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Transcript of women headship
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World Development, Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 979991,1989.
Printed in Great Britain.
0305-750x/89 3.00 + 0.00
0 1989 Pergamon Press plc
Homes Divided
JUDITH BRUCE
The Population Council New York
Summary. This paper reviews social inequalities between men and women, exploring how
they are played out among intimates within the household. Evidence is presented that households
do not constitute a unified economy. Examples are provided of the tensions that exist between
partners over life course decisions, including the use of income. In diverse cultural settings,
mothers typically contribute the whole of their earned income and devote other resources they
control to meeting the household’s basic needs. Knowledge of how women use their earnings
provides another rationale beyond that of productivity and justice for giving special attention to
women’s livelihoods,
1. INTRODUCTION
Women’s earned income and their ability to
stretch this and other resources is vital to the
survival of many households. Women pursue
personal goals, as well as simple survival, in the
context of stronger forces: segmented and dis-
criminatory labor markets for which they are ill-
prepared; powerful family systems that use them
as instruments for patriarchal or kinship ends;
discriminatory customs and laws surrounding
divorce and widowhood; inheritance systems that
deprive them of assets or undermine their legal
rights; and norms that confine women’s roles to
the production and the nurturing of dependents.
Men and women in the same cultural setting
and class group - and family - have very
different prospects in life. The contrasts are often
dramatic, in their participation in labor markets,
the content of their work, the returns to their
labor, the pattern of economic participation over
the lifecycle, daily time use, and parenting
responsibilities. Women’s possibilities for find-
ing adequate livelihoods, retaining assets, and
maintaining their social status when marriages
dissolve, whether through separation, abandon-
ment, migration, or death, are often markedly
poorer than men’s.
In this paper we review these societal inequali-
ties between men and women. We explore how
these inequalities are played out among intimates
within the household, presenting evidence that
households do not constitute a unified economy,
but several often competing economies. Exam-
ples are provided of the tensions that exist be-
tween generations and between partners over
life course decisions, including the use of income.
In diverse cultural settings, mothers typically
contribute the whole of their earned income and
devote other resources they control to meeting
the most pressing basic human needs of the
household. The building body of knowledge of
the particular destination of women’s earnings is
presented to provide another rationale beyond
that of productivity and justice for giving special
attention to women’s livelihoods.
2. SEEKING APPROPRIATE HOUSEHOLD
MODELS
Bearing in mind the contrast between male and
female experience, we must reappraise various
theories which treat the household as a unit.
Many modern constructs of household behavior
-
prominently that of the New Household
Economics’ - tend to separate gender dynamics
at the micro level from the known society-wide
dimensions of gender differentiation and asset
distribution. These theories are deficient because
they fail to acknowledge intrahousehold nego-
tiation over assets and possibly severe inequali-
ties within households. Internal conflicts are
ignored and a single overriding decision maker
(benevolent or otherwise) is proposed.
The empirical evidence suggests that alterna-
*This paper draws in part on the introduction to A
Home Divided: Women and I ncome in the Thi rd
World
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1988). Special thanks to Caren Grown for thoughtful
editorial advice.
979
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WORLD DEVELOPMENT
tive constructs of household dynamics may be
more apt. Nash, for example, and Manser and
Brown promote the notion of a bargaining
household in which members formally contend
and exchange to gain their individual ends.* Ben-
Porath proposes a transactions framework which
views family relationships as contracts between
individuals of different generations or between
conjugal pairs.3 Individuals mediate external risk
and uncertainty through exchanges with family
members.
Amartya Sen characterizes this intrahousehold
bargaining and transaction as “cooperative con-
flict.” According to Sen’s interpretation, in-
dividuals within the household contend, but in
many cases cannot bargain in the precise sense of
this word because individual utilities may overlap
in some areas, because perceptions of self-
interest and self-worth are indistinctly defined
(by self and others - an issue of extreme
importance to women), and finally in poor
economies, because the ends to be attained
are often fundamental elements of survival,
not simply “utilities” such as satisfaction or
pleasure.4
Folbre has been one of the most articulate
critics of unitary household constructs. She
identifies altruism within the family as an
element of both the New Household Economics
and evolved Marxist approaches and asks, “Why
are both the neoclassical and the Marxian para-
digms so silent on the issue of inequality within
the home?” Folbre concludes that “it is entirely
inconsistent to argue that individuals who are
wholly selfish in the marketplace (where there
are no interdependent utilities) are wholly self-
less within the family where they pursue the
interest of the collectivity.“’
The propositions and critiques of Nash,
Manser and Brown, Ben-Porath, Sen, and Folbre
seem reasonable, and certainly most people who
are members of families have experienced differ-
ences of opinion over how money and other
resources are spent. Why then has the unified
household been such an attractive formulation?
The first powerful reason is the simplicity of
consolidating individuals into households which
are assumed to behave as a unit, in contrast to
considering the economic behavior of more
numerous individuals. Unified households are
convenient policy tools.
A second point of resistance to adopting more
complex theories of household operations is the
fear that these will not bring with them explana-
tory powers far beyond that of the current unified
model. Does the discovery of conflict among the
household’s multiple decision makers make any
difference if the outcome is still predicted by the
unified household model? An increasing number
of studies have found that unexpected and
unproductive outcomes of development efforts
are best understood in light of intrahousehold
conflicts of interest.6 What explains the agricul-
tural production project which simultaneously
raises household incomes, leads women to with-
draw labor on their key cash crops, or results in
declines in nutrition and other welfare indi-
cators? Differences between households do not
explain these effects fully; women’s particular
roles in production and income use provide
powerful clues.
