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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986

WORLD DEVELOPMENT

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


9/13

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


10/13

988

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


11/13

HOMES DIVIDED

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).


12/13

990

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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HOMES DIVIDED

991

57. BuviniC, Youssef, and Von Elm (1978).

58. Furstenberg et al. (1983).

59. Richter (1988).

60. Papanek and Schwede (1988).

Documents

women headship