Written by Keith Hart
4. Sex divisions in the Caribbean and West Africa
I spent two years of fieldwork in Ghana for my PhD and published a book, The Political Economy of Agriculture, plus several articles on Ghana’s urban informal economy. I spent two years in Jamaica teaching in a new graduate school of social sciences for the Anglophone Caribbean. I gained much from that experience, learned a lot from colleagues and students there, and formed a deep relationship with C.L.R. James in London during the last two years of his life, which overlapped with my time in the Caribbean. I rely here mainly on Jamaican sources and reading much Caribbean literature, especially novels from Trinidad and elsewhere. The excerpts from my introduction to Women and the Sexual Division of Labor in the Caribbean posted on this page below complement what I have to say here.
In the heyday of the Atlantic trade, slave owners could, if they wished, turn their backs on the negro family as a means of reproducing their labor supply. Many were actively hostile, for reasons already made clear, to the formation of kinship ties that slave populations built up, seeing in them the seeds of autonomy and resistance to their system of exploitation. The slaves surely built informal kinship ties of their own, whatever their masters’ attitudes; and they did so most effectively on large estates with stable workforces, especially when market disturbances encouraged subsistence food production. These tendencies expanded when first the slave trade and then slavery itself were abolished in the early nineteenth century.
Patriarchy was of course reserved for the slave owners and its white employees. This meant that negro males had no direct jural authority over women and children; and their families had little official standing. Slaves’ work roles did follow an identifiable gender-specific pattern reflecting the sensibilities of the owners; but there was no sexual division of labor among them in the traditional sense of conjugal interdependence over a wide range of tasks. Women performed a large part of the unskilled field labor, while men held down most jobs requiring some skill that offered a measure of privilege. Unions between slaves took the form of conjugal visiting or consensual co-residence, with mothers taking responsibility for the bulk of childcare. Female slaves occasionally entered sexual relations with the whites, thereby raising the chances of their mixed offspring for some upward social mobility. They also seem to have resisted being turned into breeding machines for the owners.
The abolition of slavery at first enabled the emergence of an independent black peasantry. To the extent that the former slaves could establish a subsistence base and sell some agricultural products, ordinary working people could establish patriarchal families in the countryside. Any such developments, however, were counteracted by the efforts of plantation owners to retain a dependent wage labor force. Nineteenth-century proletarianization may have seen a shift away from female field labor on the plantations to a relative withdrawal of women into domestic subsistence supplemented by petty trade. In some areas, black women were replaced on the plantations by indentured Indian migrants. The end of formal slavery there coincided, as in the ancient Mediterranean, with an upsurge of syncretistic Christianity. This revival provided moral support for the revival of socially sanctioned family life among the former slaves.
The turn of the new century saw a sharp movement of population into urban areas. In common with early urbanization in Europe and the Americas, but not in most of Africa, women outnumbered men in the burgeoning towns. The Germans even had a word for this, Frauenüberschuss (an “overshoot of women”). They performed domestic labor for the white and brown middle classes and dominated petty trade. Women may have had more to gain than men from evading rural patriarchy in its plantation and new peasant forms. Simultaneously, successive waves of male emigration emphasized families’ dependence on their female members.
In the last century, a strongly dualistic family pattern took root. This involved on the one hand a middle-class ideal of marriage, but without the norm of female seclusion that often goes with it elsewhere. This was endorsed by Christian churches for all strata. On the other hand, there was an equally identifiable working-class pattern of conjugal visiting, unstable unions and matrifocality, without strong sanction for male authority within families. A culture of male machismo was matched by recognition of women’s strength, responsibility for the family and growing participation in urban service employment. Educational trends favored women at the secondary and tertiary levels. On the face of it, sex divisions are weaker and less rigid than they were during the peasant revival.
