meals and for performing domestic duties for the family. Boserup notes that though the work completed by women calculates for a larger percentage of the tasks that form the basis of sub-Saharan life, women often do not receive the majority portion of the benefits that accompany economic and agricultural success. An elderly cultivator, with several wives and likely several young male children, benefits from having a much larger workforce within his household. By the combined efforts of his young sons and young wives, he may gradually expand his cultivation and become more prosperous. A man with a single wife has less help in cultivation and is likely to have little or no help for felling trees. According to Boserup's historical data, women living in such a structure also welcome one or more co-wives to share with them the burden of daily labor. However, the second wife will usually do the most tiresome work, almost as if she were a servant to the first wife, and will be inferior to the first wife in status. A 1930s study of the Mende in the West African state of Sierra Leone concluded that a plurality of wives is an agricultural asset, since a large number of women makes it unnecessary to employ wage laborers. Polygyny is considered an economic advantage in many rural areas. In some cases, the economic role of the additional wife enables the husband to enjoy more leisure. Anthropologist Jack Goody's comparative study of marriage around the world, using the Ethnographic Atlas, demonstrated a historical correlation between the practice of extensive shifting cultivation and polygyny in many Sub-Saharan African societies. Drawing on the work of Ester Boserup, Goody notes that in some of the sparsely-populated regions where shifting cultivation takes place in Africa, much of the work is done by women. This favored polygynous marriages, in which men sought to monopolize the production of women "who are valued both as workers and as child bearers." Goody, however, observes that the correlation is imperfect, and also describes more traditionally male-dominated though relatively extensive farming systems, such as those common in much of West Africa, particularly the savanna region, where more agricultural work is done by men, and polygamy is desired more for the production of male offspring whose labor in farming is valued. Goody's observation regarding African male farming systems is discussed and supported by anthropologists Douglas R. White and Michael