the index that Haiti is the most female repressive country in all of Latin America, indeed the world, considerably lower in ranking than even Iran or Saudi Arabia (United Nations Development Programme 2006).

I want to make it emphatically clear that I am not denying the importance of empowering women in Haiti: In urban areas violence against women is a problem.  I believe this is a consequence of, a) the relative absence of family—parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, and cousins—who can protect or even seek revenge for the woman, and b) women in urban areas have far fewer economic opportunities than their male counterparts. In the rural areas we find the exact opposite conditions. My point here is that, as with so many issues pertaining to life in rural Haiti, researchers and aid workers devoted to a particular agenda selectively and erroneously grasp information. The types of misinterpretations that result have left a generation of scholars, aid workers, and interested laypeople with a mistaken image of gender among the 65 percent of the population that live in provincial Haiti.

[iii] Among fishermen however, it is not unusual for wives to live in the same small hamlet. In Makab, for example, three fishermen had two or more of their wives living in the hamlet itself. Bokor (healers/shaman) are also an anomaly among polygynous men; they are notorious for having multiple wives living in the same compound and sometimes even in the same household and being able to maintain peace among all of them. The ability of bokor to manage this type of situation is something that even fishermen do not accomplish and that never ceases to amaze other Haitians.

[iv] At first glance polygyny does indeed look like a repressive institution. Women react strongly when their husbands take a second wife. A woman who is bandi (a scrapper)—as many Haitian women pride themselves on being—turns to violence. Displaying little or no aggression toward her husband—indeed, wooing and sweet-talking him in private—a Haitian wife will make violent statements of intent to physically attack the other woman. She will curse her in the street and in the market. It is not unusual for the first wife to go to the other woman’s house and stand outside screaming insults at her. She may stalk her. She may wait at crossroads and on paths to ambush and beat her. She may throw rocks at her, scratch her, or try to bite her lip in order to disfigure her face.

In the end, if the first wife cannot force the other woman to abandon her husband, she must resign herself to the situation. And some would point out that she does not have many choices. She can leave her husband and return to her parent’s house, but if she does so she sacrifices her own house and her right to claim support from her husband. If the woman engages in an affair with another man she may be required to give up considerably more for infidelity would give the man the right to throw her off the property and keep the children, or at least give them to his mother.  And so, it can be said that, with the acceptance of polygyny, many Haitian women are pushed into a situation where they are pitted violently against one another, where one woman is forced to share her husband, and where they have little choice but to conform to their husband’s philandering.

[v]  And oddly enough it is almost certain that the  scholars cited above knew this as all of them had done field work in rural areas and written extensively on agricultural labor patterns. I believe that the reason for this misrepresentation of rural Haitian culture has to do with our own patriarchical bias as Western researchers and here I am trying to correct those interpretations with a feminine oriented analysis. But it also helps to delve more deeply in the perspective of the Haitian male because, as seen, it is not Haitian men who say that two or more wives are better than one.

[vi] In highlighting the extreme repression of women researchers cite the commonality of domestic, political, and criminal violence against women as well as discriminatory legal codes (Fuller 2005). Others cite high levels of maternal mortality (World Bank 2002) and even the overall deterioration of economic and political conditions as unfair and specifically repressive to women (UNIFEM 2006). Others point to female involvement in onerous and labor-intensive economic endeavors (Divinski et al. 1998). Female repression is also evident in the Haitian feminine struggle for identity illustrated in creative literature (Francis 2004). Summarizing these views, the UN’s Gender Development Index (GDI) ranks Haiti at the very bottom in the Western hemisphere, making it seem to observers who do not carefully interpret the index that Haiti is the most female repressive country in all of Latin America, indeed the world, considerably lower in ranking than even Iran or Saudi Arabia (United Nations Development Programme 2006).

