ABSTRACT
Societies with clearly distinct roles for the male and female are familiar to the social anthropologist. In Sarakatsani society in the 1950s, the husband ran the sheep and handled financial and governmental relations: the wife ruled in the home, displaying a sexual modesty which set off the proud persona of her strutting turkey-cock of a husband, and steadily gaining in social status as she accumulated her grandchildren around her, and as her ageing husband (now less useful for work) gradually lost it. In Grazalema in the same decade, the complement of the male's manliness was the female's vergüenza, or reserve on sexual and family matters. In Ambéli in the 1960s, womanliness consisted in the efficient performance of household duties, and a woman's status depended thereon. In societies of this type, conflict rarely arises between husband and wife because, in their carefully delimited spheres, each is supreme. One recalls the complete dominance in the household of F. E. Smith's mother Elizabeth, who none the less displayed 'an almost Oriental sense of priority for the dominant male.'10 With so organic a relationship between the sexes, there is little room on the part of the woman for anything more than a ritual grumbling against a hierarchy which seems divinely ordained.
