ew, the only one to be completely valid in Germanic society. Women were seen as objects, they were not able to decide who was going to be their husband. Nevertheless, the bridegift is not to be considered as a price for the purchase of the woman. It merely represented the act of annulment of the woman's dependence on her family. This kind of marriage was called Muntehe. Through various symbolic acts, like for example shaking her hand, stamping her foot and making her kneel down, the husband showed on the day of the marriage his assumption of tutorial power over his bride. A marriage contracted without bridegift would have been possible, too. It was called Friedelehe and was based on the mutual consent of both partners. However, historians are not sure if it was considered at the same level of the Muntehe. It is thought that in this case the wife remained together with her children under the power of her kin. Edith Ennen suggests, therefore, that nobility used this kind of marriage in order to avoid a low class woman to reach the status of her husband's family and in order to exclude her children from the heredity . Even if involving mutual consent, Friedelehe was a way of limiting social mobility, in fact, and was not favourable to women, as it might seem.
             Roman laws gave women's will some more place in the choice of a husband. Nevertheless, Suzanne Fonay Wemple notices that in reality also in the roman empire: " double standards of sexual behaviour imposed on women of the upper classes, as well as the sexual exploitation of women of the lower classes by men of the upper classes, reinforced two contradictory and confining female stereotypes: woman as a sexual object and woman as a dutiful wife and mother. Slaves and freedwomen had little choice but to conform to the former model, while women of the upper classes were expected to live up to the latter idea." The unmarried girl was expected to be pure, the wife...