Gender relations and household economic planning in the rural Philippines

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 397-413

  Eder, James F ^a  

^a ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ECONOMIC PLANNING; FEMALE HEADED HOUSEHOLD; GENDER RELATIONS; RURAL AREA; WOMENS STATUS;

ASIA; EURASIA; PHILIPPINES; SOUTHEAST ASIA;

EID: 33748292798     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463406000701     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. See, for example, Miriam S. Chaiken, 'Economic strategies and success on the Philippine frontier', Research in Economic Anthropology, 15 (1994): 277-305.
2. Jeanne Frances I. Illo, 'Who heads the household? Women in households in the Philippines', in The Filipino woman in focus: A book of readings, ed. Amaryllis T. Torres (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1995), pp. 235-54.
3. Harold Alderman et al., 'Unitary versus collective models of the household: Is it time to shift the burden of proof?', The World Bank Research Observer, 10 (1995): 1-19
4. Gillian Hart, 'Gender and household dynamics: Recent theories and their implications', in Critical issues in Asian development: Theories, experiences, and policies, ed. M. G. Quibra (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 39-74.
5. Amartya Sen, 'Gender and cooperative conflicts', in Persistent inequalities: Women and world development, ed. Irene Tinker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 123-49.
6. Andrew W. Davidson, 'Rethinking household livelihood strategies', Research in Rural Sociology and Development, 5 (1991): 14
7. Richard W. Wilk, Household ecology: Economic change and domestic life among the Kekchi Maya of Belize (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), p. 31
8. Diane L. Wolf, Factory daughters: Gender, household dynamics, and rural industrialization in Java (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 13.
9. E. Paul Durrenberger and Nicola Tannenbaum, 'Household economy, political economy, and ideology: Peasants and the state in Southeast Asia', American Anthropologist, 94 (1992): 86.
10. For household studies, see, for example, Robert McC. Netting, Richard W. Wilk and Eric J. Arnould, Households: Comparative studies of the domestic group (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
11. Peggy F. Barlett, Agricultural choice and change. Decision making in a Costa Rican community (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989)
12. Richard W. Wilk, 'The household in anthropology: Panacea or problem?', Reviews in Anthropology, 20 (1991): 1-12.
13. Peter Laslett, 'The family as a knot of individual interests', in Netting et al., eds., Households, pp. 353-79
14. Benjamin White, 'Problems in the empirical analysis of agrarian differentiation', in Agrarian transformations: Local processes and the state in Southeast Asia, ed. Gillian Hart, Andrew Turton and Benjamin White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 22.
15. Robert McC. Netting, Smallholders, householders: Farm families and the ecology of intensive subsistence agriculture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 59, 100-1.
16. Benedict J. Kerkvliet, Everyday politics in the Philippines: Class and status relations in a central Luzon village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 63
17. Wolf, Factory daughters.
18. Netting, Smallholders, householders, pp. 60-1, 101.
19. Gillian Hart, Power, labor, and livelihood: Processes of change in rural Java (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)
20. Hart et al., Agrarian transformations
21. Benjamin White, 'Production and reproduction in a Javanese village' (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976)
22. Diana Wong, Peasants in the making: Malaysia's Green Revolution (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1987).
23. Wolf, Factory daughters, p. 56.
24. See, for example, Philip C. C. Huang, The peasant economy and social change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985)
25. and The peasant family and rural development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990)
26. Robert McC. Netting, Balancing on an Alp: Ecological change and continuity in a Swiss Alpine community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
27. Diane L. Wolf, 'Does Father know best? A feminist critique of household strategy research', Research in Rural Sociology and Development, 5 (1991): 14-15
28. Wolf, Factory daughters, p. 15.
29. Wolf, 'Does father know best?', p. 33.
30. Daniel C. Clay and Harry K. Schwarzweller, 'Introduction: Researching household livelihood strategies', Research in Rural Sociology and Development, 5 (1991): 5-6.
31. Phyllis Moen and Elaine Worthington, 'The concept of family adaptive strategies', Annual Review of Sociology, 18 (1992): 235
32. Edsel Sajor, 'Upland livelihood transformations: State and market processes and social autonomy in the northern Philippines' (Ph.D. diss., Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 1999), p. 29.
33. Tania Murray Li, 'Working separately but eating together: Personhood, property, and power in conjugal relations', American Ethnologist, 25 (1998): 679.
34. See, for example, Jeanne Illo, 'Who heads the household?'
35. Jeanne Frances I. Illo and Jaime B. Polo, Fishers, traders, farmers, wives: The life stories of ten women in a fishing village (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1990)
36. Carolyn Israel-Sobritchea, 'Gender roles and economic change in a fishing community in central Visayas', in Fishers of the Visayas, ed. Iwao Ushijima and Cynthia Neri Zayas (Quezon City: College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the Philippines, 1994), pp. 279-303
