Myth of the woman as property

Chapter six of David Graeber’s Debt describes ways in which human economies – those based on the exchange and movement of human beings rather than wealth – function. In particular, he recounts a study by the anthropologist Phillipe Rospabé of “bridewealth” across several continents. Rospabé concluded that the exchange of goods or currency at the time of marriage is not a means of purchasing a wife like one would in the market economy; rather, it was a symbolic gesture indicating that a human life – the future wife – is so valuable that it cannot be compensated for by anything but another human. This then ties back to the Tiv economy, which we have studied in recent weeks through the work of Bohannan and Guyer and also Rospabé. Rospabé challenges Bohannan’s spheres of exchange, in which women and children occupied the highest sphere, by noting that it is impossible within the Tiv economy to convert cattle or brass rods into a value great enough for a wife.

Graeber explains bridewealth and bloodwealth as similar in this, as both recognize the impossibility of compensating for a human life. However, there exists at least a myth of the woman as property in at least Western culture. Does this myth have any grounding in reality, and, if so, where did it originate? If not, why would such a myth exist? In those societies that do/did treat women as property, what value did she hold in society?