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Onar, S.S. 1955. The MagaJla. Law in the Middle
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Women. Sigm'SU 14-22. Peristiany, John G., ed. 1965. Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. London: Weidenfekl and Nicolson. Ramsay, W. M. 1917. The Intermixture of Races in Asia Minor, Some of its Causes and Effects. Proceeding* of ihe lirilish Academy, Vol. 7, pp. 31, 83. Loudon: Oxford University Press. Sacks, Karen.  1974. angels Revisited: Women, The Organization of Production and Private Property. In Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. Woman, Culture and Society, pp. 207-220. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sot.eriad.is, G. 1918. An Ethnological Map Illustrating Hellenism in the Balkans Peninsula and Asia Minor. London: Edward Stanford. Schneider. Jane. 1971. Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Societies. Ethnology 10(1): 1-24. Schneider, Jane and Peter Schneider. 1976. Cul-
ture ttntl Political Economy in Western. Sicily. New York: Academic Press.
Starr, ]. 1 978. Dispute and Settlement in Rural Turkey. An Ethnography ofüiw. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
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Velidedeogm. H.V. 1957. The Reception of the Swiss Civil Code in Turkey. International Social Science Bulletin 9: 60-65.
Voting, G. 1905. Corps de Droit Ottoman. Vol. II. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
White, Elizabeth H. 1978. Legal Reform as an Indicator of Women's Status in Muslim Nations. In Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie, eds.. Women hi the Muslim World, pp. 52-68. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
The study of kinship has been central to cross-cultural research. Marriage customs, systems of descent, and patterns of residence have been described and compared in a range of societies around the world. At the heart of traditional studies of kinship is the opposition between the domestic domain on the one hand and the public, political, and jural domain on the other. Anthropologists, particularly those working in Africa, studied kinship in this latter domain. They delineated large corporate descent groups called lineages that managed property and resources and that were the basic building blocks of political organization (Fortes 1949, 1953). Marriage, for some kinship theorists, is a political transaction, involving the exchange of women between men who wish to form alliances (Levi-Strauss 1969; see also Ortner, this book). A woman, from this perspective, is a passive pawn with little influence over kinship transactions. She is viewed "in terms of the rights her kin have to her domestic labor, to the property she might acquire, to her children, and to her sexuality"
(Lamphere 1974:98). The dynamic, affective, and even interest-oriented aspects of women's kinship are essentially ignored in an approach that is rooted in androcentric principles: women have the children; men impregnate the women; and men usually exercise control (Fox 1967).
Recent critiques of the traditional study of kinship have pointed out that it is "no longer adequate to view women as bringing to kinship primarily a capacity for bearing children while men bring primarily a capacity for participation in public life" (Collier and Yanagisako 1987:7). A gendered approach to kinship takes a number of different directions but focuses on the status of men and women in different kinship systems and on the power (defined as the ability to make others conform to one's desires and wishes) that accrues to women through their manipulation of social relations. Cross-cultural variations in the status of men and women have been examined in relation to rules of descent and postmarital residence (Martin and Voorhies 1975; Friedl 1975). Among horticulturalists, for example,
297
298    Gender, Household, and Kinship
Gender, Household, and Kinship 299
women, have higher status in societies characterized by matrilineal descent (descent through the female line from a common female ancestor) and matrilocal residence (living with the wife and her kin after marriage) than in societies characterized by patrilineal descent (descent through the male line from a common male ancestor) and patrilocal residence (living with the husband and his kin after marriage), in matrilineal systems descent group membership, social identity, rights to land, and succession to political office are all inherited through one's mother.
When matrilineality is combined with matrilocal residence, a husband marries into a household in which a long-standing domestic coalition exists between his wife and her mother, sisters, and broader kin relations (Friedl 1975). These women cooperate with one another in work endeavors and provide mutual support. Although a man retains authority in a matrilineal system over his sisters and her children, the coalitions formed by kin-related women can provide them with power and influence both within and beyond the household (Brown 1970; Lamphere 1974) and also with a degree of sexual freedom. The important issue for women's status, as Schlegei (1972:96) has argued, is not the descent system per se but the organization of the domestic group.