A third reason for adopting a unified house-
hold model is that the research required to
describe lively intrahousehold bargaining is de-
manding. Defining the “household,” let alone
detailing the dynamics of internal resource allo-
cation, can be daunting. Yet, by the same token,
standard survey methodologies oversimplify and
distort family dynamics by mechanically identify-
ing adult males (when present) as heads of
household. The adult male as designated head is
often exclusively interviewed about sources and
overall levels of household income. His welfare
is often taken as a proxy for the welfare of
all household members. But, as will be shown
shortly, this may be an inaccurate representation
of reality.
Fourth, the assumption that households be-
have as economically rational units is not only
analytically simpler to handle, but suits practical
tastes as well. Policy makers in both industrial-
ized and developing countries often prefer to
direct resource flows and benefits to the “house-
hold” as a unit or to the nominal household head.
They avoid the issue of internal distribution,
possibly assuming it will prove difficult to de-
velop mechanisms to deliver benefits to specific
individuals within households.
Finally, a strong cultural bias also supports the
analytic and practical impetus to consolidate
individuals into households. The family, especi-
ally the marital relationship, is viewed as a
sanctum which is protected from the conflicts
that characterize virtually all other social insti-
tutions. This bias, though comforting, is also
incorrect. Since men’s and women’s access to and
control over resources differ systematically in the
wider world - the external world of income
relations - why would their personal economies
be served by a common groundplan in the
internal world of income relations? In the follow-
ing sections, we review some of the recent
literature on adult men’s and women’s social and
economic experience. This review shows how
profound is the distinction between the male and
female spheres; we argue, therefore, that men’s
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HOMES DIVIDED
981
and women’s needs and interests are unlikely to
fully accord within the intimacy of family and
marriage.
3. MEN’S AND WOMEN’S
CONTRASTING LIVES
(a)
Economic contribution
In recent years, it has become important to
document what women contribute to family and
society through household and market produc-
tion. Over the last 30 years, there has been a
steady upward trend in the participation of
women in the labor market in developing coun-
tries. Though still afflicted by the serious prob-
lems of underenumeration,’ the official rate of
female labor force participation in developing
countries in 1985 was 32 percent. A more
important fact to consider is that the rate of
growth of women’s labor force participation since
1950 has outstripped the rise in male workers by
two to one.’
Apart from this, it has been established that
women’s compensated labor combined with
household production renders them substantial
and sometimes predominant economic contrib-
utors in all developing regions of the world.
This is true even in parts of Asia where cultural
prescriptions mask women’s productivity. In
recognition of the generally severe problem of
undervaluation of women’s productive activities
in Asian national accounts, Krishna put forward
a three-step methodology - parallel in approach
to that routinely used to estimate income gener-
ated in unregistered or unorganized sectors - to
assess women’s economic input to the national
product.’ Using a similar methodology, Muker-
jee estimated that Indian women contribute -
exclusive of their services as housewives - 36
percent of India’s net domestic product.‘” A
detailed time allocation study in the Philippines
determined that, although mothers contributed
only 20 percent of market income, their contri-
bution to full household income was about 38
percent.” Acharya and Bennett’s intensive study
of 279 households in eight villages in Nepal
concluded that when both subsistence production
and market production are considered, women
- despite having over two-thirds less cash
income than men - contribute 15 percent more
than men to
ull
household income.‘*
Women subsidize economic progress in at least
four ways: through their underemployment, their
unemployment, their willingness to go in and
out of the labor market, and their low wages.
Women carry the major share of part-time
employment worldwide. In addition to the gen-
erally accepted observation that much of their
productive work is uncompensated by wages,
their hourly earnings in sectors like manufactur-
ing compare unfavorably to men’s. As reported
in a survey of nine developing countries, women
earned between 50 percent (South Korea) and 80
percent (Burma) of the wages of men who are
comparably employed.13 A review of rural
women’s income conducted by the International
Labor Organization reveals that women some-
times earned as little as one-third to one-fifth of
the wages earned by men for work of equal or
greater difficulty.14
(b)
Fert il i ty decision maki ng and
t he demand f or chil dren
In pursuing their life course, women may seek
a balance between two areas in which they have
high stakes and little freedom of choice: increas-
ing their access to income and assets and obtain-
ing the desired timing, number, and sex of
children. Despite the obvious dissimilarity in
male and female reproductive risk and parenting
responsibilities, fertility decision making has
often been studied as a household-level phe-
nomenon. However, innovative analysts such as
Todaro and Fapohunda are beginning to apply
Ben-Porath’s transactions framework to the
question of which intrahousehold processes in-
fluence fertility decisions. They state, “We begin
by assuming that during the reproductive lifetime
of the conjugal unit,
each
spouse examines his or
her individual experience, benefits, and personal
expenditures associated with alternate family
sizes in order to arrive at a specific perception of
personal reproduction goals.“” They go on to
detail salient aspects of the implicit husband/wife
contract in three communities in Nigeria and
project their influence on fertility behavior.
Mason and Taj have identified four aspects of
the reproductive experience in which men’s and
women’s experience contrasts, particularly in the
most traditional societies. l6 These dimensions
are: (1) the risk of morbidity and mortality as-
sociated with pregnancy, birth, and lactation -
an exclusively female experience; (2) the social
and economic costs of child rearing; (3) the
likelihood of gaining the benefits of children
because of inheritance patterns and sex bias; and
(4) the way in which children may enhance either
partner’s position socially and in the family,
potentially increasing the dominance of one
partner over the other. The alignment of these
four factors may argue for either more or fewer
children for men or women. In reviewing the
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WORLD DEVELOPMENT
reasons women may wish to have more children
than men do, Mason and Taj define situations in
which female fertility goals exceed men’s -
especially the desire for sons - as a hedge
against risk and insecurity. Cain describes, at the
extreme end of female dependence, women’s
range of choices in rural South Asia, as these
occur in contrasting villages in Mymensingh,
Bangladesh, and in three states of India -
Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Madhya
Pradesh.” In Bangladesh in particular, women’s
access to income-earning opportunities is se-
verely limited; their legal inheritance rights are
generally forfeited; their chances of becoming
widows (because of age differentials between
spouses at marriage) are a near certainty; divorce
and abandonment are realistic possibilities; and
control of women by patriarchal structures is
extreme. Many Bangladeshi women must repro-
duce to survive. Sons are especially valuable;
they are long-term risk insurance, and widows
maintain a stake in their deceased husband’s
property largely through sons’ productive activi-
ties and status.
