Smith-Greenaway Emily, Weitzman Abigail, Chilungo Abdallah
University of Southern California.
The University of Texas at Austin.
J Marriage Fam. 2019 Oct;81(5):1126-1143. doi: 10.1111/jomf.12591. Epub 2019 Jul 1.
The authors study matrilineal settings in rural Malawi, a southeast African country, to assess if women experience better marital outcomes in the presence of daughters and if so whether daughter preference plays a role.
A provocative finding in family sociology is that couples with sons experience better marital outcomes relative to those with daughters. Sociologists contend that these marital benefits are attributable to the gender system fostering greater closeness between fathers and sons, a preference for sons, or economic, cultural, and social incentives for fathers to invest more in unions that have produced sons. Extrapolating these arguments beyond son-inspired marital benefits in patriarchal settings suggests that the reverse process-daughter-inspired marital benefits-could prevail in matrilineal contexts.
The authors analyze three rounds of the nationally representative Malawi Demographic and Health Survey. They estimate three series of parity-specific, multivariable logistic regression models to assess the associations between child sex composition and marital outcomes (two forms of relationship abuse and polygyny) and model each outcome among the full sample of women with one to four children and control for number of children, thus conveying the average effect of sex composition across parities.
Women with daughters-particularly women with only daughters-in predominately matrilineal, rural communities in the central and southern regions of Malawi are more likely to be in monogamous versus polygynous unions and are less likely to have experienced emotionally abusive and controlling behaviors. We find little evidence that women and men explicitly prefer or pursue daughters.
The study shows that a matrilineal gender system can influence marital dynamics in the presence of daughters even without fostering an overwhelming preference for them.
作者对非洲东南部国家马拉维农村的母系社会环境进行研究，以评估在有女儿的情况下女性是否会有更好的婚姻结局，若如此，女儿偏好是否发挥了作用。
家庭社会学中一个引人深思的发现是，与有女儿的夫妇相比，有儿子的夫妇婚姻结局更好。社会学家认为，这些婚姻益处归因于性别体系促使父亲与儿子关系更亲密、对儿子的偏好，或父亲在有儿子的家庭中投入更多的经济、文化和社会激励因素。将这些观点延伸至父权社会中由儿子带来的婚姻益处之外，意味着相反的过程——由女儿带来的婚姻益处——可能在母系社会环境中占主导。
作者分析了三轮具有全国代表性的马拉维人口与健康调查。他们估计了三组特定胎次的多变量逻辑回归模型，以评估子女性别构成与婚姻结局（两种形式的关系虐待和一夫多妻制）之间的关联，并对有一至四个孩子的女性全样本中的每种结局进行建模，同时控制孩子数量，从而得出不同胎次中性别构成的平均影响。
在马拉维中部和南部以母系为主的农村社区，有女儿的女性，尤其是只有女儿的女性，更有可能处于一夫一妻制而非一夫多妻制婚姻中，且遭受情感虐待和控制行为的可能性较小。我们几乎没有发现证据表明女性和男性明确偏好或追求女儿。
该研究表明，即使没有形成对女儿的压倒性偏好，母系性别体系在有女儿的情况下也会影响婚姻动态。
