ABSTRACT

This chapter presents the first academic study of the inner working of polygamous households in Java through a series of detailed case studies. It discusses the relationships between wives in polygamous marriages in the context where Islamist campaigns had stressed acceptance of polygamy as a sign of wives’ religious piety, and represented relationships between co-wives as ‘good’ and harmonious. Here I assess these claims by exploring the everyday relationships between wives. As I have stressed in preceding chapters, most Muslims believe that Islam requires a polygamous husband to treat all his wives equally. This equal treatment is usually measured by a husband’s equal distribution of time, attention and resources among his wives. Therefore, the second section of this chapter looks at the rosters that polygamous husbands use to divide their time between wives. To explore these processes, the chapter also describes the ways in which polygamous households celebrate important days, such as the first day of Idul Fitri, and attend familial and official parties. I also discuss economic management in polygamous households, to see whether a polygamous husband treats his wives justly by distributing equal economic resources, and to see how polygamous marriage affects the economic wellbeing of first wives. As children were also involved in these households, I shall briefly examine the possible influence of their father’s polygamous marriage on the emotional and economic well-being of the children. Most of the data in this section derives from the interviews with mothers, and from adult children recalling their family life.