Even when men and women agree on a
preferred number of children, the factors behind
these choices are likely to differ. Childbearing
and rearing is a far more powerful determinant
of women’s life course than men’s, Further,
women’s role in childbearing and rearing gen-
erates other fundamental distinctions between
women’s life experience and that of men.
(c)
Time use
Gender-differentiated time use occurs from
early childhood through old age. Fairly consis-
tently, women in all parts of the world work more
hours (paid and unpaid) than do men of the same
age. Most critically, becoming a parent has a
significant effect on women’s time use and little
on men’s,. For certain developing societies, data
indicate that additional children reduce the
already little amount of time a man spends in
child care, while typically erasing leisure and
reducing the sleep time of women to a biological
minimum.‘a The tenacity of this gender-differen-
tiated system of time use is most striking when
one considers middle-class couples in industrial-
ized countries where both spouses are full-time
members of the work force, and where substitute
child care during the parents’ work hours can be
purchased. Based on a study in the United
States, Hill and Stafford conclude that “the
overall impressions [are] that college educated
women make substantial re-allocations of time to
direct child care
. .
that they sacrifice personal
free time and sleep to avoid an excessively large
reduction in market hours. Overall the time use
response of men to the presence of children in
the household is minor.“”
Let us return for a moment to the new
household economics model as depicted by
Folbre. Under this theory, she states, “The
economic rationality of the household unit fur-
ther extends to decisions about family size which
are influenced by changes in the price of children
due to increases in production costs such as
education and opportunity time devoted to child
care. “‘O
Time use data suggest that the decisions
about these tradeoffs are not taken by the
household, but rather almost exclusively by the
mother who balances the conflict between mar-
ket work and child care by reducing sleep and
leisure.
Comparative information on male and female
time use raises another question about the degree
to which men and women do different things at
different times of the day, and how tasks are
shared (if at all). If we analyzed individual time
use at a distance, not knowing that the person-
alities under study are members of the same
household, and viewed time use, like monetary
investment as an economic choice, we would
likely conclude that men and women belong to
distinct social and economic groups, and some-
times would have difficulty regarding their be-
havior as cooperative or even linked.
Does this segmentation of experience affect
men’s and women’s perceptions of themselves,
their partners, and the transactions between
them? Jain suggests that it may. In Tyranny ofthe
Household
she states that in poverty, “lives by
necessity get acutely segregated both in space
and in task, and to that extent
perceptions are
limited to personal experience.” ’ If this is so,
men and women in some poor households have
less opportunity to plan and live cooperatively
than those in better-off households, because of
the stress of fulfilling essential, but distinct,
responsibilities. Hoodfar, writing about life in a
low-income neighborhood of Cairo, contrasts the
male world of coffee shops, movies, and work
away from the neighborhood with the confined
and impoverished environment of the women,
who may not leave the small geographic territory
of the district during their entire lives. Men’s
“outside” world can claim a sometimes substan-
tial portion of their earnings and may loosen their
personal and social contracts to provide materi-
ally and emotionally for their immediate fam-
ilies.
This description, when combined with
what we know of the increasing migration world-
wide of men and women, suggests an often
forgotten dimension of male/female differentials
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HOMES DIVIDED
983
-that of long-term and daily spatial separation;
men and women literally move in different
worlds. Plausibly coping with economic down-
turns necessitates an increasing segmentation of
household members’ experience, and this is one
reason poverty may intensify age- and gender-
based inequalities. Thus, the recent school of
analysts exploring “household survival strat-
egies” may find that what appears to be an
adaptive, even a finely tuned balancing of house-
hold resources, is actually the uneasy aggregate
of individual survival strategies.‘”
4. CONFLICT IN HOUSEHOLDS,
COOPERATIVE AND OTHERWISE
The literature reviewed above establishes a
widespread inequality between men and women
in assets, income, and social norms and obli-
gations. This inequality crosses the threshold of
the household and is an institutionalized feature
of many intergenerational family relationships
and marital partnerships. We contend that
women bargain to improve their position within
these frameworks. Further, it seems to be the
case that, for mothers, a primary goal of this
bargaining - beyond reasonable personal sur-
vival - is to maximize the channeling of income
and other resources to the benefit of their chil-
dren. Yet, the literature admits a striking variety
of visible and invisible bargaining styles and
implicit and explicit contracts. It is not clear how
readily women perceive their dilemma or
whether they acknowledge the arrangements
under which they labor as contracts. Finally, do
women consciously bargain or exchange to
achieve ends?
Sen assigns a high value to
perception
itself as
“one of the important parameters in the deter-
mination of intrafamily divisions and inequali-
ties.” He argues that if a woman undervalues
herself, her bargaining position will be weaker,
and she is likely to accept inferior conditions. Sen
contends that outside earning can provide
psychological and practical leverage for women
by offering them a better fallback position should
negotiations break down (e.g., through divorce);
an enhanced ability to deal with threats and
indeed to use threats (e.g., leaving the house);
and a higher “perceived” contribution to the
family economic position - by them and
others.24
The “others” to whom Sen refers include not
only husbands, but also common-law partners,
parents, in-laws, patriarchs of their own or other
lineages, siblings, and children. The currency on
which we focus most closely is income. Yet there
are other valued but less negotiable currencies -
the bearing of children, education and training,
social networking, household-based production
-that determine women’s position in the family
and wider society and their ability to achieve
their desired ends. Detecting women’s implicit
lifetime contracts and strategic position requires
careful qualitative research that looks both lat-
erally and vertically at the family system.
