Homes divided

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 discriminatory 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 finding adequate livelihoods, retaining assets, and maintaining their social status when marriages dissolve, whether through separation, abandonment, migration, or death, are often markedly poorer than men’s.

In this paper we review these societal inequalities 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 between 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 negotiation over assets and possibly severe inequalities 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 Income in the Third World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). Special thanks to Caren Grown for thoughtful editorial advice.

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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 conflict.” According to Sen’s interpretation, individuals 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 differences 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 agricultural 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 indicators? 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 household 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 allocation, 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 behave as economically rational units is not only analytically simpler to handle, but suits practical tastes as well. Policy makers in both industrialized and developing countries often prefer to direct resource flows and benefits to the “household” as a unit or to the nominal household head. They avoid the issue of internal distribution, possibly assuming it will prove difficult to develop 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, especially 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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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 production. Over the last 30 years, there has been a steady upward trend in the participation of women in the labor market in developing countries. 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 contributors 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 generated 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 contribution 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 full 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 generally 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 sometimes earned as little as one-third to one-fifth of the wages earned by men for work of equal or greater difficulty.14

(b) Fertility decision making and the demand for children

In pursuing their life course, women may seek a balance between two areas in which they have high stakes and little freedom of choice: increasing 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 influence 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 associated 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


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 severely 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 activities 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 consistently, 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-differentiated system of time use is most striking when one considers middle-class couples in industrialized 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 further 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 market 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 sometimes would have difficulty regarding their behavior 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 substantial portion of their earnings and may loosen their personal and social contracts to provide materi- ally and emotionally for their immediate families. This description, when combined with what we know of the increasing migration worldwide of men and women, suggests an often forgotten dimension of male/female differentials

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-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 strategies” may find that what appears to be an adaptive, even a finely tuned balancing of household 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 obligations. 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 survival - is to maximize the channeling of income and other resources to the benefit of their children. 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 inequalities.” 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 obligations 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’ educational 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 participation of young women in export-oriented production lines is a modernized version of an older family strategy that increases the value of sons’ contributions to parents by using the income 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


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 opportunities for and an increased measure of monetary 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 return 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 between 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” households, the literature on family monetary arrangements 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, husbands 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 finding 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 pooling and joint expenditure planning. She found substantial risks for each spouse associated with revealing income or unreservedly collaborating in joint financial arrangements. Based on evidence 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 husbands put it), children’s discipline, and husbands’ drinking, unfaithfulness, and jealousy. Violence

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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 monetary 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, incomplete 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 increases in paternal income. An expanding number 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 personal use even when overall income is clearly inadequate. Mencher’s data challenge the hy- pothesis that men’s and women’s income contributions 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 household 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 personal 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 production 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 responsible 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 economies within households. Women are responsible 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


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 consumption 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 destinations 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 research 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 increase. 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 nutritional 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 reduced.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 commercial activities declined by more than half, and they found it difficult to provide the “sauce items” for the major daily meal, a vital nutritional 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 circumstances.

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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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 children (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 impacts (at the household and subhousehold level) could enlighten debates about development policy, 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 working 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 interventions.

These three groups diagnose and treat differently, 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 opportunities 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 children. 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 societies and the creation of new class disparities. Their sensitivity to increasing class differentiation 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 economic 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 women’s earning 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 outside the village. (It approximates a spatial con- cept, as women’s productive activities move farther from the geographic locus of the household.) They found that it is not women’s productive 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


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 income 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 economically and for women as a group - e.g., support of women’s collective action. Finally, this last section proposes that demographic factors 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 marriage, marital disruption, national and international 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 jure 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 increasing 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 according 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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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, sometimes 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 maintained 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 explicit. 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 networks 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 themselves should be the objects of economic outlays, whether income transfers or wage-earning opportunities. 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 specific 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 resources 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 “individual” 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 inequalities, 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 female 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).


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).

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