Selves of Wives and Selves of Daughters

I began conducting my research on bedouin co-wives in the summer of 1992 and continued it in the summer of 1993; and for that purpose spent most of those summers in the Bekaa' valley. During the interval between the two summers, and in the winter of 1995, I interviewed a number of urban co-wives in the cities of Beirut and Tripoli and in the town of Baalbeck. My research covered eighty-five women, each of whose husbands had either one or two other wives. Twenty-eight of these were bedouin, thirty-five were sedentary of bedouin origin and twenty-two were urban. The main reason for the restricted number of subjects was the scarcity of polygynous households, especially in the cities.