Female Supremacy Articles - Page 28

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With records not readily available, it’s unclear how many divorces there were earlier, but islanders agree that there are significantly more now than in the years when men waited patiently for a proposal on a plate. They waited some more, as their brides-to-be then set out for the eggshell-white beaches encircling the island, looking for the raw materials with which to build their new house.

Women built all the grass-covered huts here, dragging driftwood back from the ocean to use as poles, cutting blankets of blond grass to weave into roofs and shaping the pink mud underfoot into bricks. Only once the house is built, a process that takes at least four months, can the couple move in and their marriage be considered official.

There are matrilineal cultures in numerous pockets of the world, including in other parts of Africa, as well as in China’s Yunnan province and in northeastern Thailand, said anthropologist Christine Henry, a researcher at France’s elite National Center for Scientific Research, or CNRS. But the unquestioned authority given to women in matters of the heart on this island is unique—“I don’t know of it happening anywhere else,” said Henry, who has written a book on the customs of the archipelago.

That things are changing is evident in the material chosen for the island’s newest house: concrete. It was erected by paid laborers, not local women.