Munachonga examines income allocation and
control systems within changing marriage forms
in the emerging middle classes of urban Zambia
and finds women must be innovative in their use
of kin networks. She suggests that most women
will seek status and security - however uncer-
tain - through marriage. Even then, the wage-
earning wife finds that her traditional work
obligations toward her husband have been re-
interpreted in the urban context to mean that the
husband owns her earnings. Traditional obli-
gations to kin are factored into an equation that
is reformulated in modern terms. For example,
she recounts a story of one couple in her sample
who called in representatives of each of their kin
groups when either spouse “bought a major
household item . . . to explain who had bought
and therefore owned the item.“25 All this con-
tinues to be necessary because current ordinance
law does not provide women with property rights
in case of divorce.
Greenhalgh describes how Taiwanese parents
create differential contracts with male and female
children.26 Male children are bound by a longer
and somewhat looser contract of obligation.
They must achieve and earn over the long term to
support and honor their aging parents. Females
leave the family at marriage and so must repay
their debt for nurturance and education before
they are absorbed into their husbands’ families.
Greenhalgh contends that this system has oper-
ated in the presence of modern educational and
employment opportunities to increase girls’ edu-
cational attainment and their participation in
formal wage labor, but that it has not resulted in
an increasingly autonomous younger generation
of females. Rather, she argues that the partici-
pation of young women in export-oriented pro-
duction lines is a modernized version of an
older family strategy that increases the value of
sons’ contributions to parents by using the in-
come generated by their sisters to pay for and
prolong the sons’ education. Within the currently
observed intergenerational contract, women’s
earning opportunities give them little new power
and perhaps have served to subjugate them
longer if not more severely.
Wolfe discusses a contrasting case in Java
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984 WORLD DEVELOPMENT
where a bilateral kinship system assists daughters
in making more autonomous decisions about
whether to work and how to use the earnings.
She finds that daughters had various and indirect
ways of balancing parental approval with factory
employment. In the ideal they were to ask
parental permission beforehand, but “the most
common way was to apply for positions first,
receive a job, and then ask parental permission.”
The community she studied was very poor, thus
she expected the remittances from the factory to
be diverted to the family economy. However, she
found a high degree of income retention rather
than income pooling. “Unlike their Taiwanese
counterparts. who turn over 50 to 80 percent of
factory wages to families, these Javanese factory
daughters control their own income, remitting
little if anything from their weekly wages to the
family till and often asked their parents for more.
Most participated in rotated savings associations
through which they accumulated substantial sums
of capital. That money was used to buy their
clothing, consumer goods for the household, and
was made accessible for parents for lifecycle
events (birth, death, circumcision, marriage),
emergencies, and debts.“*’
Pessar reveals the intricacy of negotiations
over return migration between spouses in Do-
minican Republic migrant couples to the United
States.** The value of the new social context,
which
includes expanded earning
oppor-
tunities for and an increased measure of mone-
tary control by women, is clearly perceived by
women, who are reluctant to return home in
many cases. Among other indications of women’s
expanded power, Pessar documents a profound
change in budgetary allocation patterns in Do-
minican households after migration. The conflict
over this changing authority resulted in 14 US
divorces among the 55 women in her sample.
Wives’ new interests are to build their personal
stake in the United States and to delay their re-
turn home, while husbands stress the importance
of saving (“Five dollars wasted today means five
more years of postponement of the return to the
Dominican Republic”). Men also look forward to
returning to the home country with the elevated
status of direct producer or owner of a business.
Pessar calls into question the gender-blind
models of migration that focus on household
behavior and fail to inquire into the interplay of
male and female interests.
These examples point up the many life course
decisions in which male and female interests fail
to accord. There are also different degrees of
conflict; they reveal a substantial territory be-
tween cooperative households (as insisted upon
by some household models) and the open conflict
allowed to emerge in bargaining or transactions
models.
Beginning with mildly “uncooperative” house-
holds, the literature on family monetary arrange-
ments provides evidence of a lack of mutuality in
that adult partners generally have incomplete
information about each other’s earnings. In both
industrializedz9 and developing societies, hus-
bands frequently minimize their wives’ income
contribution; women on their side are often
deliberately kept uninformed of the husband’s
earning and spending. Safilios-Rothschild ex-
plored the basis of income relations in the
context of agrarian reform in Honduras and
found the women generally ignorant of the men’s
earnings and that the majority of men underesti-
mate their wives economic contribution, a find-
ing that should be of great interest to surveyors
who rely on a single informant for data on family
income.“’ Safilios-Rothschild sees a tendency to
minimize women’s contribution as part of a
larger strategy to uphold the ideal of the male
breadwinner, which in turn validates the broader
system of sexual stratification. The greater
women’s earnings are relative to men’s, the more
likely they are to be underestimated. However,
women themselves find it notoriously difficult to
report their earnings accurately because of their
irregularity and the form they take; thus, to some
degree, women collaborate in the obfuscation of
female contributions.
Fapohunda investigated income arrangements
in three socially different Yoruba communities in
Nigeria. She considered shared information on
income a precondition for effective income pool-
ing and joint expenditure planning. She found
substantial risks for each spouse associated with
revealing income or unreservedly collaborating
in joint financial arrangements. Based on evi-
dence of men’s and women’s individualized
income strategies in each of the three societies
studied, she states,
“Theoretically, the challenge
to social scientists is . to consider the char-
acteristics and functioning of heterogenous
nonpooling domestic units, perhaps viewing the
household with a unified budget as a special
case.“31
Occasionally the literature provides dramatic
and explicit examples of negotiation over money.
