In the bark cloth costume of long ago
Dressed up in her big sister’s dancing skirt
In the girl’s religious life the attitude of the missionaries was the decisive one. The missionaries require chastity for church membership and discouraged church membership before marriage, except for the young people in the missionary boarding schools who could be continually supervised. This passive acceptance by the religious authorities themselves of pre-marital irregularities went a long way towards minimising the girls’ sense of guilt. Continence became not a passport to heaven but a passport to the missionary schools which in turn were regarded as a social rather than a religious adventure. The girl who indulged in sex experiments was expelled from the local pastor’s school, but it was notable that almost every older girl in the community, including the most notorious sex offenders, had been at one time resident in the pastors’ households. The general result of the stricter supervision provided by these schools seemed to be to postpone the first sex experience two or three years. The seven girls in the household of one native pastor, the three in the household of the other, were all, although past puberty, living continent lives, in strong contrast to the habits of the rest of their age mates.
It might seem that there was fertile material for conflict between parents who wished their children to live in the pastor’s house and children who did not wish to do so, and also between children who wished it and parents who did not.[8] This conflict was chiefly reduced by the fact that residence in the pastor’s house actually made very little difference in the child’s status in her own home. She simply carried her roll of mats, her pillow and her mosquito net from her home to the pastor’s, and the food which she would have eaten at home was added to the quota of the food which her family furnished to the pastor. She ate her evening meal and slept at the pastor’s; one or two days a week she devoted to working for the pastor’s family, washing, weaving, weeding and sweeping the premises. The rest of her time she spent at home performing the usual tasks of a girl of her age, so that it was seldom that a parent objected strongly to sending a child to the pastor’s. It involved no additional expense and was likely to reduce the chances of his daughter’s conduct becoming embarrassing, to improve her mastery of the few foreign techniques, sewing, ironing, embroidery, which she could learn from the more skilled and schooled pastor’s wife and thus increase her economic value.
[8] See Appendix, [page 257].
If, on the other hand, the parents wished their children to stay and the children were unwilling to do so, the remedy was simple. They had but to transgress seriously the rules of the pastor’s household, and they would be expelled; if they feared to return to their parents, there were always other relatives.
So the attitude of the church in respect to chastity held only the germs of a conflict which was seldom realised, because of the flexibility with which it adapted itself to the nearly inevitable. Attendance at the girls’ main boarding school was an attractive prospect. The fascination of living in a large group of young people where life was easier and more congenial than at home, was usually a sufficient bribe to good behaviour, or at least to discretion. Confession of sin was a rare phenomenon in Samoa. The missionaries had made a rule that a boy who transgressed the chastity rule would be held back in his progress through the preparatory school and seminary for two years after the time his offence was committed. It had been necessary to change this ruling to read two years from the detection of the offence, because very often the offence was not detected until after the student had been over two years in the seminary, and under the old ruling, he would not have been punished at all. Had the young people been inspired with a sense of responsibility to a heavenly rather than an earthly decree and the boy or girl been answerable to a recording angel, rather than a spying neighbour, religion would have provided a real setting for conflict. If such an attitude had been coupled with emphasis upon church membership for the young and an expectation of religious experience in the lives of the young, crises in the lives of the young people would very likely have occurred. As it is, the whole religious setting is one of formalism, of compromise, of acceptance of half measure. The great number of native pastors with their peculiar interpretations of Christian teaching have made it impossible to establish the rigour of western Protestantism with its inseparable association of sex offences and an individual consciousness of sin. And the girls upon whom the religious setting makes no demands, make no demands upon it. They are content to follow the advice of their elders to defer church membership until they are older. Laititi a’u. Fia siva (“For I am young and like to dance”). The church member is forbidden to dance or to witness a large night dance. One of the three villages boasted no girl church members. The second village had only one, who had, however, long since transgressed her vows. But as her lover was a youth whose equivocal position in his family made it impossible to marry, the neighbours did not tattle where their sympathies were aroused, so Lotu remained tacitly a church member. In the third village there were two unmarried girls who were church members, Lita and Ana.
Lita had lived for years in the pastor’s household and with one other girl, showed most clearly the results of a slightly alien environment. She was clever and executive, preferred the society of girls to that of boys, had made the best of her opportunities to learn English, worked hard at school, and wished to go to Tutuila and become a nurse or a teacher. Her ideals were thus just such as might frequently be found from any random selection of girls in a freshman class in a girls’ college in this country. She coupled this set of individual ambitions with a very unusual enthusiasm for a pious father, and complied easily with his expressed wish for her to become a church member. After she left the pastor’s household, she continued to go to school and apply herself vigorously to her studies, and her one other interest in life was a friendship with an older cousin who spoke some English and had had superior educational advantages in another island. Although this friendship had most of the trappings of a “crush” and was accompanied by the casual homosexual practices which are the usual manifestations of most associations between young people of the same sex, Lita’s motivation was more definitely ambition, a desire to master every accessible detail of this alien culture in which she wished to find a place.
Sona, who was two years younger than Lita and had also lived for several years in the pastor’s household, presented a very similar picture. She was overbearing in manner, arbitrary and tyrannous towards younger people, impudently deferential towards her elders. Without exceptional intellectual capacity she had exceptional persistence and had forced her way to the head of the school by steady dogged application. Lita, more intelligent and more sensitive, had left school for one year because the teacher beat her and Sona had passed above her, although she was definitely more stupid. Sona came from another island. Both her parents were dead and she lived in a large, heterogeneous household, at the beck and call of a whole series of relatives. Intent on her own ends, she was not enthusiastic about all this labour and was also unenthusiastic about most of her relatives. But one older cousin, the most beautiful girl in the village, had caught her imagination. This cousin, Manita, was twenty-seven and still unmarried. She had had many suitors and nearly as many lovers but she was of a haughty and aggressive nature and men whom she deemed worthy of her hand were wary of her sophisticated domineering manner. By unanimous vote she was the most beautiful girl in the village. Her lovely golden hair had contributed to half a dozen ceremonial headdresses. Her strategic position in her own family was heightened by the fact that her uncle, who had no hereditary right to make a taupo, had declared Manita to be his taupo. There was no other taupo in the village to dispute her claim. The murmurings were dying out; the younger children spoke of her as a taupo without suspicion; her beauty and ability as a dancer made it expedient to thus introduce her to visitors. Her family did not press her to marry, for the longer she remained unmarried, the stronger waxed the upstart legend. Her last lover had been a widower, a talking chief of intelligence and charm. He had loved Manita but he would not marry her. She lacked the docility which he demanded in a wife. Leaving Manita he searched in other villages for some very young girl whose manners were good but whose character was as yet unformed.