Page 177 - Arabian Studies (V)

Women *s Inheritance of Land in Highland Yemen 165

force of arms central in protecting rights to land, and levels of
mortality high, the pooling of grain and labour in a large household
may be seen to offer a margin of security to the individual member
of such a group. Consider the risks for the farming family in condi­
tions of high mortality. The larger household could absorb what
would threaten to dissolve a smaller house: the death of the adult
male, the failure of a couple to beget a male heir, or the alienation
of land by a younger widow and her children. In the opposite situa­
tion, growth in the numbers of the family did not always entail divi­
sion of the patrimony. The stronger figure(s) in the household
would simply squeeze or buy out the weaker members. With the
growth in numbers of this family, this form of tenure and exploita­
tion cannot be said to provide greater security for all the individual
members of a family, but it may work to preserve the standing of a
major household unit (house and land) in the rural community by
cushioning the impact of changes in the demographic composition
of a household exploiting relatively fixed amounts of land. Thus, a
big household did not represent simply the prosperous but brief
high point in the domestic cycle of a landed family, but so long as
strong individuals succeeded to its direction, the very structure that
could allow for the retention and continuity of family wealth and
power in a rural society characterised by a highly competitive politi­
cal system. Rural leaders, building upon such rural inequality, were
able to mobilise men in a way that long resisted or defeated persons
and organisations based ultimately in the town.
Such forms of family land holding, common among some of the
wealthiest families, greatly restricted the freedom of many
members of the family to dispose of the property on which he or
she ultimately had a claim. This restriction fell hardest upon those
who had, at best, only half a claim and who represented to the main
holders both the body of solidarity and the figure of alienation—
women. The importance of the economic level and composition of
the family in determining a woman’s position as heir may be illus­
trated by different cases from the area under discussion. First, we
may consider some of the ways in which a woman’s claim on land
was paid in other forms of wealth and then several cases in which a
woman’s land was actually transferred to her.
Regardless of whether the division of a man’s estate precedes his
death, occurs soon after his death, or is postponed for a long time
after his demise, the property of a daughter is rarely transferred to
her (and to her marital home) early in her marital career. The back­
ground to this lies in the structure of marriage or at least of the
most common type of marriage, where the woman marries ‘out’ of
the property owning group, and in a woman’s need for security.