ABSTRACT
In most of Christian Europe honour required that better-off families supply their marrying daughters with a dowry, but many such families were strapped for cash, and were reluctant to split the family patrimony by endowing daughters. Families also seemed to promise greater marital happiness, perhaps even greater egalitarianism. All European and Middle Eastern marital property/inheritance complexes disadvantaged women, but they did so in different ways and at different stages in the life cycle. Just as the prevalence of polygamy has been greatly exaggerated for the Ottoman Empire, monogamy is something of a misnomer for Christian Europe, at least if one mean by it sexual fidelity. In the Ottoman Empire muftis began taking an increasingly expansive view of women's legal rights in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, influenced in part by the increase in the number of women litigants and by the real-life women's problems judges were encountering.
