A bride and a daughter-in-law are both in the village called gelin, clearly by etymology `the one who comes'. She is expected to do all the more menial tasks in the household, and to wait on her mother-in-law. No sign of mutual affection is permitted her and her new husband, except in complete privacy, and like all young persons, she is not expected to initiate conversation with elders, or to argue with her husband or his senior kin. But she is under no formal restrictions or taboos, and informants invariably stated firmly that the bride must be treated like one's own daughter. Menial tasks and respectful silence before elders are no less expected of daughters than of brides, so the lowly status of the girl and her nominal daughterhood are not inconsistent.
On the whole, as I have said, it was the close co-operation between mother-in-law and her gelin which surprised us. In cases which we knew intimately, jobs and baby minding were shared with apparent amity. One girl expressed great affection for her husband's mother, saying that she got on better with her than with her own mother. In another instance in a fairly well-to-do household, a girl was left by the death of her mother-in-law to keep house single-handed for three small boys, her husband and her father-in-law. She said how much she missed her mother-in-law, who alone had defended her against the men, and dated her own miseries from her death.
At the other extreme, we heard of cases where girls deserted their husbands because they could not stand their mothers-in-law. One girl who had eloped from her father's home because, so we were told, her stepmother beat her, found her mother-in-law much worse. She was found ostensibly trying to drown herself in the pool above the village. In Sakaltutan, one woman turned her husband's old mother out of the house. But this was an exceptional case (p. 115).