Roldan studied 140 Mexico City women who
worked as garment and textile industry piece
workers in their own homes. She reports,
“Family interaction is fraught with friction. Forty
of the 53 wives studied reported very frequent
discussions and quarrels over shortages of
money, wives’
‘faulty’ administration (as hus-
bands put it), children’s discipline, and husbands’
drinking, unfaithfulness, and jealousy. Violence
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HOMES DIVIDED
985
was frequent, and surprisingly, 32 of the wives
thought their marriage was a failure. Half of
them had separated at one point or another in
their married lives. “32 In her 1983 study of the
Simri irrigation program in the Gambia, Jones
defined a different linkage between domestic
violence and income relations.33 Her research
illustrated women’s rational response to mon-
etary incentives for their labor. Women reduced
labor on crops for which they were not justly
compensated, Jones reported, but could not
withhold their labor altogether for fear of beat-
ings from their husbands.
5. ALLOCATION OF INCOME
These vignettes illustrate considerable tension
in households over the use of income and other
valued resources. However, whether expressed
through inadequate sharing of information, in-
complete pooling of income, or open violence,
what difference do intrafamily disputes over
resources make? When are these contentions
and conflicts of social policy interest? Confining
ourselves primarily to negotiations over uses of
income between formally married or consensual
adult partners, the data suggest at the very least
some important differences in the destinations of
men’s and women’s income, and their tendency
to withhold income for personal uses.
A central impetus to women’s earning -
attaining a better life for their children, which
many women view as an extension of “good
mothering”34 -
may explain the allocational
priorities they apply to their own income and
other income that they control. Though difficult
to research, a considerable body of information
has been compiled on this subject in the last
decade. Kumar’s 1977 study in Kerala, India,
indicated that a child’s nutritional level corre-
lated positively with the size of the mother’s
income, food inputs from subsistence farm-
ing, and the quality of available family-based
child care.35 Significantly, children’s nutritional
level did not increase in direct proportion to in-
creases in paternal income. An expanding num-
ber of recent studies and project evaluations in
Jamaica, St. Lucia, Ghana, Kenya, Botswana,
Sri Lanka, and another multi-village study in
Guatemala strongly indicates a greater devotion
of women’s than men’s income to everyday
subsistence and nutrition.36
Mencher describes income levels and relations
in landless families in Tamil Nadu and Kerala
and focuses attention on women’s limited access
to sex-segregated rural labor markets.37 She
documents that in a variety of poor classes in 14
different villages, women consistently devote a
higher proportion of their income (nearly 100
percent) to family needs than do men. Men
withhold some portion of their wages for per-
sonal use even when overall income is clearly
inadequate. Mencher’s data challenge the hy-
pothesis that men’s and women’s income con-
tributions are fungible and cooperatively worked
out. And while it is sometimes alleged that
men contribute more of their earnings when
women are earning less, Mencher’s data show
that fluctuations in men’s contributions to the
household move in unexpected directions. Men
tend to make higher contributions to the house-
hold budget in both relative and absolute terms
when women are earning the most. Curiously,
they do not usually increase their contributions in
times of family stress (when women are finding
less work or have just given birth to a child).
Men’s income contribution to the household
varies, in most cases, not with family need but
with their own income. From this, most men
subtract a constant amount of income for per-
sonal use. The consequences of this pattern are
potentially serious in communities where in-
fant mortality is high, where all families live on
the edge of poverty, and where malnutrition is
common. Development policy is not neutral in its
impact. Mencher notes that planned new produc-
tion techniques will bypass the poorest women
and men and concentrate new technologies in the
hands of a minority of wealthier men. Under
present circumstances, any reduction in the
income that women earn and devote to the family
is liable to affect their survival.
Gender-based responsibilities are most explicit
in Africa. In some societies, husbands are re-
sponsible for the provision of lodgings, children’s
tuition and other educational costs. Providing
income for food and clothing for children may
vary as a male or female/male joint obligation.
However, almost universally, women in Africa
are viewed as ultimately responsible for fulfilling
children’s food needs.38 Analyzing domestic
budgets among the Beti in Cameroon, Guyer
finds both class-related aspects to household
spending and distinctive male and female econ-
omies within households. Women are respon-
sible for providing the day-to-day food and, to a
greater and greater degree, the education of
children.39
At issue is not simply the ways in which
women’s income is used, but the degree to which
men and women differ in withdrawing personal
spending money from their earnings. Although
the specifics of women’s consumption responsi-
billities vary (both in Africa and across the
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world), it is quite commonly found that gender
ideologies support the notion that men have a
right to personal spending money, which they are
perceived to need or deserve, and that women’s
income is for collective purposes.40 Mencher,
Hoodfar, Maher, Roldan, Engle, and Guyer -
commenting on India, Egypt, Morocco, Mexico,
Guatemala, and Cameroon, respectively - con-
firm men’s tendency to withhold portions of their
income for not directly productive purposes,
even when families live in or near poverty.
Maher suggests that one reason for this is the
socialization of male children. She traces its
development in rural Morocco from a relatively
early age: “In the hamlets, by the age of 15, they
[boys] are men and begin to avoid all work
connected with the domestic enterprise . .