It is not obvious what obstacles Caribbean women must overcome in their struggle for emancipation; and this is reflected in their ambivalence towards western feminism. In Britain, the long decline of peasant patriarchy was encouraged by successive stages of industrialization. Here slavery weakened the jural standing of men; the short-lived revival of peasant patriarchy had an indeterminate effect; and the region is marginal to global industrialization as such—wage employment is not sufficient to guarantee the income most families need. Meanwhile, the ongoing boom in Christianity, especially Pentecostalism, supports conservative family values at all social levels. It is uncertain which tendency, if either, will become dominant.
West Africa is divided into three main zones: the creolized towns that grew up on the coast over centuries of multinational European mercantilism; the tropical rainforest, home to great states such as Ashanti; and the savanna interior with its Islamic civilization. The first of these produced the West African “mammy”, epitome of the fearless female trader. The last has an extreme variant of female seclusion, more in the towns, less in the countryside. All three rested on generalized markets and civil law. My concern here is with the remaining traditional rural peoples from whom the bulk of New World slaves were taken and their experience of modern developments since my doctoral field research concerned one of them.
In some cases, social organization was based on matrilineal descent, tracing kin group membership through the female line. This is best understood as a device to reduce accumulation of power from fathers to sons, an egalitarian political principle, but not a devolution of authority from men to women. There is no evidence that there ever existed a matriarchal human society here or elsewhere, although some paleoanthropologists have speculated that the earliest bands of hunter-gatherers may have been anchored by women divided into two classes by the menopause as mothers and grandmothers. In general, West African sex divisions were based on peasant patriarchy with and without indigenous states.
Throughout the region, the division of labor rested on a combination of sex and age. Married men controlled the distribution of agricultural goods produced in the main by dependent women and young men. These elders disposed of movable wealth in the form of animals, cloth, precious metals and slaves. They monopolized long-distance trade and generally restricted the mobility of women to a distance compatible with spending each night at home. Each sex was responsible for a list of complementary manufactures and services. The key to the collective dominance of elders was their control of marriage, often through institutions such as bridewealth.
Urbanization and rural development in the last century introduced several modifications to this pattern. Men have taken up most cash cropping and wage labor opportunities, while women have moved into dominance of small- and medium-scale trade. There is a common illusion that West African women are dominant because of their access to the liquid wealth afforded by trade. This ignores the fact that the upper echelons of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial societies were and are unequivocally dominated by men. They vastly outnumber women in government, the army, higher education, finance, and wholesale trade. Women do have their own secret societies, market chiefs and queen mothers; they often show scant deference to their menfolk. In most respects, however, they have much further to go than their Caribbean sisters towards achieving social equality.
An ethnographic example from northern Ghana illustrates this point. Soon after I arrived to stay in a village, I witnessed a young woman being dragged across the market square by four robust men, partly by the hair. I was told that they were her brothers. She was married to an old man, their political patron, had run away six times to join her younger lover, and was being returned in this brutal fashion because her male kinsmen found it unthinkable to break the marriage alliance.
This part of the savanna is also noted for the practice of clitoridectomy—excision of the clitoris during adolescence—not just to reduce women’s experience of and desire for sexual pleasure, but because the custom is based on the idea that we are all born bisexual. The clitoris is a woman’s penis—the foreskin is likened to the vulva—and its retention affords her the potential of being sexually self-sufficient. Human beings (males and females) must be made monosexual to force us into the necessity of marriage and all the social interdependence and hierarchy associated with it. Maybe that is not such a primitive idea, even if the practice is rather brutal.
West Africa is even more marginal to industrialization than the Caribbean. The pattern of sexual division of labor there is highly particular and variable, reflecting the continuity of divergent rural cultural traditions that were not displaced by a brief and weak colonial presence, nore in British colonies than the French. There has recently been a deluge of feminist research in the region. Some see these women as a model of personal independence, an inspiration for their downtrodden western counterparts. Others see them as victims of capitalist “Third World” exploitation. The reality is neither of these extremes. Comparative analysis of sex divisions in Africa, Asia and Latin America requires a firmer grasp of social and cultural variation than I have been able to muster here.
Perspectives in Anthropology 