37. Villia Jefremovas, 'Women are good with money: The impact of cash cropping on class relations and gender ideology in northern Luzon, Philippines', in Women farmers and commercial ventures: Increasing food security in developing countries, ed. Anita Spring (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), pp. 131-50
38. Rosanne Rutten, Artisans and entrepreneurs in the rural Philippines (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1993)
39. Maria Christina Blanc Szanton, A right to survive: Subsistence marketing in a lowland Philippine town (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1972).
40. Sylvia Chant and Cathy McIlwaine, Women of a lesser cost: Female labour, foreign exchange, and Philippine development (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1995), p. 7.
41. Illo, 'Who heads the household?', p. 245.
42. Li, 'Working separately but eating together', p. 679
43. Chant and McIlwaine, Women of a lesser cost, pp. 7-8.
44. Ibid., pp. 8-10.
45. Elizabeth Eviota, 'The articulation of gender and class in the Philippines', in Women's work, ed. Eleanor Leacock and Helen Sala (Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 1986), p. 194.
46. Suzanne Brenner, 'Why women rule the roost: Rethinking Javanese ideologies of gender and self-control', in Bewitching women, pious men: Gender and body politics in Southeast Asia, ed. Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 19-50
47. Jonathan Rigg, Southeast Asia: The human landscape of modernization and development, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2003).
48. Moen and Worthington, 'Concept of family adaptive strategies', p. 239.
49. I typically obtained my data on household economic planning in the course of informal follow-up visits to households previously visited for other reasons and whose co-heads had appeared amenable to further questioning. I also employed local female research assistants to make inquiries of their own about these matters, particularly from women who had been helpful but guarded in my own visits. Small sample size is one significant limitation here. All in all I assembled about 20 cases documenting specific differences between household co-heads in their approach to or ideas about household economic planning (although of course I do have detailed knowledge regarding the economic circumstances and livelihood strategies of numerous other households). A second significant limitation is inconsistency in how the data were collected. Usually household heads were interviewed separately regarding their different notions of the household plano, but on some occasions they were interviewed together, or only one was interviewed. Some case material, furthermore, came from third parties (friends, neighbours and the like); and while I have tried to guard against it, my analysis here has likely been influenced by the second-hand nature of some of my data.
50. James F. Eder, A generation later: Household strategies and economic change in the rural Philippines (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999).
51. Ibid., pp. 115-16.
52. Ibid., p. 110.
53. Ibid., p. 116.
54. James F. Eder, 'Of fishers and farmers: Ethnicity and resource use in coastal Palawan', Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, 31 (2003): 217.
55. See Hart, 'Gender and household dynamics', pp. 57-8.
56. Mothers throughout the region are commonly expected to be more focused on the well-being of their children than are fathers; see, for example, Brenner, 'Why women rule the roost'.
57. Hart, 'Gender and household dynamics', pp. 57-8
58. Henrietta Moore, 'Households and gender relations', in Understanding economic process, ed. Sutti Ortiz and Susan Lees (New York: University Press of America, 1992).
59. Hart, 'Gender and household dynamics', pp. 58, 61
60. S. S. Berry, 'Social institutions and access to resources', Africa, 59, 1 (1989): 41-55.
61. Nitish Jha, 'Gender and decision-making in Balinese agriculture', American Ethnologist, 31, 4 (2004): 552-72
62. Bina Agarwal, '"Bargaining" and gender relations: Within and beyond the household', Feminist Economics, 3, 1 (1997): 1-51.
63. Hart, 'Gender and household dynamics', p. 41
64. Shanshan Du, Chopsticks only work in pairs: Gender unity and gender equality among the Lahu of Southwest China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 135
65. Dorte Thorsen, "'We help our husbands!" Negotiating the household budget in rural Burkina Faso', Development and Change, 33 (2002): 129.
66. See, for example, Chant and Mcllwaine, Women of a lesser cost, p. 10.
67. The prominent role of women in the day to day economic affairs of Javanese households has been related by Brenner ('Why women rule the roost') to Javanese ideologies of gender differences in self-control, whereby women are believed more capable than men of controlling their emotions and not acting foolishly with money. While such ideologies are also present in the Philippines, they do not appear to relate in systematic fashion to the development of (partially gendered) differences in longer-term household planning skills.
68. See, for example, Chaiken, 'Economic strategies and success', p. 301.
69. Deirdre McKay, 'Cultivating new economic futures: Remittance economies and land-use patterns in Ifugao, Philippines', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 34, 2 (2003): 285-306.
70. Just as they appear to play a lead role in religious conversion and other social changes; see Eder, A generation later.