The distinctive feature of women's songs and stories about the 1949 famine is the emphasis they place on the role of marital relations in shaping the pattern of suffering. When asked about famine, women tell about family, marriage, divorce and children. In their pounding songs they sing about the role of husbands in the famine – either praising them for their exemplary behaviour or (much more frequently) berating them for their neglect. This chapter analyses the women's accounts of the 1949 famine and assesses the importance of gender in shaping the disaster. In so doing it attempts to locate the famine within a larger historical process of change in the economic role and social status of women.

As we have seen, many factors contributed to the creation of a food shortage in Blantyre District in 1949–50. But the explanation for the transformation of food shortage into famine, and the nature and severity of that famine, must lie in part in the institutionalised pattern of human relationships which we call the ‘social structure’. Returning to a theme raised in the Introduction, it is important at one level to separate the analysis of problems of long-term food supply from that of the problem of famine. We need to consider who starves and why, and to relate this to established patterns of behaviour in normal times. But as the last chapter has shown, we must also consider the effect of state intervention and famine policy as a major factor in shaping the famine.