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Summary
There have been recurring claims that a wife is not a true family member. This belief is rooted in patriarchy, which views women as property to be owned and passed down. However, this has no place in modern law. Legal practitioner Dogo Joy shares how.
“At the end of the day, your wife is not your relative,” said a young man from Oshogbo. “My father taught me that if I ever get married and have kids, I should never forget that in my home, my wife is the only one who isn’t my relative. As I grow older, his words become more real.”
Comments like these are just outright misogynistic. Interestingly, if his wife makes this statement, it would likely end in a family meeting.
If you also ask Omobaobola if he considers his mother a part of their family, he would say yes, forgetting that his mother is also a wife to someone.
Reason being that men like these want to reserve the right to be misogynistic to their wives because of the privilege it affords them, while creating an exception for the mothers, sisters or daughters they truly like…. but the sad truth about sexism is that there are no exceptions. The same system you uphold would come back to hunt you.
So how did comments like this come to be?
A Historical Perspective
The idea that a woman is not a member of the family has a deep historical bearing rooted in patriarchy.
In many old traditions in Nigeria, women were not seen as full humans; they were seen as property of the husband.
A property might stay under the same roof as its owner, a property might even be useful and indispensable to its owner, but properties are not considered family members, no matter how useful they are.
They are meant to be owned—first by their father, then by their husband (after he has paid the bride price), and lastly passed down to the son (after her husband’s death). A woman is owned and passed down by the men in her life.
In fact, in many cultures, like the Old Igbo culture that allowed for Levirate marriage (when a male relative marries the widow of his brother), she is inherited by male relatives alongside lands and other chattels.
During those times, women did not even have the right over their children because children were considered ‘properties of the man’s family’ and a property cannot own property.
Women were disposable and passed around, treated like necessary evils— chatter boxes who are only useful for sex, procreation and free labour.
Now, while the law has secured the position of women in the family, it is one thing to get legal protection and another thing to change the cultural beliefs.
Like I said in a previous post, just because a right is legally available doesn’t mean it is culturally viable. Despite women being equal in the eyes of the law, culturally, this bias still persists strongly.
A cultural perspective
Another reason why people claim wives are not part of the family is that a wife can divorce them.
That is, in fact, funny because in Nigerian culture, families actually break up, and this act of breaking up is culturally recognised! The only difference is in the terminology used in describing the break-up.
For instance:
A parent parting ways with their children is called disowning, disinheritance, relinquishing parental rights or familial exile.
A child parting ways with parents, siblings or relatives is called cutting off or emancipation.
A lover parting ways with a significant other is called breaking up.
A spouse parting ways with the other spouse is called divorce.
Parting ways by reason of an act of nature is called death, widowhood, widowerhood or orphanhood.
So it becomes evident that even the so-called blood relation can also part ways. Parting ways is not peculiar to wives! They are just known by different terminologies.
So what does the law have to say about the status of wives in the family?
1. It is a constitutionally recognised right: Chapter IV of our Constitution recognises every citizen’s right to freedom of private and family life.
It didn’t just recognise the right to family life, it recognises the right to freedom of… What this means is that you not only have a right to be part of a family, you have a freedom to create one (usually through marriage or adoption). Hence, family is not limited to blood relation.
2. Marriage creates a family bond: In Nigeria today (as I believe it is with many jurisdictions out there, there are three ways of creating a family bond:
First is by birth. The very act of birthing a child makes that child a member of the family to the parents as well as the extended family.
Second is by marriage: This is a family relationship created out of contract.
The law views marriage as a contract, albeit a special kind of contract, as seen in the Marriage Act.
This contract creates not only a relationship with the wife but also a stepparent relationship with the children, such as a spouse might have.
The law recognises it as a valid type of family because you can only enter it when you’re of age, of full mental capacity, and give your full and informed consent. You chose it, and the law recognises it regardless of what your culture says.
Third is by family, through adoption, fostering, etc. In Nigeria, you don’t need to be married to adopt.
Adoption is permanent in that it terminates the biological relationship the child shares with its biological parents, and in its place, the law creates a legal relationship between the adoptee and the adopter.
Fostering merely suspends the relationship between the biological parent and child during the period of fostering.
Having established that, it is pertinent to state that today, we are seeing more nonconventional family set-ups where people can gather, e.g., friends can gather and decide to be family.
Although this is not legally recognised under Nigerian law, it is not illegal (an act can only be illegal if a law explicitly prohibits it). Thus, although unconventional family set-ups are not legally recognised, they are also not prohibited.
3. Right of advancement: The law didn’t just recognise a person’s right to start a family, it also imposes duties and obligations towards that wife.
A husband has a legal duty to advance his wife (duty to provide). This duty of advancement is only recognised in a husband-wife relationship and not in any other relationship. This is because the law views marriage as a contract that creates familial bonds, hence imposes duties to maintain that bond.
Spousal and parental relationships are the only relationships in which the law imposes a legal duty on one person to financially maintain another human!
4. Custody: The law also recognises the wife’s right to custody and care of her children. This is a far cry form our traditional beliefs that a wife is a property to be owned hence can’t ‘own’ a child. Now, even a child is not a property, a child is also a full autonomous being.
