Women and wages: Gender and the control of income in farm and Bantustan households
Date
1986-09-15
Authors
Sharp, John
Spiegel, Andrew
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Abstract
Virtually all of the married men to whom we spoke in Matatiele
and Qwaqwa were bitterly opposed to their wives engaging in
certain kinds of local income-generating activity. The main
target of male opprobrium was shebeening, because husbands who
were migrant workers were afraid that if their wives sold liquor
from their homes they would be tempted into prostitution by their clients. The men were not, of course, opposed to the existence of shebeens, and were happy, when home on leave, to visit
shebeens run by other men's wives, mothers or daughters.
Male migrants attempted, despite their long absences from home,
to exert control over their wives' activities in this regard.
They left strict instructions concerning the disbursal of
remittances, often threatening physical violence if their wives
'wasted' the money they remitted on liquor or the ingredients of
homebrew. Where possible they also asked other men to check that
their wives were not shebeening surreptitiously, and to report
any breach of their prohibition.
Women found it necessary to view shebeening differently. To
them, it was one of the most accessible and convenient ways in
which to generate a cash income from the home. It required
little by way of equipment, did not demand regular inputs of time
and labour, and could be undertaken at the same time as other
domestic work. Women also had more personal discretion over
income from shebeening than from remittances. For these reasons
many women brewed and sold liquor, and some went to considerable
lengths to conceal their activity from their husbands. A common
strategy was to run the shebeen from the home of a friend in the
vicinity - often the latter was a widow, whose marital status and
age permitted her to avoid or disregard male censure. Women who
did this explained that if questioned by their husbands, they
could always say that they were just 'helping out' now and again
for a neighbour.
In both Matatiele and Qwaqwa, male and female images of
shebeens were very different. Women stressed that most of the
shebeens in their neighbourhood were small-scale affairs, with a
limited number of clients at any one time; during the week,
moreover, most of the clients were old men - pensioners for whom
a visit to a shebeen in a neighbour’s house was a means of quiet
recreation. Men, on the other hand, painted lurid pictures to
express anxiety about their homes being turned into sites of
drunken revelry in their absence, with sex and drugs as well as
liquor for sale on demand. Both types of shebeen undoubtedly
existed in both areas, but whereas male images seemed to
represent the kind they most liked to visit themselves, women's
accounts were more accurate in the case of the majority of such
establishments.
Disagreement about the nature of shebeens and the desirability
of shebeening were part of a much broader struggle between men
and women about access to income and control over this and other
resources within households. This paper examines some aspects of
this wider domestic struggle in the particular circumstances of
the bantustans, and explores several key differences between
Matatiele and Qwaqwa in this regard. The notion of 'domestic
Struggle’ (Bozzoli, 1983: 144-148) is, for two reasons, central
to our argument….
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 15 September 1986
Keywords
Women. Employment. South Africa, Women, Black. Employment. South Africa, Income. South Africa, Wages. Women. South Africa