In contrast to matrilineal and matrilocal systems, in patrilineal and patrilocal societies women do not have their own kin nearby. A woman enters her husband's household as a stranger. Separated from her own kin, she cannot forge lateral alliances easily. However, other opportunities are open to women that enhance their power and status in patrilineal and patrilocal societies. Taiwanese women, for example, marry into the household of their husbands (Wolf 1972). A Taiwanese wife must pay homage to her husband's ancestors, obey her husband and mother-in-law, and bear children for her husband's patrilineage. According to Wolf (1972:32). "A woman can and, if she is ever to have any economic security, must provide the links in the male chain of descent, but she will never appear in anyone's genealogy as that all-important name connecting the past to the future."
After a Taiwanese wife gives birth to a son,
her status in the household begins to change, and it improves during her life course as she forges what Wolf calls a uterine family—a family based on the powerful relationship between mothers and sons. The subordination of conjugal to intergenerational relationships that is exemplified by the Taiwanese case, as well as the opportune ways in which women take advantage of filial ties to achieve political power within and beyond the household, are apparent in other societies around the world—for example, in sub~Saharan Africa (Potash 1986).
When a Taiwanese wife becomes a mother-in-law she achieves the greatest power and status within her husband's household. Wolf (1972:37) concludes that "the uterine family has no ideology, no formal structure, and no public existence. It is built out of sentiments and loyalties that die with its members, but it is no less real for all that. The descent lines of men are born and nourished in the uterine families of women, and it is here that a male ideology that excludes women makes its accommodations with reality." Similarly, Hausa trading women are able to compensate for an ideology that keeps them in residential seclusion by depending on their children to distribute their goods, provide information on the world outside the household, and help with child-care and cooking (Schildkrout 1983).
Wolf's research on Taiwanese women substantiates Lamphere's (1974:99) observation that "the distribution of power and authority in the family, the developmental cycle of the domestic group, and women's strategies are all related." By strategies Lamphere is referring to the active ways in which women use and manipulate kinship to their own advantage. The strategic use of kinship is a mechanism for economic survival among the African-American families of a midwestern town described by Stack (in this book).The households of these families are flexible and fluid; they are tied together by complex networks of female kinship and friendship. If the boundaries of the household are elastic, the ties that unite kin and friends are long-lasting. Through these domestic networks, women exchange a range of goods and services including child care. They rely on one another and through collective efforts keep one another
afloat. When one member of the network achieves a degree of economic success she can choose to withdraw from kin cooperation to conserve resources. However, by reinitiating gift-giving and exchange, at some point she can easily reenter the system. Stack's research shows one example of a strategy pursued by many families in the United States who must cope with urban poverty and the constant threat of unemployment
A similar approach is shown in research on Afro-Caribbean families, who also live in conditions of economic uncertainty and stress. This research has generated a vigorous debate about a complex of characteristics, including female-headed households, women's control of household earnings and decision making, kinship networks linked through women, and the absence of resident men. This complex of characteristics has been referred to as matrifocality. Drawing on data from her research in Jamaica, Prior (in this book) reviews the concept of matrifocality, a concept first introduced by Raymond Smith in 1956 to describe the central position and power of the mother within the household. Rather than viewing these households as disorganized or pathological results of slavery and colonialism, anthropologists recently have stressed their adaptive advantages (Bolles and Samuels 1989) for women who are both mothers and economic providers. Furthermore, as Prior suggests, the composition of households in the Caribbean is fluid; they can be female-headed at one point in time and nuclear at another. Arguing against a widely held conception within anthropology, Prior suggests that fathers and male partners are by no means marginal to the household.
Prior points out that very little work has been done on the relations between men and women in such households because men were always assumed to be absent. One neglected aspect of male-female household relations is domestic violence. Such violence often emerges because the expectations that women hold for men, whether they are monetary contributions to the household or fidelity, are not fulfilled. The potential for violence that can erupt when women challenge men about these unfulfilled obligations can undercut the power that women otherwise maintain within the household.
