should be equal to men and not subject to them in marriage. Professor Ifediora also believes that polygyny is a "hindrance to social and economic development" in the continent of Africa due to women's lack of financial control. Standard polygynist practices often leave women at a disadvantage if they make the decision to remove themselves from the polygynist lifestyle. To leave the marriage, women must repay their bride price. Though this is simple in thought, this is not simple in execution. To prevent their wives from leaving, husbands will often keep the bride price at high levels, which is often at an unpayable level for women. In most cases, women do not have access to their children if they decide to leave polygyny, nor are they allowed to take them, due to cultural ideas of ownership in relation to progeny. Marci Hamilton sees polygyny as a form of oppression of women; she wrote: "In polygamy, also not a victimless crime, the practice is built on the subjugation of women to the men's needs and demands. Moreover, for many of the religious polygamists, the women are nothing but the means to a particular doctrinal end – creating more children to increase the man's odds of getting into heaven. Again, the men control the finances and the women are commodities, carrying out the sexual goals of the men. There can be no gender equality in this scenario, which is incapable of being squared with any viable theory of women's rights." First wives in polygynous marriages are often in a difficult situation, when the law or religious code does not require their consent or input for new wives to be admitted in the marriage, so the first wife is forced to accept any new women brought into the family by the husband and to get along with them. Polygyny is criticized because of its asymmetrical, unequal marital arrangement, where the husband has sexual/romantic relations with several women, but the wives can only have such a relation with one man, their husband, which often leads to rigid gender roles in the marriage. A criticism against polygyny is that in almost all cultures and religious communities that practice it, polygyny is the only form of polygamy that is allowed; and, as such, this violates modern principles of equality between men and women, especially as in many such places females having multiple partners is violently punished