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together. On 12 of the purse-seiners it was necessary for the crew to be made up by the addition of hired hands.
In the 'fifties the single purse-seiner boat was not a working unit, but even on the operating pairs of purse-seiners family groupings still preponderated. There were 18 pairs of purse-seiners in 1953 (and one extra boat, belonging to a family that owned 3). They were manned as follows: 4 by 3 generation extended families of the type man, wife (wives), married sons, their wives, and the unmarried children of all the couples, and 12 by extended families comprising married brothers, their wives and children. Only in 2 cases did families of two unrelated purse-seiner neighbours form a pair together.
In 1970 the kinds of group found on the small long-liners remained exactly similar to those of 1953. The purse-seiners showed one striking change in addition to the change to single boat operation; namely, the complete disappearance of the hired men. As operating units, however, the purse-seine groups were still predominantly extended families. Of the 12 for whom I have full details, 9 were three generation families (7 each comprising a man and his married sons together with their respective wives and children, 2 each containing a group of married brothers with their married sons and children) and 2 were composed of married brothers with their wives and unmarried children. There was only 1 nuclear family on the purse-seiners in 1970, and that was an unusually large one with no less than 4 teenage sons.
Thus, despite the smaller numbers required for the modern single boat fishing operations, the purse-seiners still tended to live in extended family units, a fact which I believe to be indicative of a newly developing change in the sexual division of labour connected partly with the new fishing method itself, which is more strenuous than the old, and partly (for those whom it affected) with the move to living ashore, of which women were both the chief beneficiaries and the essential organisers.
Ashore, women's roles became more purely domestic, though not necessarily less productive. If few of the shore-based women