A Home Divided; Women and Income in the Third World

xi, [3], 289, [1] pages. Tbls. Figs. Acknowledgments, Contributors, and Introduction. References Cited. Also contains Introduction; as well as chapters on The Material Consequences of Reproductive Failure in Rural South Asia; Sexual Stratification in Taiwan; Women Are Good with Money: Earning and Managing in an Indonesian City; Women's Work and Poverty; Household Budgeting and Financial Management in a Lower-Income Cairo Neighborhood; The Nonpooling Household: A Challenge to Theory; Dynamic Approaches to Domestic Budgeting: Cases and Methods from Africa; Income Allocation and Marriage Options in Urban Zambia; The Constraints on and Release of Female Labor Power: Dominican Migration to the United States; The Impact of Agrarian Reform on Men's and Women's Incomes in Rural Honduras; Renegotiating the Marital Contract: Intrahousehold Patters of Money Allocation and Women's Subordination Among Domestic Outworkers in Mexico City. This book explores the allocational priorities women apply to their own income and other income that they control, the way in which having or not having children fits into women's for survival, and the gender-differentiated use of time. Do women see their disadvantage, and if so, do they consciously negotiate, bargain, or exchange to improve their position? The underlining message of this book for policy makers is that individuals rather than households should be recipients of economic outlays, whether they take the form of transfers or wage-earning opportunities, with women being more appropriate recipients when certain ends are desired. Dr. Daisy Hilse Dwyer, taught at Columbia University after receiving her doctorate from Yale, and authored "Images and Self-Images: Male and Female in Morocco," and "A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World," with Judith Bruce. She later obtained a law degree from Columbia, and was Of Counsel for many years with Dewey-Ballantine. Judith Bruce is a senior policy analyst at the Population Council. Through policy analysis and capacity building, she has changed the way the world thinks about quality of care from the client's perspective and about the power and potential of the most excluded girls. A challenge to economic theories that view the household as a harmonious unit with a single decision-maker, this book shows that in the Third World the household is an arena of conflict marked by inequality and negotiation over income and expenditures. Dwyer and Bruce's introduction is followed by eleven field studies: four in Asia, four in Africa and the Middle East, and three in the Caribbean and Central America. These twelve essays, by economists, sociologists, anthropologists and demographers provide a cogent analysis of household structure dynamics and women's bargaining context. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in gender studies but also to ethnologists and other social scientists.…