Pretty much what the title said. There’s a wide variety of marriage customs in human history but I can’t think of any society that restricted people to one spouse for a lifetime and prohibited a person from marrying a second time if their original spouse died (unless there were other factors involved). Were there any?
In one very special case. Under old Jewish law, if a Woman married A, and he died, and she married B and he died, and she married C and he died she was prohibited from marrying again.
As I understand satī , the widow flings herself /is flung onto the funeral pyre, so no remarrying there. Not such a common practice there days, though.
A very special case: Orthodox (Christian) clergy [priests] are permitted to marry before ordination, but not to remarry if their wife dies (or to marry if they are ordained while still single, too). It’s customarily said that Orthodox bishops cannot be married, but that is not a law of the church. Rather the practice is that the bishops are almost exclusively selected from among the monks, who are under a vow of celibacy. In theory and by the rules, a bishop could be married; in practice, he never is. (There was one 20th century case of an Orthodox bishop chosen from among the non-monastic clergy who was a widower when made a bishop.) This does not apply to the rest of the cultures in which Orthodoxy is a major religion, though, just the clergy.
I believe it was standard custom among several ancient Middle Eastern cultures that a woman with adult children widowed after her childbearing years would not remarry but be supported by her son(s). I don’t know if this was a tabu-type rule in any of them, though, or just a default expectation which might be ignored in specific cases.
In a movie I saw (I know, good source, but it was about this practice specifically) Hindi widows used to be sent away to a sort of widow house to live in poverty the rest of their lives. Re-marriage was forbidden. This took place as recently as Ghandi’s campaign apparently.
In some places, like Crete, a widow will cover herself in black clothing. I don’t know if that specifically prohibits her from remarrying but it reduces her chances of attracting a replacement spouse. It’s much unlike the behavior of Spears, Hilton, Lohan $ Co.
I once read that in Indian culture, a widow (one who has not immolated herself) is typically referred to as “a dead woman waiting to die.” No self-respecting man will take any interest in her, however attractive she might be. But I got that from a historical novel about Marco Polo, and have no other cite.
I remember now. The movie was Water and was made by Deepa Mehta. It is not a documentary, but the conditions shown were real, if not the actual characters.
Because she is clearly a jinx.
Not quite the same thing, but pensions payable to a widow from a pension fund often used to cease on the widow’s remarriage. That would certainly have been a significant factor reducing the incidence of remarriage.
But if you’re over a certain age, you may still collect the dead spouse’s Social Security benefit.
This is a sorta, kinda example, depending on your definitions and a few other things.
In the LDS church, a couple who meets certain requirements can be married in a special ceremony in one of the temples, normally called (not surprisingly) a “Temple Marriage”.
As I understand it, the ceremony has the couple make special commitments to each other and to God, and also marries them not just “until death do us part”, but for ‘time and all eternity”. According to their beliefs, they remain married even after death, and will be together in the afterlife.
Now if the wife of such a couple dies, the husband can be married in the same way to another woman. If this happens, then according to their beliefs, the man will have both women as his wives in the afterlife. This is the only vestige of polygamy that remains in the LDS church.
But if the husband dies, the woman cannot marry again in the temple. She can marry again in a civil ceremony, or even a regular church marriage. But she can’t go through the special marriage in the temple.
So you could kind of say that the woman can not marry again, at least not the special commitment that presumably means the most to her. On the other hand, as someone who believed in the tenets of the LDS church to begin with, she presumably wouldn’t want to anyway, so it’s not much of a restriction.
Many conservative Hindus still frown upon widow remarriage, but it isn’t actually prohibited as it was in medieval Hindu law codes. The widow’s prescribed lot was generally either self-immolation on her husband’s pyre or a pretty penitential life of asceticism and waiting on others.
Traditionally, in India, women were not allowed to remarry. Remarriage is now a right under Indian law, but among more conservative circles, there is still a prejudice against remarriage for women.
Note, no such restrictions for men.
How “old”? In the hypothetical proposed to Jesus, the woman is described as marrying seven times, and the question was whose wife she would be in heaven, with no caveat for her marriages not being valid.
There’s a twist on remarriage law in Judaism, called yibum or levirate marriage. If a woman is married to a man but has no children, and the man dies, the woman is supposed to marry the dead husband’s brother. That’s laid out in the Torah, so I could see Jewish law considering the obligation to do that to be more important than a law about remarriage that doesn’t come from the Torah (that limit on remarriages doesn’t).
