Husband's Circular Migration and the Status of Women left behind in Lamerd District,Iran

Iranian women often serve as temporary heads of household as husbands work elsewhere, returning home at intervals for several months. Results of this preliminary study in Lamerd District in Fars Province, with a high incidence of such patterns, show that, overall, wives of migrants are not ‘left-behind women’ as reported in other countries when husbands migrate. Rather, wives of migrating husbands report a higher level of satisfaction with economic resources and no greater physical or mental health problems relative to those in non-migrant relationships. Counter to expectations, autonomy reported by migrants' wives does not differ from that reported by wives of non-migrant men. Data suggest that work-migrant males, in particular urban migrants, may be more exposed to sexually transmitted diseases. Our findings are limited, being based on data on experiences of women in one district in Iran. There is need for more comprehensive studies based on representative samples.     

Time Ni Hota Hai: time poverty and food security in the Kumaon hills,India

This article investigates food and nutritional security (FNS) in a sub-Himalayan North India community, and argues that socio-spatial policies and practices naturalize a discourse that places women in a position where they are responsible for an inequitable share of both productive and reproductive labor. As a result, women are often unable to properly perform FNS practices. Paradoxically, insecurity increases when there is more agricultural labor and thus less time for food preparation, a notion itself that is productive of anxiety and further compounds poor FNS practices. NGO and government programs implicitly reinscribe these gendered labor burdens through exclusively targeting women, educating them to be ‘better’ housewives and mothers. While simple solutions and an educative approach were the dominant activities, these organizations also constitute the home as a delimiting social space for development and seek to empower women through livelihood diversification and employment activities. While these programs provide women new spaces with which to forge social relations and develop different sets of knowledge outside the home, without a renegotiation of household labor burdens, these novel commitments oftentimes exacerbate women’s existing workloads at home. This analysis suggests that while FNS programs and policies might sometimes lend short-term relief to FNS, the greatest threat to FNS comes from the ways that the home spaces of women and their household work are devalued through development practices. This results in a lack of gendered labor time to adequately prepare food, thereby contradicting the policies’ stated objectives of reducing food insecurity.     

IS THE GENDER DIVISION OF LABOUR CHANGING IN JAPAN?

The paper examines potential changes in housework and employment among married couples in Japan. The data are from national surveys in 1994 and 2000 of persons aged 20–49. Wives’ housework hours decreased and the proportion of husbands doing any housework increased. A majority of wives are employed, many work full-time and husbands work long hours and many return home late in the evening. While wives do less housework if they are employed, husbands’ housework does not respond to their wives’ employment. Large gender differences persist, with wives’ employment associated with family constraints. In general, changes were the same across categories of the population, though three of five significant interactions with time involved wives’ education. A positive relationship between wives’ education and any housework by husbands becomes stronger over time. The results suggest gender inequality in housework may decrease in the future, with potential relevance to future marriage and fertility.     

Home–work relations and the spatialization of care: wives on the margins of the Israeli high-tech industry

This study applies the concept of care to examine how home–work transitions of high-tech men affect others in these two places, namely their wives and managers. The high-tech industry is famous for its particularly demanding culture and masculine disposition, which contest daily involvement with family and domestic affairs. Care is conceptualized as a wide-ranging multifaceted notion that embraces work, morals, and policy, and is represented by the exchange of various tangible and intangible, resources across the home–work divide. In-depth interviews with 22 high-tech managers and 47 wives of high-tech engineers disclose a well-established reciprocity of care resources. The managers reward the wives' nonmaterial support of the engineers/husbands with rhetorical recognition and nonfinancial benefits. The spatialization of care across the home–work divide is discussed, pointing to its hierarchical – not only contextual – relations.     

TWO-EARNER FAMILIES IN THE HOUSING MARKET

The 1970's has been a period in which three trends have coincided: housing prices have been escalating, wives have continued to enter the labor force, and legislation prohibiting discrimination in mortgage markets on the basis of sex and marital status has been enacted. In this paper, we examine the role of the two-earner family–one in which both husband and wife work–in the housing market of the 1970's, and the interrelation of this household type with other factors shaping the current high demand for housing. We also speculate on the role of the two-earner family in the housing market of the 1980's. We conclude that two-earner families are in a position to increase their housing outlays in the future, that the continued growth in the number of two-earner families will add to future housing demand, but that many two-earner families may be divorced couples of the future. This suggests that, while there will be a strong impact on single-family home demand, there will also be some restructuring of demand toward rental housing and cooperative/condominium ownership.     

