The Women's Kingdom

Walking Marriages - Mosuo



In our Moso language there are no words for husband, wife, jealousy or fidelity; women make all the decisions about who they go with and who they stay with. A man may be an azhu, a close male friend, but that’s as close as we get to any form of marital obligation.
According to our tradition, a family should never divide. In the Moso culture, marriage is considered to be an attack on the family. We practice zouhun, ‘walking marriage’, in which a man and a woman may spend the night together, but he walks back to his own home in the morning. Couples share neither ties nor possessions. We women inherit all the property and bring up the children, who grow up side by side with their cousins - the children of our mother’s sisters.
The only men who live in the house are our brothers and uncles. So in place of one father, Moso children have many uncles who take care of them.
Women and men should not marry, for love is like the seasons - it comes and goes.
Among my people this is how families live together.
From 'Leaving Mother Lake' by Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu, 2003, Little, Brown & Company.

http://artoflivingguide.org/love/walking-marriages

An interesting video on the Mosuo tribe of China who practice "Walking Marriages". Quite informative.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbzG0n3shTM

Others:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090619-fathers-day-2009-no-fathers.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAWhZ1e8P6M

Nandita

 

Walking Marriages

Walking Marriages

Probably the most famous – and most misunderstood – aspect of Mosuo culture is their practice of “walking marriages” (or “zou hun” in Chinese), so called because the men will walk to the house of their ‘partner' at night, but return to their own home in the morning.
The Mosuo generally live in large extended families, with many generations (great grandparents, grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, etc.) all living together within the same house. For the most part, everyone lives within communal quarters, without private bedrooms or living areas. However, women between certain ages (see the section on “coming of age”) can have their own private bedrooms.
Traditionally, a Mosuo woman who is interested in a particular man will invite him to come and spend the night with her in her room. Such pairings are generally conducted secretly, so the man will walk to her house after dark (thus the description of “walking marriage”), spend the night with her, and return home early the next morning.
While it is possible for a Mosuo woman to change partners as often as she likes – and in fact, having only one sexual partner would be neither expected nor common – the majority of such couplings will actually be more long term. And few Mosuo women will have more than one partner at a time. More than one anthropologist has described this system as “serial monogamy”; and, in fact, many such pairings may last for a lifetime. ( In recent years, a lot of information about the Mosuo has portrayed their culture as a sexually promiscuous culture in which women change partners frequently; this is addressed in greater detail in our “Myths & Misinformation” section.)
Even when a pairing may be long term, however, the man will never go to live with the woman's family, or vice versa. He will continue to live with and be responsible to his family; she will continue to live with and be responsible to her family. There will be no sharing of property.
Most significantly, when children are born, the father may have little or no responsibility for his offspring (in fact, some children may not even know who their father is). If a father does want to be involved with the upbringing of his children, he will bring gifts to the mother's family, and state his intention to do so. This gives him a kind of official status within that family, but does not actually make him part of the family. Regardless of whether the father is involved or not, the child will be raised in the mother's family, and take on her family name.
This does not mean, however, that the men get of scot-free, with no responsibilities for children. Quite the opposite, in fact. Every man will share responsibilities in caring for all children born to women within their own family, be they a sister, niece, aunt, etc. In fact, children will grow up with many “aunts” and “uncles”, as all members of the extended family share in the duties of supporting and raising the children.
The result – as different as it may be from other systems – is a family structure which is, in fact, extremely stable. Think about it. Divorce is a non-issue…there are no questions over child custody (the child belongs to the mother's family), splitting of property (property is never shared), etc. If a parent dies, there is still a large extended family to provide care.
One particularly important result is the lack of preference for a particular gender. For example, in most cultures, the female will join the male's family when she gets married. The result is that if a couple has a lot of female children, they will lose them after marriage, and have no one to care for them in old age; but if they have male children, their sons (and their sons' wives) will care for them. So, in poorer populations in particular, there will be a strong preference for male children.
However, among the Mosuo, since neither male nor female children will ever leave home, there is no particular preference for one gender over the other. The focus instead tends to be on maintaining some degree of gender balance, having roughly the same proportion of male to female within a household. In situations where this becomes unbalanced, it is not uncommon for Mosuo to adopt children of the appropriate gender (or even for two households to ‘swap' male/female children). http://www.mosuoproject.org/walking.htm

 

Dear Ragini25,

If you had read my previous posts you will notice I have never endorsed any specific point of view. My whole objective was to provoke a debate. FYI I have never been comfortable with the concept of polyamory. At the same time I am of the view, blindly adhering to marriages as practised today, is misery to most women (and maybe for men too!!).

My view is that women have been getting a raw deal because of their own subservient thinking. Women are the stronger sex and they have comfortably forgotten it; and hence their plight. My agenda (if you can call it so) is only for a happier life for women.

I am very thankful to satchitananda for the very positive and helpful attitude she has. This is what we need in our women today, for a great life ahead of us.

Thanks to sweetgirl123 and Suryakala too for your appreciation.

Nandita

 

Another interesting video on the mosuo people:

The land where there are no husbands and marriage is unknown - YouTube
A visit to the Mosuo people of Lugu lake in South West China. Made by Alan Macfarlane and Xiaoxiao Yan in 2003. The absence of even the idea of marriage is an anthropological puzzle, but related to the trading system.