Women-centered families like those of African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans have been described for other parts of the world (Tanner 1974). Cole (in this book) introduces us to Maria, a fisherwoman who lives in a small town on the northern coast of Portugal. Forced into productive activity because her husband emigrated to Brazil and abandoned her for many years, Maria has taken control of her life and her personhood. Like Taiwanese women, she has invested in her relationship with her children rather than in the conjugal tie with her husband, although in this case the significant children are daughters rather than sons. Children, says Cole, are a resource for women. This is most evident in the high rates of illegitimacy that have characterized this town, and northern Portugal in general, until fairly recently. Also characteristic of the region are the significant inheritance of property by women and the tendency for matrilocal residence or neolocal residence near the wife's kin. These women-centered patterns are, as Cole and others (Brettell 1986) stress, closely linked to a long-standing pattern of male emigration. Whether in agriculture or in fishing, many women in northern Portugal must fulfill both male and female roles within the household.
The matrilateral bias in kinship described by Cole for northern Portugal is also apparent among Japanese-American immigrants in the urban United States (Yanagisako 1977). Manifested in women-centered kin networks, this bias influences patterns of coresidence, residential proximity, mutual aid, and affective ties. Rather than stressing the economic reasons for the maintenance of kinship ties, Yanagisako draws attention to the role of women as kin keepers who foster and perpetuate channels of communication and who plan and stage elaborate family rituals.
The social and ritual importance of kinship is precisely what di Leonardo (in this book) focuses on in her discussion of the female world of cards and holidays. The Italian-American women she describes work in the labor market and at home, but they are also engaged in "kin work." Kin work is women's work and involves maintaining contact through all kinds of mechanisms with family members who are deemed important.
300    Gender, Household, and Kinship
Unlike child care and house cleaning, it is a task that has to be carried out by the woman herself. Though it is often burdensome work women undertake kin work, according to di Leonardo, because through it they can set up a chain of valuable and long-term obligations within a wide circle of social relations.
Although di Leonardo identifies other parts of the developed world in which women have greater kin knowledge than men and work hard at maintaining kinship networks (for example, Lomnitz and Perez-Lizaur 1987), several questions are open to further empirical investigation. For example, why in some societies does kin work take on ritual significance, and why is it culturally assigned to women in some contexts and to men in others? Di Leonardo interprets the emergence of gendered kin work in association with a relative decline in importance of the domain of public male kinship that is found, for example, in African societies characterized by a powerful principle of descent The shift, she suggests, is part of the process of capitalist development. Recently, Enloe (1990) has taken these arguments much further by demonstrating how both global politics and global economics are engendered. Without kin work, for example, Hallmark (the card manufacturer) would be out of business.
Collier and Yanagisako (1987) have recently argued that gender and kinship are mutually constructed and should be brought together into one analytic field. Kinship and gender are closely allied because they are both based in, but not exclusively determined by, biology and because what it means to be a man or a woman is directly linked to the rules of marriage and sexuality that a culture constructs. As Linden-baum (1987:221) has observed, "Relations of kinship are in certain societies, relations of production. If kinship is understood as a system that organizes the liens we hold on the emotions and labors of others, then it must be studied in relation to gender ideologies that enmesh men and women in diverse relations of productive and reproductive work. The variable constructions of male and female that emerge in different times and places are central to an understanding of the character of kinship."
REFERENCES
Bolles, A. Lynn and Deborah d'Amico-Samuels. 1989 Anthropological Scholarship on Gender in the English-speaking Caribbean. In Sandra Morgen (ed.). Gender and Anthropology, pp. 171-188. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.
Brettell, Caroline -8. 1986. Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait: Population and History in a Portuguese Parish. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Brown Judith K. 1970. Economic Organization and the Position of Women Among the iroquois. Eth-nohistoryM: 151-167.
Collier, Jane Fishburne and Sylvia junko Yanagisako. 1987. Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fortes, Meyer. 1949. The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi. London: International African Institute, Oxford University Press.
-. 1953. The Structure of Unilineal Descent
Croups. American Anthropologist 55: 25-39.
Fox, Robin. 1967. Kinship, and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Friedl, Ernestine. 1975. Women and Men: An Anthropologist's View. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Lamphere, Louise. 1974. Strategies, Cooperation, and Conflict among Women in Domestic Groups. In Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds.). Women, Culture, and Society, pp. 97-112. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press.