Most adolescents of this age are unemployed,
partly because they do not have the strength or
skills needed for most jobs. However, this does
not deter them from seeking the kind of con-
sumption which they consider proper to men -
clothes, cigarettes, cinema, prostitutes. Con-
sumption is more important than work to the
social role of the adult male.“4’
This growing knowledge of the specific des-
tinations of women’s income was initially ob-
scured by a larger debate about the possible
losses to children’s welfare when mothers work
outside the home.42 The debate initially arose in
industrialized countries, but has been translated
into Engle’s succinctly posed question: Can
children’s needs be met when their mothers work
for cash income in third world countries?43 It
should first be observed that many women have
no choice about earning income. And research
has begun to spell out the favorable develop-
mental impacts of mothers’ income-generating
activities. Wilson noted that the children of
“working” mothers have more adequate home
diets at 18 and 30 months than same-aged
children of nonworking mothers in a set of
Guatemalan villages studied.44 More recent re-
search by Engle, also in Guatemala, confirmed
the positive contribution of maternal earnings (of
nondomestic workers) to the welfare of one- and
two-year olds, and noted that “two-year old
children of working mothers were significantly
heavier than nonworkers’ children.“45 Kennedy,
in a study of the effects of cash cropping on
nutrition in Kenya, concluded, “Children from
households headed by females consistently have
better nutritional status than preschoolers from
other types of households. Girls do better than
boys and older children do better than younger in
many of the growth parameters. There is also
some evidence that income controlled by women
correlates with improved nutritional status, in-
dicating that women are more likely to spend on
food and health care.“46
Senauer evaluates the impact of the value of
women’s time on the next generation’s food and
nutritional status in case studies, two in the
Philippines and one in Sri Lanka. These analyses
coincide in the conclusion that “the value of
women’s time can be utilized as a means to
indirectly change behavior and resource flows
within households, and thus improve the well-
being in particular of women and children.“47
This conclusion is warranted by findings that
indicate that the mother and children receive a
higher relative share of a household’s available
food when the mother’s estimated wages in-
crease. This is in contrast to a more limited or
even null effect of the father’s wage. In one
Philippine case study, the father’s wage had a
negative impact on children’s long-run nutri-
tional status.
Blumberg has reviewed the other side of this
question, that is, the negative impacts on welfare
when women’s control of cash income is re-
duced.48 Of the case studies she reviewed for the
World Bank, one drawn from Burkina Faso
describes the impact on household nutrition
of a resettlement scheme.49 This project denied
women personal plots and emphasized cotton
production which relied on increasing their
“family” labor contribution. As a result women’s
work day lengthened, their independent com-
mercial activities declined by more than half, and
they found it difficult to provide the “sauce
items” for the major daily meal, a vital nutri-
tional component. Another example from Africa
- perhaps the classic - is that of the Mwea
resettlement scheme in Kenya which, similar
to the Burkina Faso case, markedly reduced
women’s access to independent plots while com-
pelling them to work on the new irrigated rice
fields assigned to the men.50 Husbands were
directly compensated for the official project crop
-
rice - while women’s income and provision-
ing activities declined. As a result, nutritional
levels fell and more than a few families broke up,
as women left the scheme to find better circum-
stances.
6. A LINK TO POLICY
(a)
Individualized income streams
Understanding
individual income streams
within the household is analytically important
for deciphering the determinants of economic
change at both the upper and lower ends of the
economic spectrum. When monitoring the health
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HOMES DIVIDED 981
and welfare of low-income groups, it becomes
crucial for policy makers to see the link between
women’s roles as financial managers of the
household and the physical and social status of
their children and eventually their readiness to
join a modern labor force. Household authority
patterns and norms may act to reduce the
potential benefits to women of new economic
opportunities by, for example, insisting that
women take differential responsibility for chil-
dren (and sometimes older dependents). There
tends not to be a reciprocal pressure on men to
contribute more to the family as their income
increases; on the contrary, men may keep their
bargaining edge by deciding what externally
derived benefits are to be passed on to the
household and to what degree. Men serve as
unacknowledged gatekeepers between the family
and purportedly gender-blind new economic
opportunities.
The forging of an appropriate theoretical link
between macrolevel policy and microlevel im-
pacts (at the household and subhousehold level)
could enlighten debates about development pol-
icy, such as the current controversy about the
impact of economic readjustment (e.g., changes
in debt structure and internal pricing policies) on
the poor. The debate - in its most simplified
form - engages the economists (generally work-
ing within a neoclassical framework with its
presumptive unified household) and other social
scientists who tend to be more sensitive to the
interclass and other distributional effects of
economic policy. A third set of actors, also part
of this debate, are the welfare planners who act
principally through health and nutrition interven-
tions.
These three groups diagnose and treat dif-
ferently, but their models of the household are
similar in assuming high levels of cooperation
between the adult males and adult females.
Economists propose to help the households in
their models principally by looking for ways to
increase the earnings of the main breadwinner. It
is assumed that income the male breadwinner
earns from newly created employment opportun-
ities will be distributed to his family. The degree
to which this income will leak out for other
purposes is not formally considered, nor is the
degree of actual attachment of the economically
benefited males to the needy females and chil-
dren. The second group, the social theorists,
more attuned to the distributional effects of
macroeconomic policies, are alert to decreases in
real wealth; they look for polarization within so-
cieties and the creation of new class disparities.
Their sensitivity to increasing class differenti-
ation and divisions within communities has often
not been extended to a concern with what
happens inside households in times of stress. The
third group, the health and welfare theorists and
activists, have fewer resources and a good deal
less in the way of policy instruments at their
command; in effect, they take on “the women” as
their agents. The invisible women of the eco-
nomic theorists become powerful mothers in
the eyes of health advocates. It is believed that
these women, with more knowledge (but little
more time or money), can heal, reconstitute, and
fortify their children, while in fact the underlying
cause of much of the illness - inadequate
nutrition owing to low incomes - cannot be
dealt with at the level of health interventions.
(b) Is
support of idi ~di ~;zl w omen’s earni ng
7
Few who have studied women’s position would
conclude that fundamental change for women
and, by extension, better prospects for their
children can be based solely on increasing their
individual earning power. Feminist theorists have
identified collective action as a primary step for
women in achieving personal power and status
in the public domain. ” Sanday’s cross-cultural
analysis of female status identified four indicators
of high status, the most important of which -
superseding female material control - is the
existence of female solidarity groups.52 An
empirical support for this analysis is the role that
some women’s organizations in South Asia,
specifically in India and Bangladesh, .have played
in bringing women, weak and in domestic iso-
lation, into visibility and power in a wider
arena. s3 Their achievements extend beyond en-
hancing the material prospects of the partici-
pants, to effecting changes in women’s outlooks,
increasing their freedom within the family unit,
and enabling them to mobilize vital community
resources, gaining access to literacy classes, a
voice in community government, and so forth.