[vii]  I want to make it emphatically clear that I am not denying the importance of empowering women in Haiti: In urban areas violence against women is a problem.  I believe this is a consequence of, a) the relative absence of family—parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, and cousins—who can protect or even seek revenge for the woman, and b) women in urban areas have far fewer economic opportunities than their male counterparts. In the rural areas we find the exact opposite conditions. My point here is that, as with so many issues pertaining to life in rural Haiti, researchers and aid workers devoted to a particular agenda selectively and erroneously grasp information. The types of misinterpretations that result have left a generation of scholars, aid workers, and interested laypeople with a mistaken image of gender among the 65 percent of the population that live in provincial Haiti

[viii] Murray also finds about eleven percent of those rural Haitian men who are no longer living in the home of their parents are engaged in a conjugal union with more than one woman.

Table 16.14: Ever-polygynous men in Kinanbwa Haiti

		Has the man ever been polygynous?
		No	Yes	Total
Age	Under 35	77% (26)	23% (06)	100%
	35–49	70% (40)	30% (17)	100%
	50+	56% (35)	44% (27)	100%
	Total	67% (101)	33% (50)	100%

                                    Source: Murray 1977: 263.

[ix] The only people who are not members of a household are a few mentally disturbed individuals called pov (poor), easily spotted in their shabby straw hats and scraggly, matted hair; a bowl in hand for begging coins, they wander from market to market, and sleep on the tiny front porches of nicer houses and in churches—and, interestingly, they are very few.

[x]  Murray (1977: 173), too notes that rural Haitian women tend to be more violent than their male counterparts.

Despite the traditional rule that even if a man takes another wife, the first wife must be faithful (or he can take the homestead and the children), in reality this almost never happens. If a woman refuses to accept a koleg, she almost always takes the children and returns to her mother or a sister’s home. In the case of the man’s abuse, women also have recourse to the legal system and judges enforce the rules described above.

[xi] Congruently women play an influential role in encouraging aggressive male sexual conduct. Women condition habitually fondle the genitals of male infants, toddlers, and boys up to the ages of nine and ten years  They take part in propagating the myth that a celibate man can go insane, become ill, and may die. They tease timid boys and ridicule celibate men, taunting them with names like jay-jay (retarded) and masisi (homosexual); and they goad younger brothers and even sons into pursuing nubile young women with comments that sound to the Westerner like admonitions to rape: “you must bother them, don’t let them get away, grab them” (fo ou jennen yo, pa kite yo ale, fo ou kenbe yo).

[xii] Post-pubescent Haitian women respond to the male sexual aggressiveness with emphatic expectation of material reward, anyen pou anyen (nothing for nothing) they say and they excuse each other for engaging in an sex outside of conjugal union not with alusions to the emotional needs—women who have sex for fun are severely rebuked as piten (slut)—but with clichés that refer to material rewards, such as, “She is a woman isn’t she? It’s her right”; “Getting by is not a sin” (degaje se pa pech).  Men are acutely aware of the rules, and they commonly say “in order to have a woman you must have money” (pou gen fi, fo gen lajan) and “women eat/devour men,” meaning they take all a man’s wealth (fi konn manje gason).

[xiii] Most Haitian men will readily complain, bitterly so, of the remonstrations necessary to convince a woman to consider a sexual relationship with him; famous for making men wait months and even years for a simple response that yes, they will date him.

[xiv] The man must meet certain criteria, such as being a good worker, not having a reputation of entering into relationships and abandoning women, be known to give women money; or he must feign and lie to convince the woman and her family that he has changed, is sincere, will plant gardens, tend animals or work to obtain money and, most importantly of all, that he will bring the fruits of his labors to the woman.

The material demands being described apply whether a man is in union with the woman or not. The point cannot be overstated. And if he wants to claim exclusive sexual access to a woman, he must purchase that right with gifts and promises (or lies). In the event it is a young woman still living in her parents’ home, the man must first fianse the girl (become engaged), which requires giving a gold chain and gold earrings. And, if the man wants to maintain his right to her sexual fidelity, he must build her a house, plant gardens, and tend livestock for her. A man who fails to provide continued assistance to his partner can be legitimately cuckolded.

So summarizing to this point, sex is important and men are taught from an early age to associate women with sexual attention and to aggressively pursue it. But wanting sex is one thing; getting it is another. Women subsequently exploit male interest in sex to their material advantage and in ways that go much deeper than immediate monetary gains for all this comes to a head with the material reality of the household, something that, as seen, the man provides but the woman owns.