Lindenbaum, Shirley. 1987. The Mystification of Female Labors. In Jane Fishburne Collier and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako (eds.). Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lomnitz, Larissa and Marisol Perez-Lizaur. 1987. A Mexican Elite Family, 1820-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Martin, M. Kay and Barbara Voorhies. 1975. Female of the Species. New York: Columbia University Press.
Potash, Betty (ed.). 1986. Widows in African Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Schildkrout, Enid. 1983. Dependence and Autonomy: The Economic Activities of Secluded Hausa Women in Kano. In Christine Oppong (ed.). Fe-
male and Male in West Africa. Winchester, MA: Allen and Unwin.
Schlegel, Alice. 1972. Male Dominance and Female Autonomy: Domestic Authority in Matrilineal Societies. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files.
Tanner, Nancy. 1974. Matrifocality in Indonesia and Africa and Among Black Americans. In Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds.), Woman,
Carol Stack
In The Flats the responsibility for providing food, care, clothing, and shelter and for socializing children within domestic networks may be spread over several households. Which household a given individual belongs to is not a particularly meaningful question, as we have seen that daily domestic organization depends on several things: where people sleep, where they eat, and where they offer their time and money. Although those who eat together and contribute toward the rent are generally considered by Flat's residents to form minimal domestic units, household changes rarely affect the exchanges and daily dependencies of those who take part in common activity.
The residence patterns and cooperative organization of people linked in domestic networks demonstrate the stability and collective power of family life in The Flats. Michael Lee grew up in The Flats and now has a job in Chicago. On a visit to The Flats, Michael described the residence and domestic organiza-
Excerpts from All Our Kin by Carol Slack. Copyright © 1974 by Carol B. Stack. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Domestic Networks: "Those You Count On" 301
Culture, and Society, pp. 129-156. Stanford;
Stanford University Press. Wolf, Margery. 1972. Women and the Family in Rural
Taiwan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko. 1977. Women-centered
Kin Networks in Urban Bilateral Kinship. American
Ethnologist 2: 207-226.
tion of his kin. "Most of my kin in The Flats lived right here on Cricket Street, numbers sixteen, eighteen, and twenty-two, in these three apartment buildings joined together. My mama decided it would be best for rne and my three brothers and sister to be on Cricket Street too. My daddy's mother had a small apartment in this building, her sister had one in the basement, and another brother and his family took a larger apartment upstairs. My uncle was really good to us. He got us things we wanted and he controlled us. All the women kept the younger kids together during the day. They cooked together too. It was good living."
Yvonne Diamond, a forty-year-old Chicago woman, moved to The Flats from Chicago with her four children. Soon afterwards they were evicted. "The landlord said he was going to build a parking lot there, but he never did. The old place is still standing and has folks in it today. My husband's mother and father took me and the kids in and watched over them while I had my baby. We stayed on after my husband's mother died, and my husband joined us when he got ajob in The Flats."
302    Gender, Household, and Kinship
Domestic Networks: "Those You Count On" 303
When families or individuals in The Flats are evicted, other kinsmen usually take them in. Households in The Flats expand or contract with die loss of a job, a death in the family, the beginning or end of a sexual partnership, or the end of a friendship. Welfare workers, researchers, and landlords have long known that the poor must move frequently. What is much less understood is the relationship between residence and domestic organization in the black community.
The spectrum of economic and legal pressures that act upon ghetto residents, requiring them to move—unemployment, welfare requirements, housing shortages, high rents, eviction—are clear-cut examples of external pressures affecting the daily lives of the poor. Flats' residents are evicted from their dwellings by landlords who want to raise rents, tear the building down, or rid themselves of tenants who complain about rats, roaches, and the plumbing. Houses get condemned by the city on landlords' requests so that they can force tenants to move. After an eviction, a landlord can rent to a family in such great need of housing that they will not complain for a while.
Poor housing conditions and unenforced housing standards coupled with overcrowding, unemployment, and poverty produce hazardous living conditions and residence changes. "Our whole family had to move when the gas lines sprung a leak in our apartment and my son set the place on fire by accident," Sam Summer told me. "The place belonged to my sister-in-law's grandfather. We had been living there witli my mother, my brother's eight children, and our eight children. My father lived in the basement apartment 'cause he and my mother were separated. Alter the fire burned the whole place down, we all moved to two places down the street near my cousin's house."