Acharya and Bennett’s 1983 study of household
decision making in Nepal provides an analytic
link for the phenomena observed. In their study,
women’s activities were grouped on a continuum
from those in the domestic sphere to those out-
side the village. (It approximates a spatial con-
cept, as women’s productive activities move
farther from the geographic locus of the house-
hold.) They found that it is not women’s produc-
tive activities per se that increase their influence
in household decision making, but rather the
extent to which women can move out of confined
production roles and into participation in the
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WORLD DEVELOPMENT
village
market
employment.54
economy or
extra-village
Thus, as Jain observes, there is an interplay
between the familial and extrafamilial: “The
scene of women’s advancement seems to be the
household and
. .
the household’s perception
and evaluation of women’s role, its hierarchy, its
monetary and nonmonetary sources of power.“”
But key in changing the dynamics within the
household are extrafamilial experiences which
permit women an opportunity to see themselves
differently, to become discomforted with their
subordinated status, and empowered to confront
and transform the aspects of family and income
relations that oppress them. Women may need to
become strengthened even beyond this point to
effectively use direct and bilateral strategies of
negotiation rather than less risky and often less
effective unilateral or indirect means.56 What
remains to be detailed is how women transit to
consciousness in their income relations with
intimates, and what strategies they employ
preferentially.
(c)
Impermanent households
We have argued that all different household
forms contain more than one economy. We
have suggested that even in circumstances where
men are making conventionally prescribed and
consistent economic contributions, women’s in-
come and their ability to channel resources to
improve a household’s human welfare deserve
special support. We have defined the conditions
necessary to achieve the greatest impact eco-
nomically and for women as a group - e.g.,
support of women’s collective action. Finally,
this last section proposes that demographic fac-
tors also argue for making women’s earning
power a better defined target of economic policy
and practice. That is, households are not perma-
nent. Indeed, four trends are likely to increase
the numbers of women who are primary or sole
maintainers of households, especially those that
contain dependent children. These trends are
continuing differentials in spousal age at mar-
riage, marital disruption, national and inter-
national migration, and unpartnered adolescent
fertility.
Some societies continue to maintain median
differentials of age of marriage in the range of
7-9
years (e.g., Bangladesh, Senegal). Such
differentials translate into a high proportion of
women who face widowhood as a certainty when
in most cases they will serve as their own primary
support and plausibly that of later-born
children. Apart from the natural process of death
as an uncoupler, formal marital disruption is on
the increase in many societies. Younger cohorts
tend to show higher rates than older cohorts.
Eleven percent of women in Bangladesh who
marry between the ages of 15 and 19 (the majority
marry around the age of 16) will be divorced
within five years. The comparable figures of
marital disruption of those contracting marriage
and common-law partnership between the ages
15 to 19 are 74 percent in Haiti, 17 percent in
Senegal, and 10 percent in Kenya. This translates
into numerous young women, typically with very
young children (particularly where adolescent
fertility impels many unions), being
de ure
or
de
facto
heads of households in their early twenties.
By age 40 to 45, 20 percent of African women,
rising as high as 30 percent in Mauritania, will be
separated, divorced, or widowed. In Asia the
range is 10 to 29 percent (the high being in
Bangladesh).
The net impact of male migration in the future,
both within and between countries, is difficult to
predict as it is increasing in some countries and
declining in others. But, on the whole, women’s
participation in migration is increasing. As
Standing’s article (this volume) points out, the
need for a mobile, skilled, flexible labor force
will likely entail, for both men and women, a
pattern of work which implies short or longer
term separations from family. Finally, an already
high, and in some settings, a rapidly increas-
ing proportion of women begin their families
as pregnant adolescents without committed
partners.
Women’s risks of being sole or primary bread-
winners are masked by survey classifications of
family types that greatly underenumerate
de
facto
female household heads.” Yet, even ac-
cording to existing classification techniques and
cross-sectional information, as many as one-third
of households in the world may be female
headed and, in some communities, the validated
figure is as high as 50 percent. An important
missing piece of knowledge is how many women
pass through a phase in their lives when they are
the primary or sole economic support of young
children. But provisional indications based on
research on children’s experience in the Western
Hemisphere are alarming. For example, in the
United States about 21 percent of households at
any one point in time are female headed (and
over 60 percent of those in poverty are female
headed), but nearly half of all United States
children (and about 70 percent of black children)
will be in a household which is disrupted at some
point before the age of 16. The great majority of
these children will live in female-headed
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989
households for an extended period. For example,
54 percent of the white children born between
1965 and 1969 whose families were disrupted
were living with their unremarried mother five
years after the family break-up. The comparable
figure for black children was 87 percent.‘*
Similar research in developing countries has
been undertaken using life table analysis of
census data. As noted elsewhere, census defi-
nitions of female headship may significantly
underenumerate the households primarily or
exclusively reliant on women’s earnings, some-
times by a factor of two. Still, by manipulating
marital disruption data as it stands, it has been
estimated that in Colombia as many as one-third
of the children and in Mexico as many as one-
fifth will live some portion of their lives with an
unmarried mother by the age of 15.” In the case
of Mexico, a child born out of a union may spend
three to five years in this state and in Colombia
five years. For children born between unions the
average time is different - seven years with an
unmarried mother in Mexico and 3.5 years in
Colombia. Given societies where as many as
40 percent of the households are currently main-
tained by women, is it plausible that as many as
80 percent of the children live in a female-headed
and -maintained household at some point and at
similarly young ages? What are the consequences
to the women who support these households and
to the children with whom they share their
poverty?
