This appeared in the Guardian the other day and it set my brain rolling on those unfortunately long commutes I seem to be doing these days. I once spent a while hanging out with the Santhali tribe in the Indian state of Jharkhand, some while back. This particular tribe is not officially a matriarchy, at least not according to all the official sources I have seen so far. But let me lay it out properly: The Santhali are basically Iron Age farmers, live in permanant villages and cultivatie a variety of crops including red rice, lentils and vegetables. They keep cows, water buffalo, chickens, goats, pigs and fish. They make their houses out of cow dung and locally mined minerals. They don’t really go to school and some are kind of hindus, some are kind of christian and some are kind of animist. What did strike me was the women.
You see, the women did most of the work. They did the farming and the house building, the child bearing and rearing and the logistics, and they were strong. Physically. I saw women dragging their besotted husbands home from the weekly market, bashing them furiously about the ears the whole way. I saw women building the village, tilling and ploughing the land. I saw a woman trotting down the road carrying 50 kilo sacks of rice on her head, because the bus had broken down. I asked, where are you going and she cheerfully replied, to Barai, 20km away down a stony thorny track. She wasn’t wearing anything on her feet either.
The women carry the household money tied into a knot of their shawls. They decide what to do with their land, what suplies need to be bought for the market and whether they can buy silver for themselves or bangles for their daughters. The men were not consulted, instead they seemed to spend most of their time participating in one of three pursuits: Gambling, drinking or hunting, the latter consisting mainly of hitting small birds with catapults. Everyone seemed perfectly happy with this arrangement.
I lived and taught in a school and the attendance of girls and boys was about equal. It was the mothers who brought their children to school and paid the twenty rupee fee. If a child was repeatedly naughty or absent, its mother would berate it loudly and send it back to herding livestock until it had shown a greater appreciation of learning.
They brewed and distilled the local toddy and spirits and when the season of dancing and festivity came along, they all lined up neatly, wrapped in shawls and sarees and danced to the men’s drumming.
What the Guardian article talks about, women of the world running its ecnomics, is a nice idea, but I am afraid that most of the world’s women are too busy building the hosues, raising the children, growing the food, organising the community and hauling their husbands home from a night at the market to be concerned our problems.
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