When people are unable to pay their rent because they have been temporarily "cut off aid," because the welfare office is suspicious of their eligibility, because they gave their rent money to a kinsman to help him through a crisis or illness, or because they were laid off from their job, they receive eviction notices
almost immediately. Lydia Watson describes a chain of events starting with the welfare office stopping her sister's welfare checks, leading to an eviction, co-residence, overcrowding, and eventually murder. Lydia sadly related the story to me. "My oldest sister was cut off aid the day her husband got out of jail. She and her husband and their three children were evicted from their apartment and they came to live with us. We were in crowded conditions ahead)'. I had my son, my other sister was there with her two kids, and my mother was about going crazy. My mother put my sister's husband out cause she found out he was a dope addict. He came back one night soon after that and murdered my sister. After my sister's death my mother couldn't face living in Chicago any longer. One of my other sisters who had been adopted and raised by my mother's paternal grandmother visited us and persuaded us to move to The Flats, where she was staying. All of us moved there—my mother, my two sisters and their children, my two baby sisters, and my dead sister's children. My sister who had been staying in "Fhe Flats found us a house across the street from her own."
Overcrowded dwellings and the impossibility of finding adequate housing in The Flats have many long-term consequences regarding where and with whom children live. Terence Piatt described where and with whom his kin lived when he was a child. "My brother stayed with my aunt, my mother's sister, and her husband until he was ten, 'cause he was the oldest in our family and we didn't have enough room—but he stayed with us most every weekend. Finally my aunt moved into the house behind ours with her husband, her brother, and my brother; my sisters and brothers and I lived up front with mv mother and her old man."
KIN-STRUCTURED LOCAL NETWORKS
The material and cultural support needed to absorb, sustain, and socialize community members in The Flats is provided by networks of cooperating kinsmen. Local coalitions formed from these networks of kin and
friends are mobilized within domestic networks: domestic organization is diffused over many kin-based households which themselves have elastic boundaries.
People in The Flats are immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they can count on. From a social viewpoint, relationships within the community are "organized on the model of kin relationships" (Goodenough 1970, p. 49}. Kin-constructs such as the perception of parenthood, the culturally determined criteria which affect the shape of personal kindreds, and the idiom of kinship, prescribe kin who can be recruited into domestic networks.
There are similarities in function between domestic networks and domestic groups which Fortes (1962, p. 2) characterizes as "workshops of social reproduction." Both domains include three generations oi members linked collaterally or otherwise. Kinship, jural and affectional bonds, and economic factors affect the composition of both domains and residential alignments within them. There are two striking differences between domestic networks and domestic groups. Domestic networks are not visible groups, because they do not have an obvious nucleus or defined boundary. But since a primary focus of domestic networks is child-care arrangements, the cooperation of a cluster of adult females is apparent. Participants in domestic networks are recruited from personal kindreds and friendships, but the personnel changes with fluctuating economic needs, changing life styles, and vacillating personal relationships.
In some loosely and complexly structured cognatic systems, kin-structured local networks (not groups) emerge. Localized coalitions of persons drawn from personal kindreds can be organized as networks of kinsmen. Goodenough (1970, p. 49) correctly points out that anthropologists frequently describe "localized kin groups," but rarely describe kin-structured local groups (Good-enough 1962; Helm 1965). The localized, kin-based, cooperative coalitions of people described in this chapter are organized as kin-structured domestic networks. For brevity, I refer to them as domestic networks.
RESIDENCE AND DOMESTIC ORGANIZATION
The connection between households and domestic life can be illustrated by examples taken from cooperating kinsmen and friends mobilized within domestic networks in The Flats. Domestic networks are, of course, not centered around one individual, but for simplicity the domestic network in the following example is named for the key participants in the network, Magnolia and Calvin Waters. The description is confined to four months between April and July 1969. Even within this short time span, individuals moved and joined other households within the domestic network.
