1. Examples: Extortion; blackmail; soliciting or promoting dowries

2. The 1961 law forbidding dowries further undermined traditional Hinduism.

3. 28 For single middle-class women without dowries there was only the prospect of becoming a governess or companion.

4. A newspaper reporter stationed in eastern Africa wrote: “Young people choose to elope to escape excessive dowries demanded by tenacious in-laws.”

5. In one such article, Michel Melot describes how the wealth and power of the Abbesses of the Order of Fontevrault in the Anjou region established a tradition of artistic patronage in which the Abbesses, daughters, of prominent aristocrats, brought dowries and family names that raised their religious order to high political, economic, and