Patricia Dixon - We Want for Our Sisters What We Want for Ourselves: African American Women Who Practice Polygyny by Consent

We Want for our Sisters

What We Want for Ourselves

Patricia Dixon-Spear

Imprint Womanist Press

All Rights Reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9968000-0-6

Nuvo Development, Inc.

Decatur, GA 30034

www.nuvodevelopment.com

To Anna Mae and Genie J. Dixon

I am eternally grateful

A culture of domination is necessarily a culture where lying is an acceptable norm. It in fact is required. White supremacy has always relied on structures of deceit...

Within the colonizing process, black people were socialized to believe that survival was possible only if they learned how to deceive.

bell hooks, 1993

The primary reason for revising this publication is to make it more accessible to a broader reading audience. Some chapters were shortened and combined with minor edits, while others that seemed less relevant to the subject matter were taken out completely. The chapters on the practice of polygyny in the communities of African Americans were pretty much left intact with minor edits. Although the book has been shortened, much of what was left intact was done to preserve the information and fervor of the first edition.

Since the first edition of this work, I have gotten married, which means I now have a marriage license. Getting the marriage license was important at this point in my life, since I had not done it yet and felt the need to do it in my lifetime. It was also important for me in my work as a relationships, marriage, and family educator. Although I have years of experience in relationships and have cohabitated twice, for some reason, peopleespecially those who are marriedthink if one has not been married one cannot teach them anything about marriage. It is almost like saying, because one was not a slave one cannot teach about slavery in the United States. Therefore, I thought it was important to get a marriage license to help me in my work.

Another reason that I got married (besides finally meeting a person that I really love and wanted to marry) is I needed to. I did not want to be in a relationship that felt like I was doing the "same old thing"allowing someone to engage me physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and after it gets old or the going gets tough, they, or I for that matter, move on to the next relationship. I needed the commitment to be taken to the next level. I really needed to know that he really meant what he said. I felt like, if you are serious, "meet me downtown at the courthouse" (something I tell the young women in my classes because it worked).

Now that I have the marriage license, I think the most difficult challenge in a polygynous marriage without a license is the fact that it is not legal. If a person has been in the dating arena for some time, being in a polygynous marriage without a license might feel like they are doing the "same old thing." Interestingly, now that I am married it often feels like this, but because of the legal commitment it makes me, and I imagine others who marry, feel more secure. Also, as we grow together in our marriage, the relationship feels more like a real partnership.

Because I am now married, I understand why not being legally married is one of the most difficult challenges for nonlegal wives. Because they do not hold the marriage license, they may not feel the same level of security as the legal wife. They are also faced with the challenge of how to present themselves to their families, communities (other than the one they have joined), in the workplace, and on legal documents. A nagging question that is a constant for some women is: "Am I really a wife?"

In spite of the challenge of not having a marriage license, considering the social circumstances surrounding the lives of African descendant peopleparticularly men, where large numbers are lost to incarceration, death, and other social illsand understanding the experiences of women of African descent, the question that remains for me is, what alternative is there for them?

Although the monogamous, nuclear family is the accepted cultural norm, we know that it is not the majority practice. We also know that polygyny is practiced in various forms (although not in ways that are healthy for women or men). But aside from polygyny, there are, and always have been, various family forms throughout the world and in the United States. Because of the close to 50 percent divorce rate (67 percent for African Americans), the blended family is increasingly becoming the family arrangement with a marriage license. Blended families means multiple parents and children, and this becomes more complex when there is a focus by either of the parents around their families of origin which is characteristic of many African American families. These families are faced with many challenges because U.S. society remains in a state of denial about the various family forms and has not yet established ways to help people navigate through them. When there is no marriage license, there are numerous family formations, some of which include cohabitating couples, multiple fertility families (cohabitating couples who are co-parents with others), and same-sex families, all of which face even more challenges because the institution of marriage does not support them. Then there is the world of singles who may or may not be in dating relationships, who may or may not have children, who may or may not be co-parenting, and who may face difficulty getting married because of changing social and cultural trends. This is in addition to trying to marry and form families in a society that still has not established institutions to teach us how to do so. Much of this is symptomatic of the Western cultural norm of the family being a "private" institution, which should be left alone by the state to handle its own affairs, while much of how it used to handle its own affairs in the past is now being handled by the state. Although the fact that the federal government has recently expended more than $100 million over a period of five years, for marriage and fatherhood education shows movement in this direction, the focus is still on the monogamous, nuclear family.

How I think and feel about the possibilities of the practice of polygyny in U.S. society has waxed and waned, especially in light of the state of affairs of our relationships, marriages, and families, and the work that needs to be done. I have been particularly struck by students who have taken my African American male-female relationships course and approached me about becoming involved in polygynous relationships. I was concerned, as it is clear that most people do not know how to do a monogamous relationship let alone a polygynous one. I know that many of them have not reached the level of maturitymentally, emotionally, or spirituallythat is necessary to enter into polygyny. I even stopped discussing it in my courses for a time. I also criticized African American leaders in the last edition for not taking a stance in favor of polygyny, but am now aware that the issue is more complex. I am also aware that some of the most critical work that has to be done must be done with African American men, particularly around masculinity, fatherhood, and how they think about and engage women.