A more modern writer, however, thought that Pennant must have been
observant but not reflective, and wrote:
It is not on the sea coast that woman looks on man as lord and
master. The fishing industry more than any other leads to great
equality between the sexes. The man is away and the woman conducts
all the family affairs on land. Home means all the comfort man can
enjoy! His life is one persistent calling for self-reliance and
independence and equally of obedience to command.
The relations Pennant quoted were not of servility, but of man assisting
woman to do what she regarded as her natural work.
To inland folk like ourselves it was a strange sight to see so many
women engaged in agricultural pursuits, but we realised that the men had
been out fishing in the sea during the night and were now in bed. We saw
one woman mowing oats with a scythe and another following her, gathering
them up and binding them into sheaves, while several others were cutting
down the oats with sickles; we saw others driving horses attached to
carts. The children, or "bairns," as they were called here, wore neither
shoes nor stockings, except a few of the very young ones, and all the
arable land was devoted to the culture of oats and turnips.
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