Women's Empowerment Through Home–based Work: Evidence from India

This article examines the extent to which home–based production in the garment sector of Ahmedabad, India, serves to empower its female participants, defining empowerment in terms of control over enterprise income and decision–making within the household. It places this question within the literatures on resource theory and bargaining models of the household, both of which posit that improved access to resources increases women's power in the household. This study highlights why access to resources may not lead so directly to improvements in women's position in the household in the Indian context. It then discusses why home–based work may be less empowering than sources of work outside of the home. The arguments about the empowerment potential of women's access to resources through home–based work are tested by examining, first, the determinants of control over the income generated by women in home–based garment production and, second, to what extent access to and control over income from this source translates into involvement in decisions which are atypically women's and yet important to their lives. The results provide a better understanding of the potential of home–based work to offer women in urban India a source of economic activity that also can translate into increased intra–household power.     

Labours of land: domesticity,wilderness and dispossession in the development of Canadian uranium markets

This article examines the role played by gendered constructions and categories in Canadian cold war appropriations of Aboriginal lands for nuclear production. Focusing primarily on the ways in which gendered tropes were mobilized by wives and companions of uranium workers recently arrived in the Serpent River watershed (home of the Serpent River Anishinabe) at the end of the first global uranium boom in which uranium production in the watershed was severely threatened, I explore how gendered constructions and categories provided important cartographies and reference points with which to order and maintain possession of the lands of the Serpent River watershed as a singular, Canadian, nuclear space. Drawing on Kaika's (2004) work on the discursive production of ‘home’, I argue that representations of the watershed as home in the wilderness and as imperilled domestic space, as well as the important ways in which they worked to secure discursive rights to space within the broader registers of white Canadian post war gender difference, relied on the near-complete erasure of Aboriginal presence and culture from the land for continuity. I conclude that while this erasure facilitated (morally and practically) the further incorporation of the watershed into Canadian geographies of nuclear production, it also worked to obscure the ways in which the industry and uranium economy were able to capitalize on Aboriginal lands, labour and their subordinate position in Canadian society.     

The relative duties of a man: domestic medicine in England and France, ca. 1685-1740

Although much work is currently being done on early modern women and household medicine and on early modern masculinities, historians have generally overlooked men's roles within the home, particularly with respect to domestic medical activities. Using medical consultation letters, this article examines men's roles as domestic caregivers and their medical decision making. During this period, manly self-management and household order were closely linked; an ideal head of household would manage himself retain order within the household, and look after the welfare of his family.     

"From Farm to Factory: Transitions in Work, Gender, and Leisure at Banning Mill, 1910 1930s"

Abstract This study explores new and traditional forms of leisureenjoyed by white southern rural millhands at Banning Mill between1910 and the 1930s. As they moved from farm to factory, millhandsexperienced unfamiliar working conditions, changes in genderroles in and outside the home, and an increase in leisure time.While both farmers and millhands had opportunities to socialize,this study will compare traditional forms of entertainment availableto farmers with similar and new recreations found in rural millvillages such as Banning Mill in Carroll County, Georgia. A comparison of leisure activities also reveals new ways inwhich rural cotton millhands separated themselves in socialsettings. Gender divisions in village recreation reflect changingroles at home as men and women coped with the transition fromfarm to factory in different ways. Specific or individual interestscreated an atmosphere in which wives, husbands, teenagers, andchildren typically socialized with members of their own sexand age. Juxtaposing the ways in which men and women chooseto spend their free time suggests husbands had a more difficulttime adjusting to work and life in mill villages than theirspouses or children.     

Drought,Domestic Budgeting and Wealth Distribution in Sahelian Households

Over the past twenty‐five years, Sahelian households have experienced recurrent harvest failure and greater reliance on remittances from migratory wage labour. Household subsistence has become less dependent on household grain stores and more on the liquidation of individual wealth stores. This study investigates how these broader changes have affected struggles between household members over obligations to support the household in the Zarmaganda region of western Niger. As the land‐derived leverage of male patriarchs has declined and household dependence on individual wealth stores has increased, domestic budgeting has become more contested. Household heads make case‐by‐case moral claims on other household members during times of grain shortage. Women and subordinate males invoke Islamic law, which accords primary provisioning responsibility to the household head, to protect their individual wealth in times of grain deficit. This article investigates the nature of these budgetary struggles, showing how individuals’ decisions to contribute individual wealth to support the household are best understood as highly situated, affected not only by the specific material conditions of the household but also the interplay of the moral, structural, and individualistic imperatives that derive from one’s position within the household. Using reconstructed livestock wealth histories for the members of fifty‐four households in western Niger, this study investigates the material consequences of these struggles. Male heads of corporate households, the historic managers of the household’s land and agricultural labour, have lost wealth relative to their wives and married male subordinates since the drought of 1984.     

