Talk:hwame

More information on hwame, from Sabine Lang, Men as Women, Women as Men (ISBN 0292777957, 2010), page 294: "Hwame were regarded as excellent providers, and they liked to gossip with "other men" about the intimate details of their married lives. Nonetheless, their marriages were unstable, because men liked to use their physical strength to shut hwame out as rivals or to take their wives away from them (Devereux 1937: 515). Sexual intercourse did take place in the marriage of the hwame (1937: 514). If a hwame married a pregnant woman, she could, like a man, claim paternity of the child (according to the Mohave view, sexual intercourse with a pregnant woman changed the paternity; Devereux 1937: 514). Like the husbands of the alyha, the wives of hwame were often teased, . The hwame were also exposed to actual verbal and physical assaults, and occasionally they were even raped by men (1937: 519; Devereux describes the rapists as "practical jesters"; this estimation of a situation in which a drunken hwame was forced to have intercourse with several men seems astongishingly insensitive). Whether it was customary or usual to break hwame in this way cannot be ascertained. In any event, her quasi-masculine status was less respected than the quasi-feminine one of the alyha." - -sche (discuss) 16:21, 26 November 2013 (UTC)