Right from the start of the play, we're aware that the society portrayed is structured along traditional gender lines. The women perform housework; the men are the breadwinners. The world outside is the exclusive preserve of men; women are confined to home and hearth. This is rural Irish society at its most traditional.

The whole family suffers as a direct consequence of traditional gender roles. After the death of Michael, there's now only one man about the house, and that is Bartley. Without additional (male) financial support, the family faces an uncertain, potentially impoverished future. The family's travails represent in microcosm the economic and demographic problems of the island in general. The island is wholly dependent on fishing, and this is dangerous work. Inevitably, many young men perish at sea, leaving their families and the community as a whole in financial distress.

And it is the family's economic decline that presages a potentially radical change in gender roles and relations. With Bartley off to try and earn a living, the women of the house must take on the roles traditionally associated with men. For example, Cathleen needs to go to market and sell the family's pig. But Maurya is fiercely dismissive of the very idea: she wonders how will Catherine get a fair price for the animal? The implicit assumption here is that the men at the marketplace won't take Catherine seriously as she is a woman and so won't give her a fair price for the pig. Maurya is instinctively rebelling against what she sees as a desperate, uncertain future. She is too old, too weary, too set in her ways to contemplate any substantial change in social and gender relations. There is no choice, then, but for her to cling to the past with all its certainties, its familiar patterns of social life, and its traditional division of labor between the sexes.