Gender,Imperialism and Domesticity: British women repatriated from India, 1940‐47

In this article, the author draws on women's personal accounts to explore the repatriation processes of white, British, middle-class wives of army officers and civil servants who returned to Britain from India between 1940 and 1947. Conventional images overwhelmingly constructed departure from the subcontinent and arrival in Britain as a time for celebration. However, women's personal sources suggest that both their expectations and experiences of repatriation were often, at best, equivocal. Feelings of uncertainty and unease about their return were coupled with a more positive anticipation connected to the idea that Britain was home. Once in Britain, women were shocked by the unfamiliarity of life there—at both national and household scales—and they struggled to construct a sense of belonging or self. Considering memoirs and oral histories, the author focuses on imperial domesticity and explores the influences of gender on expectations and experiences of repatriation. In so doing, she reflects on the ambiguous position that repatriates can occupy between forced and voluntary movement and highlights the problems in attempting to define either a beginning or an ending to journeys home.     

Mr. Dithers Comes to Dinner: Telework and the merging of women's work and home domains in Canada

Studies of home-based telework by women yield mixed results regarding the usefulness of telework in facilitating work–life balance. Most research on the social impacts of home-based telework focuses on workers—employees or self-employed—who deliberately choose that alternative work arrangement. Labour force analysts, however, predict an increase in employer-initiated teleworking. As a case study of the workforce of one large, financial-sector firm in Canada, this article considers the conditions of employment of involuntary teleworkers, those required by their employer to work full-time from a home office. In-depth interviews were co nducted with a sample of 18 female teleworkers working for the case study firm in a professional occupation. Study participants described the advantages and disadvantages of working from home, particularly with regard to spatial and social aspects of locating work in a home setting. The gendered nature of their jobs, and the caring and supportive functions they provide both through their employment and their household responsibilities are seen to support the relocation of their jobs from office to their homes. In many jurisdictions, telework is promoted as a means of giving women more flexibility to balance their paid work with their household responsibilities; the article highlights some of the contradictions involved in moving the workplace into women's homes.     

Working,Shopping, and House Rents

The interaction between household demand for goods and for leisure and the supply of labor at various distances from an urban center is investigated for the case where rents are endogenous and adjust to equalize differences in utility produced by the greater time and money costs of the journey to shop and the journey to work. The model is solved for a set of realistic parameter values and this confirms that when rents are equal everywhere the demand for leisure can increase and the supply of labor decrease for households nearer the center, while once rents are endogenous the reverse must be true. For a household at a given location the elasticities of demand for goods and leisure and the elasticity of labor supply are calculated for all the parameters of the model. It is shown that the unavoidable costs of travel to work have strong effects on the rent gradient while the costs of the journey to shop have only weak effects, being offset by the variable frequency of shopping.     

Engendered/endangered: women,tuberculosis, and the project of citizenship

The anti-tuberculosis campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an unprecedented display of medical authority and public health purview. With accumulating evidence that the disease disproportionately struck the poor, tuberculosis by the early decades of the century was perceived epidemiologically as embedded in individual practices including hygiene and domestic order. Tuberculosis was in a sense a trope for national degeneration, and as such it became the vehicle for a self-conscious thrust towards national renewal and moral regeneration. This paper uses a feminist Foucauldian framework in its analysis of the anti-tuberculosis campaign. In the case of San Francisco, efforts to combat tuberculosis centred in part on women in their roles as wives and mothers. Women were the gatekeepers of health because they were responsible for keeping the home clean and bacillus free. Not only did this focus become a medical legitimization of women's domestic duties, but it also became a discourse of citizenship. Whether explicitly or implicitly, physicians concentrated their attention on white middle class women in their messages of health maintenance. Within sanatoria, a primary agenda of tuberculosis treatment was the inculcation of middle class behaviour into the working class patients. The anti-tuberculosis campaign was thus a part of the early-twentieth-century project of nationhood where citizenship was largely calculated through the lens of class and race.     

