7 - Conjugal roles, kinship roles and the division of labour

Summary

In this chapter I discuss men's and women's work, pointing out that women's work is very labour intensive. Child-care, for instance, is entirely in the hands of women. They cannot take advantage of the technical innovations of the public sphere to relieve the burden, for this is the province of men. On the other hand, women who are closely confined to the home and its concerns, townswomen especially, are often more concerned about how to spend time and effort than how to save them, so that labour-intensive techniques have the function of combatting boredom.

Women depend on other women for company and for labour in times of peak activity, the latter especially in the ksar. They have little formal authority in their conjugal household and none in the community at large, so that their relationships with other women become a source of self-esteem and social support.

In the next chapter I pursue the organisation of women's relationships, and point out that uterine kinship bonds provide a safety-net for casualties of the social system, that is, those who do not enjoy full rights in their agnatic kin-group because they are women or the offspring of a broken marriage. Because these people constitute a high proportion of the population, if not the majority, matrilateral relationships assume such social-structural significance that they constitute a threat to the arrangements made according to the principle of agnation, of which virilocal marriage and control of property and services by men are the most important.