THE DOMESTIC NETWORK
OF MAGNOLIA AND CALVIN WATERS
Magnolia Waters is forty-one years old and has eleven children. At sixteen she moved from the South with her parents, four sisters (Augusta. Carrie, Lydia, and Olive), and two brothers {Pennington and Oscar). Soon after this she gave birth to her oldest daughter, Ruby. At twenty-three Ruby Banks had two daughters and a son, each by a different father.
When Magnolia was twenty-five she met Calvin, who was forty-seven years old. They lived together and had six children. Calvin is now sixty-three years old; Calvin and Magnolia plan to many soon so that Magnolia will receive Calvin's insurance benefits. Calvin has two other daughters, who are thirty-eight and forty, by an early marriage in Mississippi. Calvin still has close ties with his daughters and their mother who all live near one another with their families in Chicago.
Magnolia's oldest sister, Augusta, is childless and has not been married. Augusta has maintained long-term "housekeeping" partnerships with four different men over the past twenty years, and each of them has helped her raise her sisters' children. These men have maintained close, affectional ties with the family over the years. Magnolia's youn-
304   Gender, Household, and Kinship
gest sister, Carrie, married Lazar, twenty-five years her senior, when she was just fifteen. They stayed together for about five years. After they separated Carrie married Kermit, separated from him, and became an alcoholic. She lives with different men from time to time, but in between men, or when things are at loose ends, she stays with Lazar, who has become a participating member of the family. Lazar usually resides near Augusta and Augusta's "old man," and Augusta generally prepares Lazar's meals. Ever since Carrie became ill, Augusta has been raising Carrie's son.
Magnolia's sister Lydia had two daughters, Lottie and Georgia, by two different fathers, before she married Mike and gave birth to his son. After Lydia married Mike, she no longer received AFDC benefits for her children. Lydia and Mike acquired steady jobs, bought a house and furniture, and were doing very well. For at least ten years they purposely removed themselves from the network of kin cooperation, preventing their kin from draining their resources. They refused to participate in the network of exchanges which Lydia had formerly depended upon; whenever possible they refused to trade clothes or lend money, or if they gave something, thev did not ask for anything in return. During this period they were not participants in the domestic network. About a year ago Lydia and Mike separated over accusations and gossip that each of them had established another sexual relationship. During the five-month-period when the marriage was ending, Lydia began giving some of her nice clothes away to her sisters and nieces. She gave a couch to her brother and a TV to a niece. Anticipating her coming needs, Lydia attempted to re-obligate her kin by carrying out the pattern which had been a part of her daily life before her marriage. After Lydia separated from her husband, her two younger children once again received AFDC. Lydia's oldest daughter, Lottie, is over eighteen and too old to receive AFDC, but Lottie has a three-year-old daughter who has received AFDC benefits since birth.
Eloise has been Magnolia's closest friend for many years. Eloise is Magnolia's first son's
father's sister. This son moved into his father's household by his own choice when he was about twelve years old. Magnolia and Eloise have maintained a close, sisterly friendship. Eloise lives with her husband, her four children, and the infant son of her oldest daughter, who is seventeen. Eloise's husband's brother's daughter. Lily, who is twenty, and her young daughter recently joined the household. Eloise's husband's youngest brother is the father of her sister's child. When the child was an infant, that sister stayed with Eloise and her husband.
Billy [ones lives in the basement in the same apartment house as Augusta, Magnolia's sister. A temperamental woman with three sons, Billy has become Augusta's closest friend. Billy once ran a brothel in The Flats, but she has worked as a cook, has written songs, and has attended college from time to time. Augusta keeps Billy's sons whenever Billy leaves town, has periods of depression, or beats the children too severely.
Another active participant in the network is Willa Mae. Willa Mae's younger brother, James, is Ruby's daughter's father. Even though James does not visit the child and has not assumed any parental duties toward the child, Willa Mae and Ruby, who are the same age, help each other out with their young children.