There are also some rules in Judaism about who you can marry if you remarry after your spouse dies. A widow can’t marry her stepson, for example, even though there is no blood relationship between them. A widow isn’t allowed to marry one of her brothers-in-law, except in the case of levirate marriage- so a widow with children wouldn’t be allowed to marry her dead husband’s brother.
There are also restrictions in Jewish law about remarriage after divorce. If a couple gets divorced, the wife marries someone else, divorces him, and wants to remarry her first husband, that’s not allowed. If a man has divorced a woman, he’s not allowed to marry any of her sisters while she is alive. A divorced man is not allowed to marry his ex-wife’s mother or any of her daughters or granddaughters.
Wasn’t that Onan’s problem?
Yes and No. Murphy’s First Principle of Estate Law is, “Where there’s a will, there’s a bunch of relatives fighting over it.” Onan’s situation (which by the way has nothing to do with masturbation, if anyone still wasn’t aware) is a case in point.
The issue in Oman and Tamar’s case was not about sex, nor quite about marriage law. It was about inheritance – and Scripture makes that clear, but in such a veiled sort of way that it is easily missed.
According to Jewish law in patriarchal times:
[ul][li]Property was divided evenly among sons, with one more portion than there were sons, which passed to the eldest son. This was the birthright.[/li][li]A widow with children was to be supported by her sons. She did not inherit; her sons did, but it was their duty to provide for her.[/li][li]A childless widow was to be taken by the brother of the deceased, who would beget a son on her. But in law that was not his own son, but reckoned as the son of the childless deceased.[/ul][/li]
Now, consider the Judah family. He had three sons at that point (the twins by Tamar had of course not yet been born): Er, Onan, and Shelah. Therefore the estate on his death would be divided in fourths, 50% going to Er the firstborn, 25% to Onan, and 25% to Shelah.
Then Er dies childless while his father is still alive. With only two sons left, Onan now would be entitled to the birthright, making the estate 66.7% Onan’s and 33.3% Shelah’s. Er’s widow Tamar gets nothing. To avoid this situation, the levirate marriage provision comes in. Onan is required to have sex with Tamar, and beget on her a son. But by law that is not Onan’s son, but Er’s, and therefore heir to 50% of Judah’s estate, as heir of the firstborn, when the old man finally kicks the bucket.
Onan’s little gimmick of coitus interruptus was a way for him to cling to the lion’s share of Judah’s estate. And that, not kinky sex, was what pissed God off, according to Scripture – he was leaving Tamar childless and impoverished, to get his greedy mitts on two-thirds of his father’s estate. So God strikes Onan down.
Nobody mentions Shelah’s reaction; he was probably eagerly awaiting his own chance to get laid. But Judah, protective of his youngest and now sole surviving son, tells Tamar to take a hike. And she poses as a prostitute, to trick Judah into begetting the sons that she was rightfully entitled to bear, to give her progeny their rightful share of the estate. (Note Shelah in the background, bewailing, “Everybody’s getting laid but me!” ;))
It was not strictly a sex issue that brought judgment on Onan, but a family inheritance fraud scheme that God saw through.
I was rushing to go somewhere when I posted, and I forgot to mention- the woman discussed in Matthew was married sequentially to seven brothers in levirate marriages.
Another restriction on Jewish remarriage after divorce that I forgot to mention: if you were committing adultery, then get divorced from your spouse, you’re not allowed to marry the person you were committing adultery with while you were married. I suspect the same would apply if you had been cheating on your spouse, your spouse died, and you wanted to remarry- you couldn’t marry the person who you’d been cheating on your spouse with.
Jewish law mandates a waiting period of at least 3 months before remarriage after someone is widowed or divorced. This is so that, if a woman is pregnant, it’s presumably clear who the father is. There’s a two-year waiting period for a woman who is pregnant or nursing and wants to remarry. There’s a tradition that a man should wait for one cycle of the Jewish holidays (Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot) to pass after he is widowed or divorced before remarrying, to make sure he isn’t rushing into an undesirable relationship.
So it does appear there are at least a couple of societies where a woman is expected to make one marriage last her lifetime. Any examples of a society where the men only get one shot at marriage?