In a narrower sense, though, Nicaraguan families, structured by a "culture of machismo" and rent by unresolved gender conflicts, proved the most effective medium of an intimate, low-intensity conflict that ate away at the revolution's base of popular support. Nicaraguan family life has long been characterized by widespread patterns of male abandonment. At the time of the revolution, some thirty-four percent of Nicaraguan families were headed by women, and the figure was closer to fifty percent in the cities. Brittle conjugal relations, in the context of a patriarchial economic structure, necessarily put women and children in a structurally disadvantageous ocial position.2