Misconceptions and Complexities in the Study of China's Cities: Definitions,Statistics, and Implications

A noted American authority on urbanization and the household registration system in China reviews and clarifies factors leading to misunderstanding and misconceptions regarding the number of inhabitants of China's major cities. Principal sources of confusion linked to reliance on official statistical sources are the multi-layered meanings of the term "city" and, consequently, simultaneous publication and use of a multitude of official population statistics for the country's "cities." Other complicating factors analyzed by the author include the effects of the Chinese hukou (household registration) system and the rapid rate of urban growth and change over the last three decades. Systematic population and per capita GDP data for the years 2000 and 2005, all based on the multiple boundaries and systems for five major cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen), are collected to illustrate both the countrywide situation and specific cases. Also included is a critique of several studies and popular accounts of Chinese cities to highlight misstatements and areas of misunderstanding based on inappropriate use of statistical data. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, O53, P20, R12. 2 figures, 6 tables, 130 references.     

Rethinking Law and Violence: The Domestic Violence (Prevention) Bill in India, 2002

This essay focuses on the controversy generated by recent proposed legislation on domestic violence in India. An alternative draft bill on domestic violence prepared by the feminist legal NGO, the Lawyers’ Collective, and supported by women's groups nationally, includes a demand that victims of domestic violence (usually wives) be permitted by law to continue to occupy the domestic home, a demand that the Government bill has refused to include. This demand is theoretically informed by a politics of space. Bodies and space are linked, to the extent that each is an abstraction without the concept of the other to ground it. The feminist legal proposal challenges property‐as‐absolute‐(male) ownership by conceptualising the household as, instead, shared domestic space. The proposal does not dissimulate common sense – it is conscious of being radical, in part at least because it demystifies the ‘domestic’ as an ideological construct and offers it instead realistically and minimally as simply an alternative to destitution. The recognition that there are no support structures for dependant women outside the family (such as, for example, state‐sponsored welfare institutions), so that destitution can be both sudden and real for women of any class and circumstances, has led to the conceptualisation of a law that formulates a right to shared space as one that makes no claim to shared ownership – while at the same time questioning the other's absolute property right. Despite the limited nature of the claim it makes, this proposal has been viewed as threatening by Indian law‐makers.     

South Carolina Shipyards: Labour,Logistics, Lumber and Ladies

Southern shipyards, like Hobcaw and Mars Bluff, were established at locations chosen primarily for convenient access to transportation networks, building materials, clientele and labour. The historical record reveals a home front role played by local plantation owners and slaves as shipyard labour. Women served as project fundraisers, shipyard dilettantes, shipwright’s wives and possibly slave mistresses with a paucity of material culture to confirm their presence in the archaeological record. Archaeological investigations on land and underwater yield evidence of artefacts associated with diet, shipbuilding, warfare and ethnicity.     

Masculinity and domesticity in 1930s South Wales: did unemployment change the domestic division of labour?

This article examines masculinity in an area suffering from sustained high unemployment and unremitting hardship during the 1930s: the South Wales coalfield had some of the highest rates of male unemployment and the lowest participation rates of married women in paid employment in Britain. Particular attention is drawn to power relations between husband and wife by looking at the domestic division of labour and whether male unemployment affected the split in domestic responsibilities. Personal testimonies are used to assess how men filled their time whilst unemployed and the meanings they attached to their activities and relationships. It will be shown that some unemployed men engaged more in the home and that many men were able to maintain existing power relations with their wives by finding or creating alternative manual work and maintaining an elastic relationship with the home by continuing to spend the majority of their time in the company of other men.     

Crimson,Scarlet, Murrey and Carnation: Red at the Court of Henry VIII

Abstract

Red, in all its various shades, was a colour with many associations at the court of Henry VIII. This article presents a thematic analysis of the key circumstances when red clothing was worn at Henry VIII's court, namely the robes worn at sessions of parliament by the nobility and secular clergy, the livery issued at coronations, as well as livery given to members of the king's household and his army in 1544. In addition, the king wore red for key days in the liturgical year as his medieval predecessors had, while it also formed part of his everyday wardrobe. Red was also significant for others at the Henrician court, including the secular and ecclesiastical élite. As such, it was a colour that was associated with wealth, status and parliamentary authority.     

Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925

This paper considers the translation of domestic discourses over imperial space as middle-class British women established homes in India from 1886 to 1925. Unlike studies of imperial domesticity that delineate separate spheres of home and empire, I consider the exercise of imperial power on a domestic scale, by examining advice given in household guides on managing servants and raising British children in India. Rather than view the household merely as confining, I also explore the advice given to British women regarding travel outside their homes in India. The domestic roles of British women reproduced imperial power relations on a household scale, and the political significance of imperial domesticity extended beyond the boundaries of the home.