"Bride Price" vs. Dowry: Which Gender Is Privileged Depends on Your Culture

        In "bride price" cultures," the bride's family absorbs land, gifts, and/or capital from the groom's family.  This may or may not coincide with a "matrilocal" marriage, in which the husband moves in with the bride's family.  The matrilocal groom becomes the "son-in-law" who must compete with the bride's brothers for the bride's parents' control of status and resources. 

        In "dowry" cultures, the groom's family absorbs land, gifts, and/or capital from the bride's family.  This may or may not coincide with a "patrilocal" marriage, in which the bride moves in with the groom's family.  The patrilocal bride becomes the "daughter-in-law" who must compete with the groom's sisters for the groom's parents' control of status and resources.  Both the exchange of goods and the exchange of persons (locality) may be combined differently from culture to culture, but within a culture, there can be only one "norm."

         Traditional European marriages are both dowry and patrilocal, resulting in many literary plots in which the bride is mistreated by the groom's parents and/or sisters ["Cinderella"].   Traditional Chinese marriages are bride-price and patrilocal, resulting in many literary plots in which the groom's parents punish the brides for the high prices they cost the family.  Because traditional Chinese families, in the past, were polygamous, the accumulation of brides might produce intense competition among them for scarce power and status within the household.

         Dramatic political or biological events, like revolutions or plagues, might suddenly alter a culture's wedding customs.  China's Communist revolution ended the Han Dynasty and established the People's Republic of China where polygamy was banned, though it still might persist as open or covert "concubinage" in very high or very low status families.  The Chinese government's "One Child" policy, introduced and implemented in 1978-9 to control the nation's birth rate, resulted in family planning decisions that selectively favored male children to carry on the paternal name.  Females were aborted, killed after birth, abandoned, or put up for adoption by foreign families.  This has resulted in a dramatic shortage of female brides, and in accordance with classical economic "supply-demand" theory, the bride price has increased.  

Louisa Lim, "For Chinese Women, Marriage Depends on the Right 'Bride Price'," (Morning Edition, NPR, 4-23-13).  [This is a 9 minute audio news story that is also available from NPR as a text transcription, but the groom and groom's-men singing outside the bride's door really ought to be heard.]