Calvin's closest friend, Cecil, died several years ago. Cecil was Violet's husband. Violet, Cecil, and Calvin came from the same town in Mississippi and their families have been very close. Calvin boarded with Violet's family for five years or so before he met Magnolia. Violet is now seventy years old. She lives with her daughter, Odessa, who is thirty-seven, her two sons, Josh, who is thirty-five and John, who is forty, and Odessa's three sons and daughter. Odessa's husband was killed in a fight several years ago and ever since then she and her family have shared a household with Violet and her two grown sons. Violet's sons Josh and John are good friends with Magnolia, Ruby, and Augusta and visit them frequently. About five years ago John brought one of his daughters to live with his mother and sister because his family thought that the mother was not taking proper care of the
Domestic Networks: "Those You Count On" 305
CHART 1.   Spatia! Relations in Magnolia and Leo's Domestic Network
child; the mother had several other children and did not object. The girl is now ten years old and is an accepted member of the family and the network.
Chart 1 shows the spatial relations ol the households in Magnolia and Calvin's domestic network in April 1969. The houses are scattered within The Flats, but none of them is more than three miles apart. Cab fare, tip to
two dollars per trip, is spent practically every day, and sometimes twice a day, as individuals visit, trade, and exchange services. Chart 2 shows how individuals are brought into the domestic network.
The following outline shows residential changes which occurred in several of the households within the network between April andjune 1969.
306    Gender, Household, and Kinship
ULYfwi
\ /
ELOISE'«'
CECIL"'
VIOLET
< MAGNOLIA w ==== C AL VIN'«i
CARRIE""
OTIS"*
BILLY JONESm HERMAN'"
----- long-Tarm Friendihip —       jutol cowpia
cnnienHiol cwpla
CHART 2. Kin-structured Domestic Network
APRIL 1969
Household Domestic AiTange.ment
1. Magnolia (38) and Calvin (60) live in a common-law relationship with their eight children (ages 4 to 18).
2. Magnolia's sister Augusta and Augusta's "old man," Herman, share a two-bedroom house with Magnolia's daughter Ruby (22) and Ruby's three children. Augusta and Herman have one bedroom, the three children sleep in the second bedroom, and Ruby sleeps downstairs in the living room. Ruby's boyfriend. Art, stays with Ruby manv evenings.
3. Augusta's girlfriend Billy and Billy's three sons live on the first floor of the house. Lazar, Magnolia's and Augusta's ex-brother-in-law, lives in the basement alone,
or from time to time, with his ex-wife Carrie. Lazar eats the evening meal, which Augusta prepares for htm, at household #2.
4. Magnolia's sister Lydia, Lydia's "old man," Lydia's two daughters, Georgia and Lottie, Lydia's son, and Lottie's three-year-old daughter live in Lydia's house.
5. Willa Mae (26), her husband, her son, her sister Claudia (32), and her brother James (father of Ruby's daughter) share a household.
6. Eloise (37), her husband Jessie, their four children, their oldest daughter's (17) son, and Jessie's brother's daughter Lily (20), and Lily's baby all live together.
7. Violet (70), her two sons, Josh (35) and John (40), her daughter Odessa (37), and Odessa's three sons and one daughter live together. Five years ago John's daughter (10) joined the household.
JUNE 1969
Household Domestic Arrangement
1. Household composition unchanged.
2. Augusta and Herman moved out after quarreling with Ruby over housekeeping and cooking duties. They joined household #3. Ruby and Art remained in household #2 and began housekeeping with Ruby's children.
3. Billy and her three sons remained on the first floor and Lazar remained in the basement. Augusta and Herman rented a small, one-room apartment upstairs.
4. Lottie and her daughter moved out of Lydia's house to a large apartment down the street, which they shared with Lottie's girl friend and the friend's daughter. Georgia moved into her boyfriend's apartment. Lvdia and her son (17) remained in the house with Lydia's "old man."
fi. James began housekeeping with a new girl friend who lived with Iter sister, but he kept most of his clothes at home. His brother moved into his room after returning from the service. Willa Mae, her husband, and son remained in the house.
fi. Household composition unchanged.
7. Odessa's son Raymond is the father of Clover's baby. Clover and the baby joined the household which includes Violet, her two sons, her daughter, Odessa, and Odessa's three sons and one daughter and John's daughter.
Typical residential alignments in The Flats are those between adult mothers and sisters, mothers and adult sons and daughters, close adult female relatives, and friends defined as kin within the idiom of kinship. Domestic organization is diffused over these kin-based households.
