Definition
Polyandry is the condition in which one woman is married to two or more husbands simultaneously. In legal contexts, the term describes both the individual marital status of such a woman and the broader social or legal order that permits such arrangements. As a form of plural marriage, polyandry is the inverse of polygyny (one husband, multiple wives) and falls within the broader category of polygamy.
In all U.S. jurisdictions and in the legal systems of most modern nations, polyandrous marriages are void as a matter of law. A woman who contracts a second marriage while a valid prior marriage subsists commits bigamy. The term polyandry is not a separate criminal category in Anglo-American law; the offense is governed under bigamy or polygamy statutes regardless of the sex of the party who contracts the plural union.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A form of polygamy where a woman is married to two or more husbands simultaneously; also used in biology for a female mating with multiple males, and in botany for plants with many stamens.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The possession by a woman of more than one husband at the same time; contrasted with monandry.
The common meaning and the legal meaning are closely aligned here, but with one important gap: in ordinary and scientific usage, polyandry extends readily to non-human mating systems and to informal sexual plurality. Legal usage is narrower — it is confined to the formal marital status of a human woman and has no application outside the marriage context. Researchers should also note that Bouvier's assertion that polyandry "is inconsistent with the law of nature" reflects a normative legal-theological framework that shaped 19th-century Anglo-American statutory drafting but carries no descriptive force in modern legal analysis.
Common Confusion
Polyandry is frequently subsumed under or conflated with polygamy in both legal sources and popular usage. The distinction matters for precision: polygamy is the umbrella term covering all forms of plural marriage, while polyandry specifies the particular configuration of one wife and multiple husbands. Polygyny — one husband and multiple wives — is the far more commonly prosecuted form in Anglo-American legal history, which explains why many older statutes and treatises address polygamy in terms that implicitly assume the plural-wives scenario. Researchers should not assume that historical discussions of polygamy law address polyandry's specific legal questions. See also BIGAMY, POLYGAMY, POLYGYNY.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap is that polyandry is legally invisible as a distinct category in Anglo-American statutory and case law. Courts and legislatures treated plural marriage as a unitary problem under bigamy and polygamy frameworks, and the gendered specificity of polyandry rarely appears in judicial opinions or legislative debates. A researcher searching for "polyandry" in 19th- or early 20th-century legal materials will find very little; the operative term in those sources is almost always "polygamy."
The 19th-century American anti-polygamy campaign — centered on federal legislation targeting Latter-day Saint practices in Utah — was directed overwhelmingly at polygyny. Researchers examining that corpus should not expect polyandry to appear as a named concern, and the absence of polyandry from those sources reflects the empirical reality of the targeted practice, not a legislative gap or deliberate exclusion.
In comparative and international law research, the picture changes. Some legal systems historically recognized or tolerated polyandrous arrangements, most notably in parts of South Asia and, as Bouvier notes, Tibet. Researchers working in comparative family law, anthropological jurisprudence, or international human rights frameworks around marriage equality will encounter polyandry as a live category rather than a historical curiosity.
Modern debates over marriage pluralism — including scholarly arguments for legal recognition of polyamorous unions — sometimes invoke polyandry as a reference point. Researchers navigating that literature should be alert to the shift from polyandry's classical legal meaning (a formal marital status) to its broader use in contemporary discourse (any multi-partner arrangement, married or not).
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on a single core definition with minor variation in framing. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence all quote the same Latin maxim from Coke's Institutes: Polygamia est plurium simul virorum uxorumve connubium — "Polygamy is the marriage with many husbands or wives at one time." This shared citation suggests the historical sources are drawing from a common doctrinal lineage rather than independent analysis.
Bouvier stands out for its normative editorializing. The claim that polyandry "is inconsistent with the law of nature" is characteristic of Bouvier's natural law methodology and should be read as a reflection of 19th-century jurisprudential assumptions, not as a statement of positive law. No modern legal dictionary perpetuates this framing.
Anderson's entry is a bare cross-reference, offering no independent content — a pattern in that dictionary for terms it treats as derivative of primary entries elsewhere.
None of the historical dictionaries address the criminal law mechanics of polyandry in any detail, and none distinguish between polyandry as a void marital status and polyandry as a predicate act for bigamy prosecution. This gap is consistent with the broader pattern of Anglo-American law treating the subject under polygamy doctrine without sex-specific elaboration.
Jurisdictional Note
No U.S. jurisdiction recognizes polyandrous marriages, and all would treat a second marriage contracted by a woman with a living spouse as bigamy. International variation is significant in comparative research: some customary and statutory legal systems in South Asia have historically accommodated fraternal polyandry (a woman married to brothers), though formal legal recognition has been rare and is increasingly disfavored under contemporary family law reform.