I may possibly have mentioned the Deceased Wife's Sister thing on previous occasions...

[oursin]

And honestly, I find this discussion over at AITA so point thahr, misst.

Okay, yes, I think the whole thing of the family doing their best to erase his first wife, the child's mother, very, very creepy and inappropriate -

But mostly it seems to be people going OMG HE MARRIED HIS DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER????!!!!! HORRORZZZ

Going on like a load of Victorian woezerers...

Really, this used to be if, not very common, not uncommon, even if for a long time the relationship either had to be without benefit of clergy or undertaken abroad.

Mind you, I notice that commentators there often get very wound up about cousins marrying, yea, even unto the third and fourth degree. (Ahem ahem the Darwin/Wedgwood Dynasty.) I think assumptions being made about ease of exogamy in earlier phases of society...

***

In entirely other news, I virtually attended a seminar earlier this week and ventured a question, and lo, the speaker turned out to be a fellow-fan of early C20th gay pacifist male suffragist sex reformer and subsequently entered into correspondence.

Very niche fandom!

Comments

[lilysea]

I looked up the genetic risk of cousin marriage after watching a Jane Austen film in which someone marries their cousin

and the risk is equivalent to a woman who has not married her cousin having a child at age 40 or above...

which is a lot less than I thought it was before I looked it up!

[oursin]

I remember hearing a talk from somebody who does genetic counselling for the Pakistani community in Bradford (cousin marriage preferred), and they said the dangers are grossly exaggerated, provided there are no specific risk factors, even though people rant on about them.

[nineveh_uk]

IIRC the problems with some communities is cousin marriage being very prevalent, so you marry your cousin and so on for generations. But just once? No real issue (though if you're NW European you've presumably bumped your cystic fibrosis risk up, so I if I had a male cousin on that side, I would not marry him).

[oursin]

Yes, with the person I mentioned who was genetic-counselling in Bradford, I think they said - besides obvious risk factors - they would point out if things were getting a bit too close over generations.

[ethelmay]

Well, that and some cousins are more closely related than others. I don't think double first cousins should marry, nor cousins whose sibling-parents are identical twins.

[mrissa]

For me it's not the genetic risk, it's that my cousins are literally my family, they are the people who grew up as my family when I was a small child, or when they were, depending on who's older. It's a different shape of relationship.

I discovered last month that one of my second cousins has done (probably is still doing) some deeply horrible things, and it hurt in ways that it would not hurt me to hear that a random person I know as an adult had done them, because...he was my baby cousin, I pushed him on the swings when I was 10 and he was 5, how has he chosen to become this person. It's just a different shape of relationship.

[oursin]

That sounds like Westermarck Effect?

[mrissa]

Maybe? I feel like that effect assumes that sibling is the only family relationship that matters, which you get a lot in the kind of affluent Westerners who perform this kind of labeling--it feels to me like it's imposing the thing that the researcher has already determined is important (sibling relationship) on other relationships to model them, rather than saying, hey, culturally sometimes cousin is an important nonsexual-familial relationship as well.

That is: the second cousin in question has sisters, he would never describe me as having been raised like their sister and neither would I (and neither would the sisters). What I was raised like was their cousin. If someone from a different cultural sphere needs to label that "like a sibling" in order to explain the familial bond/reaction, they're...well, wrong, actually. Being their cousin was culturally and personally important in itself.

[ethelmay]

There's also the question of what happens if the marriage goes bad but you still have to be their cousin, their parents are still your aunt and uncle... it all sounds potentially Extra Fraught.

[shewhostaples]

Which reminds me, I've been meaning to share some bits from my grandmother's memoirs (her mother was a Wedgwood). And there were Quakers on the other side of my father's family, so there would have been plenty of intermarriage there too.

... And then my father married his first cousin's stepdaughter, so, although there's no consanguinity in my immediate ancestry, I do have two uncles and an aunt who are also my second cousins, and some first cousins who are also second cousins once removed. And no intention of marrying any of them.

[oursin]

As I recall - via colleague who catalogued the Thomas Hodgkin papers - the Quakers were very cautious re cousin marriage and Hodgkin had to make a case before the whole meeting as to why he should be able to marry his? - or maybe they forbade the marriage? - it was quite a long time ago.

[shewhostaples]

I'll have to look it up. But there was certainly a time when marrying out was Not Done, and it wasn't a huge community to begin with...

[antisoppist]

My great-grandparents were a dead wife's sister marriage. Their children didn't know until they were adults, although it is all written in the family bible and three siblings in one family married four in another so all their uncles and aunts must have known. There was a family rumour they married in Jersey but I got the marriage certificate and it was London. This was 1892 or so I think. Wasn't it that they had to change the law in 1907 because everyone was doing it anyway?

My ex-in-laws were step-brother and step-sister. Their parents married when they were in their teens but I found that a bit weird.

[oursin]

Couples would marry away from home where nobody they knew was likely to stand up to declare Just Cause or Impediment, but the marriage was still invalid and I suspect there would have been immense problems with inheritance over legitimacy of offspring, unless they were really meticulous in drawing up watertight wills and naming them. (I suspect a marriage in Jersey would have counted as valid because different laws?)

