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That this was so was partly, but not wholly, for economic reasons. To men fell the heavier and more arduous work, but not that which was the most productive. Aside from hunting, fishing and war, which were not, in current conditions, of economic importance, their contribution was housebuilding, basketry, and the felling of jungle, all of which took a long time and showed no immediate profit. It was the women's work which was of economic value. They cooked, brewed and pounded rice, and made the little there was go the longest way; they carried wood and water, they sowed, weeded and reaped (though the men took their share here); they spun and dyed, they wove and sewed, they (86) kept the home and raised the family. A man alone was condemned to poverty; and a lad who wished to marry must pay heavy compensation to the girl's father for the loss of a valuable asset. So, too, the death of a wife and mother was the worst disaster which could befall a house I once saw a village where a smallpox outbreak, by a freak incidence of vaccinations, had spared the men and the children under ten and removed, almost without exception, the women from sixteen upwards. The economic life of the village was at a standstill. The young men worked the fields, a task for which they, as a fraction of the normal labour available, were far too few, and the married men were penned in their houses, coping, with a pathos I cannot describe, with whole families suddenly motherless. It was a most forcible illustration of the Naga women's place. |
