The mother of sons will almost certainly be a confident and respected member of the household, or of one of the households, in which her sons live. By contrast, the most important relationship of a man is not to women at all, but to his agnates - to his father and his brothers, if any. This lack of symmetry is both an example and a consequence of the sharp inferiority of women. The fact that a woman's relation with her son is more important to her than that with her husband, and that a man's relation with his mother is more important, as a rule, than that with his wife reflects the stress in the society on procreation as the end of relations between the sexes, rather than sexual attraction and satisfaction. A Woman and her Male Affines.
Girls are deferential and distant with their husband's fathers.
To her husband's brothers, who may at the beginning be part of the same household, respect is due, and from them, if need be, help is expected. Adultery with them seems generally to be considered unthinkable. One young man slept for a year or so in a single-roomed house with his brother's wife, while his brother was away, but the circumstances aroused no scandal or adverse comment that reached my ears, and all informants whom I questioned insisted that they had no suspicions. Brothers frequently took charge of each other's families in each other's absence, and a brother would be a perfectly respectable person to take a man's wife to town to the doctor or on some other long journey.