ABSTRACT
Housekeeping is girls’ mandatory responsibility, and as such gives but little occasion for roaming about along the shore as often as boys do. Customary beliefs about the nature of fishing and fish-vending set additional limits to girls’ participation in these ‘manly’ enterprises. Instead, girls make coir yarn, which is perceived as a womanly craft, except for the first processing of the raw material, and the bulk transport and marketing, which are men’s affair. Very much in the same fashion as boys in fishing, girls’ role in coir-making is important for both the industry and the livelihood of the family. But because of the domestic nature of the industry, what they do tends to remain indistinct from the totality of housekeeping chores, and therefore turns out to be but exceptionally perceived as true ‘work’. In Chapter 3 I have discussed data obtained from the budget-study that suggested that girls devote on average six hours a day to domestic tasks, and only little more than one to productive work (see Table 3.6). Following broadly the same line of thought as the last chapter, I probe here into how the work performed by girls in coir-making relates to these domestic responsibilities.
