In the second novel, Rose in Bloom, she arrives home from a long trip to Europe and is deemed to have become a woman. She is greeted by a line-up of her seven male first-cousins, of whom the youngest immediately lets the cat out of the bag. “The aunts say that you’d better marry one of us, and keep the property in the family.” Rose is horrified, and spends the novel asserting her independence – until, of course, she falls in love with the right cousin and makes both herself and her family happy.
In cases like the fictional Rose, the need would be acute: the bulk of the family’s wealth has fallen to a young woman, in a society which would allow her husband to assume control of it. Cousin marriage, from West to East, is an efficient way of clipping the wings of young women.
If we are to talk about cousin-marriage in 21st century Britain, therefore, an element of honesty is required. Louisa May Alcott’s America may have briefly permitted cousin-marriage in certain states, but by the time of Eight Cousins it had already been banned in eight states; today that number is 24. For most of European history, marriage between first cousins has been banned in line with papal rules governing incest – it was legalised in England in 1540 as part of Henry VIII’s campaign to rewrite church law to suit his own marital intentions.
The academic Patrick Nash, a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, has published one of the most comprehensive studies of first cousin marriage in this country. Nash’s findings posit that marriages between first cousins account for 40-60 per cent of marriages between British Pakistanis, a number which rises to over 90 per cent within multiple Bradford biraderi groups (clan communities).
In 2011, the British consul in Bangladesh complained that “every week”, they encounter a woman with a British passport being pressured to marry an older male relative in South Asia who wants to emigrate to Britain. The phenomenon was estimated by the BBC to put tens of thousands of women and girls at risk each year; young South Asian brides are also conversely brought to Britain to marry British-born men.
Many of the arguments made against cousin marriage are built on this very real risk of genetic disease to children. Yet that only reveals half of the problem. As a cultural phenomenon, cousin marriage is a mechanism for asserting family control.
I grew up on benefits and experienced just how nasty Brits can be
Read MoreIqbal Mohamed fell directly into Richard Holden’s trap last week. One of the handful of insurgent Independent MPs elected by predominantly Muslim communities at the last election, his defence of cousin marriage was sufficiently crude to expose a clash of values that Holden reckons he can win. As pointed out last week by Karma Nirvana, a leading charity supporting South Asian women against honour violence, Holden does not have a track record of working with the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector. Yet values matter, and we should be prepared to fight for values of liberty and independence when they are under threat.
British marriage laws have always been framed to protect young people from exploitation. From 1837 to 1886, a legal marriage could only be conducted between 8am and 3pm, to prevent clandestine marriages and the abduction of heiresses. For years, the British intelligentsia agonised about whether a man should be allowed to marry his dead wife’s sister, but with economic pressures came legal change. After the First World War, the sudden rise in military widows resulted in a legal rush to allow them to marry their husband’s brothers, many of whom were already financially responsible for them.
There are societies which value family cohesion over the individual pursuit of happiness, but they are incompatible with the liberal values of the Enlightenment. Whether in nineteenth century Boston, or twenty-first century Bradford, the marriage of first cousins is a tool for restricting the lives of young people, particularly young women. We should not be afraid to confront it.
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