I'm curious as to historical norms for polygamous marriage, and it's hard to find sources. Here's a page about polygamy in the New Testament, but it focuses more on the religious/moral issues than on information about how polygamy worked.
For instance, are two women who are married to the same man considered to be each others' "wives", or sisters-in-law, or what? If the man dies is there any persisting relationship or obligation between the women? Depending on the culture and the laws of inheritance, if one wife or child inherits does she or he have to support the children of the other wife? Based on the longer life spans of women I imagine these situations were quite common. I bet it varied from culture to culture, but if anyone has any links I'd appreciate it.
(I'm told that my earlier post on polyamory is amusing.)
I grew up Mormon, so I can tell you some about polygamy in the early Mormon church.
Typically multiple wives referred to each other as sister wives. Wives would often live in seperate residences from one another, or if they were in the same house would at least have seperate living areas. The husband would then go to the house/bedroom of whichever wife, sometimes on a schedule, sometimes at whim.
Obviously with the male to female ratio being equal in humans, not every man was able to practice polygamy, and in practice, the men who did were usually well off. (Constrast this to current fundamentalist Mormon practicers of polygamy whose "unregistered" wives are often on welfare.) Often when a woman was left widowed, another older man would marry the woman and support her. This was sometimes a non-sexual relationship. A lot of the wives of Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism) eventually went this route after he died.
As I mentioned before, even though the Mormon church banned polygamy in 1892 (God decreed it right before the US gov. put the smack down on them), there are still fundamentalist groups that practice it today. There's a lot of stories of girls being married off to an uncle at 14 and such.
http://www.polygamy.org/history.shtml has a lot of history on the subject, and the rest of the website has a lot of information about Mormon polygamy today.
Also for good books to read, read Mark Twain's "Roughing It", which is quite funny on the subject of polygamy. Also, Orson Scott Card's "Saints" is good historical fiction. It's definitly takes a pro-Mormon stance on things, but is quite interesting.
R: Thanks for the pointers!
One thing about the male:female ratio as effected by the lifespan difference. In pre-modern times the death rate during childbirth was much higher, so the longer female lifespan would likely have been counter-balanced. FWIW.
c32: True, but from my reading it appears that women have always lived longer than men, even when childbirth is factored in.
When taking into account longer lifespans, you can't just go with the average of all women. While women historically have a longer average lifespan, it is largely because many spinsters lived a long, long time. In my genealogy research I find lots of old, unmarried women dying at age 80 or above, while many young, married women died earlier. I would venture a guess that the average lifespan of married women among my ancestors is something on the order of 45.
Keep in mind too that my ancestors lived on tiny, temperate islands in the middle of the ocean. People in more extreme climates, where snow fell in their settlements in winter, probably died younger.