Note 266 — Chapter IV · AGRICULTURAL TRIBES.

In the New Hebrides polygamy also prevails. The price paid for a wife varies from 10 to 20 pigs, “according to her capabilities as a worker in the yam-patch.” “They [the women] learn in their girlhood all that fits them to be man’s slave and toiler in the fields”. “Women are degraded to the level of brute beasts, doing all the hard field work, and being made to carry loads which appear quite disproportionate to their ugly-shaped bodies and thin legs”266. Hagen and Pineau give a similar account of female labour, and add that a man’s wealth depends on the number of his wives267.