Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
for their loss of time for productive and reproductive work. Furthermore,
research from a range of urban and rural contexts has shown that
women often rely on these social support networks as a key survival
strategy when they face financial pressures.
Research has revealed the importance of analysing the interaction
between the productive and reproductive spheres, since women often
combine work which brings in a cash income with childcare and domes-
tic duties. In rural households in sub-Saharan Africa, for example,
women often combine their reproductive roles in producing food for the
household and caring for their children, with their productive roles in
selling any surplus in markets, producing cash crops and working as an
unpaid family labourer on male household members' land (which are
often cash crop fields). Despite estimates that around 70 per cent of
Africa's food is produced by women, development interventions have
tended to assume that farmers are male and have targeted agricultural
extension services towards men.
Intra- and Inter-Household Relations
166
Although the terms 'family' and 'household' are often used interchange-
ably, it is important to understand the differences between these con-
cepts in order to analyse gender and generational relations in particular
cultural contexts. Varley (2008) suggests that households can be defined
as 'task-oriented residence units', characterized by the following fea-
tures: co-residence; economic cooperation; reproductive activities and
socialization of children. 'Families' on the other hand are 'kinship units
that need not be localized' and, indeed, family members may reside in
different places at some distance from each other while still retaining
kinship ties and responsibilities across space. Feminists sought to open
up the hidden, private space of the household and expose the assump-
tions that underpinned classical economic models of the 'unitary house-
hold'. Such models assumed that households were monogamous nuclear
family units headed by a male breadwinner. The 'unitary household'
model tended to assume that households were characterized by cohesion,
harmony and shared group preferences, and that income was pooled
between men and women to meet the consumption needs of the family.
These models, however, took no account of women's triple work roles
and failed to recognize the complexity of intra- and inter-household rela-
tions between kin and community members. Research in the global
