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| Title: | Rural women's access to labor in West Africa |
| Author: | Roberts, P.A. |
| Book title: | Patriarchy and class: African women in the home and the workforce |
| Year: | 1988 |
| Pages: | 97-114 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | West Africa |
| Subjects: | labour force women entrepreneurs rural women |
| Abstract: | Access to labour in rural West Africa is largely dependent upon the hierarchies of gender, rank, generation and class within and between households. Women are, on the whole, profoundly disadvantaged within these hierarchies. Two questions guide the present author's examination of the constraints on women's access to labour: First, in what circumstances do women recruit the labour of others rather than being the subjects of labour recruitment themselves? Secondly, which women can and do recruit the labour of others and whose labour do they mobilize? She concludes that in West Africa, most rural women's contemporary own-account enterprises - whether private farming, craft production or petty trading - are on a very small scale with very little assistance other than that of children, and are carried on between the unreciprocated demands on her labour for household or male enterprises. The 'naturalism' model attributes this to the condition of childbearing, child rearing and domestic chores. The author suggests that this is rather a consequence of the reduction of labour available to women, partly as the result of the abolition of slavery, partly as a consequence of the increasing appropriation of their labour by men/husbands transforming gender relations of production within the hierarchies of household, lineage and community. Bibliogr. |