Because the sight of women laboring in the fields struck the colonists as strange, they depicted native women as drudges. Because colonists ordinarily saw Indian men at their leisure in their villages in the warm months, the colonists dismissed them as lazy exploiters of their hardworking women. In fact, the labor of Indian women, although certainly considerable, was less time-consuming and exhausting than the chores of colonial women, who tended larger and more complex houses.
