Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/228

 granted than praised. The barren woman is mildly execrated and her misfortune attributed to loose living. There were three barren older women on Tau; all three were midwives and reputed to be very wise. Now well past the child-bearing age, they were reaping the reward of the greater application to the intricacies of their calling with which they had compensated for their barrenness.

The young married women of twenty to thirty are a busy, cheerful group. They become church members and wear hats to church. When they have not a baby at the breast, they are doing heavy work on the plantations, fishing or making tapa. No other important event will ever happen to them again. If their husbands die, they will probably take new husbands, and those of lower rank. If their husbands become matais, they will also acquire a place in the fono of the women. But it is only the woman with a flair for political wire-pulling and the luck to have either important relatives or an important husband who gets any real satisfaction out of the social organisation of the village.

The young men do not settle as early into a groove. What her first child is to a woman his title is to a man, and while each new child is less of an event in her life, a new title is always a higher one and a greater event in his. A man rarely attains his first title before he is thirty, often not before he is forty. All the years between his entrance into the Aumaga and his entrance into the Fono are years of striving. He cannot acquire