"A LAND WITHOUT FATHERS OR HUSBANDS": From the Globe and Mail

[Only available to subscribers. --Eve]

LUGU LAKE, CHINA -- Four generations of women live together in a log farmhouse on a remote lake in the Himalayan foothills. There isn't a husband in sight -- and that's the way they prefer it.

"This is our tradition," Ahlu Zhuoma says, feeding a batch of fried potatoes to her two-year-old daughter at the cooking fire on the floor of their house. "My daughter's father lives with his sisters and mother in the daytime. At night, he comes to visit me in my bedroom."

It's the same arrangement that the 30,000 Mosuo people of southwestern China have followed since time immemorial. "It's not good to live with the family of your man," says Ms. Ahlu, a tall, slender 22-year-old with short hair and a distinct air of authority.

"We can live happily with our own family. There's no complicated relationship with a mother-in-law. And if the relationship with the man is not good, we just go our separate ways -- we don't have to waste time with a divorce."

They call it the "walking marriage," but, in essence, it is not a marriage at all. In the families of Lugu Lake, the fathers are incidental. Their relationships with the mothers of their children are not legally registered. They play no role in raising their children. Nor do they pass on their names or their property to their offspring. Children take the names of their mothers and usually address their fathers as "uncle." Property is held communally within the family.

The Mosuo women have extraordinary sexual freedom. Sexual relationships take place with visiting men in the bedrooms of the women, known as "flower rooms." Because these relationships don't have an economic component, they do not interfere with the brother-sister and mother-child connections that are central to their families. ...

Anthropologists call it "a society without fathers or husbands." Perhaps not coincidentally, it is also a society without crime, without war, without rape or violence, and without the domestic tensions that have bedevilled Western societies ever since the concept of marriage was invented. ...

The reality of life among the Mosuo people is more prosaic than the tourists might have hoped. While it may be a matrilineal society, it is certainly not a feminist utopia or a matriarchal paradise.

It is the men who control the local government: The village directors are men, and a majority of the councillors and village officials are men. "Unlike women, who are constantly preoccupied with housework and farm work, men are available
to pursue positions in the outside world, to become village chiefs, administrators, cadres, technicians, teachers, traders and so forth," writes Ms. Mathieu, the French anthropologist.

Middle-aged women squatting on the edge of the lake, washing tubs of clothing by hand, grumble to visitors. "Mosuo men are the luckiest in the world," Yang Zhuoma says. "They don't do any housework. They don't raise the kids. They only do five or six days of farm work in a year -- just the plowing. The rest of the work is done by women."

Within the family, however, the role of women is much stronger than it is in many other societies. Power and money are shared communally in the family, with income-earners giving most of their money to the oldest woman in the household.

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