In sum, it seems that the process of individual-
ization of life strategies is becoming more ex-
plicit. Economic pressures and social change are
spinning the family as traditionally defined down
to its core - mothers and children. Though
many different family members may aggregate to
the core at different times as contributors of
income or as dependents, the most persistent
economic relationship within these complex net-
works of intimates is the attachment of mothers
to children. Grandparents leave, husbands break
off, aunts, sisters, and brothers come and go, but
the mothers of young children tend to stay with
their young children and the economic vulner-
ability of this reduced core should be a matter of
international policy interest.
7. CONCLUSION
The policy message of this chapter may distill
down to the proposition that selected individuals
within households rather than households them-
selves should be the objects of economic outlays,
whether income transfers or wage-earning oppor-
tunities. Cultural designation of some obligations
as male or as female, as the responsibility of the
father or the mother, especially points to the
appropriateness of directing allocations to specif-
ic individuals. In cases in which it is determined
that resources that come into the household may
be used unproductively vis-a-vis the well-being
of target groups, allocations of aid might
be directed to women outside the household.
Women’s collective action groups, cooperatives,
and savings unions can be regarded as possible
mechanisms to protect income and other re-
sources for use in meeting critical needs.
Policies that earmark individual recipients for
aid rather than the household as a unit are not
necessarily discordant with the goals of family
maintenance or strengthening. In fact, insofar as
adult men have been designated as heads of
household and have served as de facto “in-
dividual” recipients of development allocations,
this proposal is not a radical departure. More-
over, the precise delineation of recipients may
lead to more effective channeling of scarce
resources and reinforce, in a positive sense,
differentiation regarding areas of responsibility
that indigenous households already make.
We have seen that men and women are
distinctive in their economic access, and similarly
have distinct self-interest within the.family. We
have found that male and female goals within
nuclear and intergenerational households are
typically pursued through institutionalized in-
equalities, rather than through cooperative
plans. We predict an increasing sub-nuclear-
ization of families to the mother-child unit. We
argue for attention to these facts in pursuit of
equality and economic progress. Certainly, the
information presented here suggests that to the
many fault linesm along which social changes are
monitored, the economic condition of male and fe-
male within the same household should be added.
NOTES
1. Becker (1981).
4. Sen (1985), paragraphs 21-27.
2. Nash (1953); Manser and Brown (1979).
5. Folbre (1988).
p.
252.
3. Ben-Porath (1980).
6. Jones (1983); Hanger and Morris (1973); Dey
(1983); Rogers (1983); and Blumberg (1986).
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WORLD DEVELOPMENT
7.
Recchini de Lattes and Wainerman (1981). 26. Greenhalgh (1988).
8. Joekes (1987a). 27. Wolfe (1988), p. 9.
9.
Krishna’s methodology is as follows: “The first 28. Pessar (1988).
step is to obtain a detailed distribution of female time
between various activities through large-scale sample
surveys. The next (second) step is to classify activities
for the purpose of valuation into three categories:
(a) activities which are clearly productive in the con-
ventional sense and paid for in money or in kind;
(b) activities which are clearly in the nature of final
consumption, e.g., eating, sleeping, dressing, socializ-
ing, and engaging in other recreational or religious
activities; and (c) unpaid ‘quasi-productive’ activities.
There is obviously no ambiguity about the status of
activities in categories (a) and (b). Activities of type (a)
are clearly productive, and already regarded and
valued as such in current statistics. Time devoted to
them is clearly ‘employment.’ And the net value added
by them is a part of national income.” (Krishna
discusses the ambiguities and methods to resolve
them.) “The third task is the valuation of what we have
29. Pahl (1980).
30. Safilios-Rothschild (1988).
31. Fapohunda (1988), p. 153.
32. Roldan (1988). p. 245.
33. Jones (1983).
34. Engle (1986).
35. Kumar (1977).
36. Horton and Miller (nd.); Knudsen and Yates
(1981); Tripp (1981); Carloni (1987); Benson and
Emmert (1977); and Blumberg (1986).
called ‘quasi-productive’ activities. There is a good
precedent for valuing them, in the procedures used to 37.
value unpaid family inputs in the calculation of the cost
of production of agricultural products
.
In every 38.
transitional, semi-feudal, semi-commercial economy,
almost every kind of unpaid quasi-productive labor is 39.
purchased and paid for in some nearby commercialized
subsector.” Krishna (n.d.), Appendix B-2. 40.
10. Mukerjee (1985).
41.
11.
King and Evenson (1983).
42.
12. Acharya and Bennett (1983). 43.
13. Sivard (1985). 44.
14. Ahmad and Loufti (1982).
45.
15. Todaro and Fapohunda (1987) p. 5
46.
16.
Mason and Taj (1987).
47.
17.
Cain (1977).
48.
18. King and Evenson (1983). 49.
19.
Hill and Stafford (1980), p. 229. 50.
20. Folbre (1988), p. 251. 51.
21.
Jain (1985), p. xiii.
52.
22.
Hoodfar ( 1988).
53.
23. Schmink (1984). 54.
24.
Sen (1985), paragraphs 21-27. 55.
25. Munachonga (1988). p. 193. 56.
Mencher (1988).
Nelson (1981).
Guyer (1988).
Young (1987).
Maher (1984). p. 181.
Leslie ( 1987).
Engle (1986), p. 3.
Wilson (1981).
Engle (n.d.), p. 2.
Kennedy (1987), p. 10.
Senauer (1988), p. 20.
Blumberg (1988).
Conti (1979).
Hanger and Morris (1973).
Safilios-Rothschild (1982).
Sanday (1974).
Jain (1974); SEWA (1975); Chen (1984).
Acharya and Bennett (1983).
Jain (1985), p. 8.
Falbo and Peplau (1980).
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57. BuviniC, Youssef, and Von Elm (1978).
58. Furstenberg et al. (1983).
59. Richter (1988).
60. Papanek and Schwede (1988).