The American novelist Louisa May Alcott is best known for the Little Women series of novels. In the 1870s, however, her popularity with female readers was entrenched by her Eight Cousins series, a story about an orphaned heiress named Rose. Rose, who comes from a wealthy white family in Boston, is left to be raised by two domineering great aunts.
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.
Louisa May Alcott’s 19th century readers would have well understood what these meddling great-aunts were doing. In every society that has practiced cousin-marriage, the institution has been a tool by which older generations prevent family property from leaving their clutches.
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.
This is one of the reasons why Richard Holden, the former Chair of the Conservative Party, has floated a proposal for a British ban on the marriage of first cousins. Holden’s suggestion was put forward under the “Ten Minute Rule” a parliamentary concept that allows a backbencher to put forward a bill but rarely allows sufficient time to pass it. As Holden pointed out, “women and girls living under a clan mentality often know the scientific risks of first-cousin marriage, but make considered social and cultural calculations”, in the face of “strict honour codes”.
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.
If we want to ban cousin marriage in contemporary Britain – and it is my view that we most certainly should – we need to be honest about the group most directly targeted by this ban: Muslim communities of South Asian origin.
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).
We should be cautious about accepting Nash’s study unilaterally simply because it is politically convenient to those on my side of the argument – Holden, of course, quotes him liberally – but only the wilfully blind can deny that this is a phenomenon closely associated with certain ethnic groups. The highest rates of first cousin marriage in Britain are found in communities of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, although Irish Traveller families also show significant rates. In all of these groups, it can be used to limit the freedom of women and girls.
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.
The medical consequences are also significant: in 2005, a Newsnight investigation found that British Pakistanis were then 13 per cent more likely to have children with genetic disorders than the general population, a reality which multiple studies in the intervening years have linked to consanguinity.
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.
The most prominent defence offered for the practice last week, from the MP Iqbal Mohamed, asserted that in communities from “the Middle East or South Asia”, cousin marriage can be prized as “something that helps to build family bonds and puts families on a more secure financial foothold”. In other words, cousin marriage is valued where the family, not the individual, is key unit of society. Iqbal Mohamed gave the game away when he talked about “secure financial foothold”. First cousin marriage is a financial arrangement, not necessarily for the benefit of the individuals making the vows.
Iqbal 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.
We do need to be careful when talking about “liberty” and marriage; there is a case that any restriction on who we can or cannot marry is itself an infringement of liberal values. Governments should think carefully before they ban anyone from entering into a free contract; the decision to prevent couples from marrying during the Covid-19 lockdown was a shameful episode in recent history. Yet we have always understood the importance of banning incest, even as we have adjusted our definition of that word.
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.
Men like Iqbal Mohamed have argued that any genetic consequences of cousin marriage can be solved purely by suggesting “genetic counselling”, a false fix that ignores the repeated studies showing that conservative couples will ignore genetic risks in the face of family expectation or a religious instruction to leave medical matters in the hands of God. Iqbal Mohamed’s speech revealed the true purpose of cousin marriage: to maintain the interests of family powerbrokers at any cost.
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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