She lived for over a year with the Carib (Kalinya) Indians, within the family group of the headman (Kapitein), and studied their changing economic and social organisation, with particular reference to the complexity of female production.

[3] In this thesis, she describes how the economy of the Coastal Caribs of Surinam, like that of many lowland South American Amerindians, was traditionally based on a root crop horticulture complemented by a maximum exploitation of wild food resources.

Women were vital to the economy as primary producers of cultivated food - bitter manioc is planted and, through an arduous process, made into bread.

The solidarity of kinswomen within these residential camps, in conjunction with their economic role, afforded women a high degree of personal autonomy.

Within these egalitarian societies, the concept of personal autonomy was crucial to our understanding of not only the political and economic relations between men, but the relationship between the sexes, where marriage was a partnership characterised by interdependence rather than domination.