Possibly MPs were just fed up with the bill coming up every year and decided, hell, let's pass it and be done. (Yes, I have masses of relevant historiography somewhere about this, if I could find it.)

I've noticed people on AITA and elsewhere getting their knickers twisted about step-siblings marrying or getting into relationships, even if they were well past childhood when they became thus related.

[nineveh_uk]

Possibly MPs were just fed up with the bill coming up every year and decided, hell, let's pass it and be done.

An understandable position. And one going on for 300 years by that point - doing my masters I had a letter from Bishop Jewel in 1569 that he wished 'they would declare it lawful to marry two sisters so should the world be out of doubt'.

[mrissa]

I strongly suspect that the twisted knickers are coming from people who process familial relationships one way not really understanding that not every situation is like that. Because I was not a child when I met my younger BIL--I met him because I was marrying his brother--and he looks like my husband and we have many interests in common and I adore him. Also our brains have absolutely and fully accepted each other into the FAMILY category--he often just refers to me as his sister rather than his sister-in-law, which makes me so happy because yes, that's how I feel too--so when I run into a situation like the one described, I have to actively remind myself that not every relationship is like that. And in fact my relationship with their middle brother is not like that: the reason I would never marry middle BIL in the event of husband's demise is NOT that my brain would set of the flashing red alarm that goes "FAMILY, INCEST TABOO" but that we don't get on particularly. They are literally the same degree of related to me. There is no "half-brother" or "came around later" or anything. Just...I have a firsthand example of how brains can slurp up opportunities to be in that category differently, so it's easier to say, ah, there's always variation here.

[caulkhead]

I know it only as a joke in Iolanthe and was astonished to find people actually still cared.

[thistleingrey]

My ex's father's family had "madness" and physical deficiencies as a result of longterm inbreeding, but then, people do studies on it, it's that well recognized. :/ We went to a genetic counselor before deciding to try becoming pregnant, and the counselor was like, good job, exogamy! Somewhere I still have detailed notes on which unmet relatives had which issues--and one thing did survive general-white-European exogamy, his first cousin's inheritance of late-onset muscular atrophy. Not dystrophy, and I'm not sure of the underlying cause.

("Madness" is in quotation marks because the proximate bits are identifiable as clinical anxiety and bipolar, and because some of it seems to've been secondary/environmental. Bipolar is not inherently necessarily a cause of nearly dropping one's child out a window--but feeling isolated and completely unsupported postpartum could be, without the rest of it.)

[oursin]

An Icelandic movie I saw a few years ago, a noir thriller, leant heavily on the fact that in Iceland there is (understandably and feasibly, given how small the population and much of it historically in isolated communities) a universal genetic registry. (Also everybody knew everybody else, so everywhere the cop protag went people were asking whether his daughter was still a junkie...).

[threeringedmoon]

About everyone knowing everyone in Iceland: my friends (from the US) were staying in a guest house, and expressed their disappointment to the manager that one of the attractions that there wanted to see was closed. The manager of the guest house called the manager of the attraction who opened it so my friends could go see it.

[thistleingrey]

The registry sounds sensible, considering! (heh.)

[elainegrey]

OP doesn't note what the mother died of ("got sick"), and i am not a geneticist, but depending on what the mother died of, mother died of X is not the same risk as aunt died of X. Google says, "Mother–daughters share 50% of their genes, whereas typical aunt–nieces share on average 25% of their genes."

I assume typical is exogamy assumed.

[calimac]

Given the society, marrying a dead wife's sister often made so much sense - and was best for the children, too, since the sister had probably been taking care of them since their mother died.

Still, it depends on circumstances. The thought of marrying any of my wife's sisters ... I like them all, but ... no.

[ethelmay]

No one seems to have thought of Patrick Brontë marrying Charlotte Branwell, though.

[oursin]

Well, he would as a clergyman have been particularly aware of forbidden degrees!

[oursin]

And quite often sister had already come into household to nurse the wife and take some of domestic burden.

A survey of British sexual fantasies some few years back with which I was not entirely prepossessed encountered: ' 'the apparently repetitive desire of the British male to engage with his sister-in-law'.

[replyhazy]

Yeah, my husband's grandparents were a marry-the-deceased-wife's-sister marriage. Which "shouldn't have happened", apparently, because these were all Catholics, and I'm puzzled how it all worked out for them -- but of course I never met any of these folks, they are long gone.

It's interesting to me, from sort of an anthropological angle, that some cultures consider this The Thing To Do and others consider it verboten, as if it's a polygamous marriage or incestuous.

[silveradept]

As a person who occasionally dabbles in the study of history and of religion, is it not the case that even in either or both of the foundational writings of Judaism and Christianity (and possibly by extension, Islam, since they also take many of those books as canonical) that there is a command that should a wife die before her husband, that marrying whichever sister is still unmarried and of age in the family is the Right and Prudent thing to do, so that there are still the familial and marriage bonds at work, even if it is not the initial person married? Or am I remembering some other thing?

[oursin]

Possibly, but the edict I recall was the one about brother having to marry deceased brother's widow - Levirate marriage - in order to beget son for the lineage. This may be due to knowing what the heinous sin of Onan actually was (i.e. not wanking).

[silveradept]

That's the thing I am thinking of, thank you. It's great how memory lets me be in the neighborhood but ringing the bell of the wrong house.