Even at the point of divorce or the death of the husband, the law recognises the wife’s right to maintain relationships with the children through custody orders. This wouldn’t be so if the law considered a wife a mere outsider.
Demystifying the misconception about permanence
Like we stated earlier, many people think that just because a wife is not blood-related and the relationship can end in divorce, that makes a wife a non-family member.
Unlike a parent’s relationship with a child that is a blood relation, marriage creates a legal relationship in that two people decide to come together to enter a special kind of contract to create a family. Legal contracts or contracts created by the instrumentality of the law do not need to be permanent to be valid.
Take, for instance, a business contract. You can contract that this business will only last for five years. For the duration of those five years, it is valid and legally enforceable!
A valid contract does not feature permanence. What makes a contract valid are offer, acceptance, consideration (payment), consent, legal capacity to enter into such a contract (must be of age and mental capacity), legality of the contract, and public policy.
So, the mere fact that a marriage contract looks more impermanent than a blood relationship because of the possibility of divorce does not make it any less valid, the same way the mere fact that a parent might disown the child in the future does not mean they are less of a family.
The only way your wife can cease to be family is when there is a valid order of dissolution of marriage. During the pendency of the marriage, the wife is family to the child, husband and extended family, and so is the husband!
And even a divorce order only terminates family relationships between husband and wife, not wife and child.
Common misconceptions about a wife’s place in the family
Myth 1: She must give birth to be part of the family.
Truth: A roommate of mine back in the university said her cousin’s husband is hitting on her. I asked her what her cousin had to say about it, and she said,
“She doesn’t have a child, so she couldn’t say anything.”
Nigeria and many other cultures have the idea that a wife must bear sons to ‘solidify’ her place in the family. This might be culturally acceptable, but it has no legal backing.
Let me make this clear: The very act of signing a marriage certificate or exchanging bride price automatically makes you family!
Myth 2: Only a valid marriage contract makes you family.
Truth: Even when a man does not marry the woman, yet goes ahead and cohabits with her for a long time and even bears children through her, the law still affords her protection in what is known as common law marriage.
This is because the law takes cognisance of conduct and action. You cannot claim that you do not want her as a wife while creating a living situation that is similar to a legal marriage, i.e., cohabitation and childbirth.
When your actions negate your words, the scale of justice tends to tilt towards your actions as representing your true state of mind! Even in common law marriage, the man owes the woman some duties, like advancement (provision). Many cultures, like Yoruba, also practice this. The moment she moves in and gives birth, they start addressing her as ‘our wife’. Legally, that is called common law marriage.
In fact, a very few cultures take it so far to the point that if you date a woman and she dies single, the boyfriend is culturally expected to redeem “her honour” by carrying out marriage rites over her corpse! (Cultures like these are likely to be held by the court to be repugnant to natural justice, equity and good conscience).
Although common law marriage has drawbacks and fewer legal protections than an actual marriage, it shows how far the law is willing to go to protect the woman’s place in the family. That is how serious it is!
Myth 3: A wife is married into the man’s family.
Truth: The law considers marriage a union of two families, unlike the cultural belief that the wife joins the man’s family as an appendage.
In cultures like Yoruba, a wife who marries today is seen as behind her husband’s 2-year-old nephew. In fact, she’s expected to add honorifics to his name when addressing him because she came into the family last. This is not expected of the husband towards his wife’s family.
In the eyes of the law, the wife did not leave her family to join the man’s family to continue his lineage; rather, both families came together to form a new union.
Myth 4: Taking up his name is part of being a wife.
Truth: There is also no legal obligation for a wife to adopt her husband’s name or change her identity. This is a borrowed Western culture that has no bearing on traditional African culture. Those we borrowed it from have long discarded it as inequitable, so why are we still holding tight to it?
Myth 5: Submission is part of your duty as a wife.
Truth: The law imposes what is known as conjugal duties on both husband and wife, which include the duty to consummate and cohabit. Submission is not part of it!
The law also sees the wife as a separate person from her husband. It was the previous practice to subsume a wife under her husband so she could only vote through him, earn through him, etc. This is no longer the case. There has no duty to submit.
“They two shall become one,” is a religious dictate with no legal bearing.
The best practice will be mutual respect
Conclusion
Comments that wives are not a part of a husband’s family are a wake-up call to women. We sacrifice so much in marriage when the man doesn’t even have the decency to view us as family. This is a call to tread wisely, to sit back and question why you’re reaching that compromise to quit your job, pop babies, relocate, change your religion, all to marry. Ask yourself. ‘Does he even see me as family?’ ‘Would he do the same for me?’ ‘For whose benefit is this compromise and to what end?’
Most importantly, posts like these are biased and harmful relics of bygone days. As a woman, it is expedient that you’re fully aware of your rights in the family so that you can walk into any room with pride of place. You are not begging to be there; your presence in every family or marriage is extremely valuable and carries the full weight of the Constitution right behind you.
Editor’s note: The author first published this article on Sheresonance.