Residence patterns among the poor in The Flats must be considered in the context of domestic organization. The connection between residence and domestic organization is apparent in examples of a series of domestic and child-care arrangements within Magnolia and Calvin's network a few years ago. Consider the following four kin-based residences among Magnolia and Calvin's kin in 1966.
Domestic Networks: "Those You Count On" 307
Household
Do m est ic A nan gem ent
1. Magnolia. Calvin, and seven young children.
2. Magnolia's mother. Magnolia's brother, Magnolia's sister and her sister's husband, Magnolia's oldest daughter, Ruby, and Ruby's first child.
3. Magnolia's oldest sister, Augusta, Augusta's "old man." Augusta's sister's (Carrie) son. and Magnolia's twetve-vear-old son.
4. Magnolia's oldest son, his father, and the father's "old lady."
Household composition per se reveals little about domestic organization even when cooperation between close adult females is assumed. Three of these households (1, 2, 3) were located on one city block. Magnolia's mother rented a rear house behind Magnolia's house, and Magnolia's sister Augusta lived in an apartment down the street. As we have seen, they lived and shared each other's lives. Magnolia, Ruby, and Augusta usually pooled the food stamps they received from the welfare office. The women shopped together and everyone shared the evening meal with their men and children at Magnolia's mother's house or at Magnolia's. The children did not always have a bed of their own or a bed which thev were expected to share with another child. Thev fell asleep and slept through the night wherever the late evening visiting patterns of the adult females took them.
The kinship links which most often are the basis of new or expanded households are those links children have with close adult females such as the child's mother, mother's mother, mother's sister, mother's brother's wife, father's mother, father's sister, and father's brother s wife.
Here are some examples of the flexibility of the Blacks' adaptation to daily, social, and economic problems (Stack 1970, p. 309).
Relational Link Domestic Arrangement
Mother Viola's brother married his first
wife when he was sixteen. When she left him she kept their daughter.
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Domestic Networks: "Those You Count On" 309
Mother's mother Viola's sister Martha was never able to care for her children because of her nerves and high blood. In between husbands, her mother kept her two oldest children, and after Martha's death, her mother kept all three of the children.
Mother's brother A year after Martha's death, Martha's brother took Martha's oldest daughter, helping his mother out since this left her with only two children to care for.
Mother's mother Viola's daughter (20) was living at home and gave birth to a son. The daughter and her son remained in the Jackson household until the daughter married and set up a separate household with her husband, leaving her son to be raised by her mother.
Mother's sister Martha moved to Chicago into her sister's household. The household consisted of the two sisters and four of their children.
Father's mother Viola's sister Ethel had four daughters and one son. When Ethe! had a nervous breakdown, her husband took the three daughters and his son to live with his mother in Arkansas. After his wile's death, the husband took the oldest daughter, to join her siblings in his mother's home in Arkansas.
Father's mother When Viola's younger sister, Christine, left her husband in order to harvest fruit in Wisconsin, Christine left her two daughters with her husband's mother in Arkansas.
Father's sister When Viola's brother's wife died, he decided to raise his two sons himself. He kept the two boys and never remarried, although he had several girl friends and a child with one. His residence has always been near Viola's and she fed and cared for his sons.
The basis of these cooperative units is mutual aid among siblings of both sexes, the domestic cooperation of close adult females,
and the exchange of goods and services between male and female kin (Stack 1970). R.T. Smith (1970, p. 66} has referred to this pattern and observes that even when lower-class Blacks live in a nuclear family group, what is "most striking is the extent to which lower-class persons continue to be involved with other kin." Nancie Gonzalez (197.0, p. 232) suggests that "the fact that individuals have simultaneous loyalties to more than one such grouping may be important in understanding the social structure as a whole."
These co-residential socializing units do indeed show the important role of the black female. But the cooperation between male and female siblings who share the same household or live near one another has been underestimated by those who have considered the female-headed household and the grandmother-headed household (especially the mother's mother) as the most significant domestic units among the urban black poor.
The close cooperation of adults arises from the residential patterns typical of young adults. Due to poverty, young females with or without children do not perceive any choice but to remain living at home with their mother or other adult female relatives. Even if young women are collecting AFDC, they say that their resources go further when they share goods and services. Likewise, jobless males, or those working at part-time or seasonal jobs, often remain living at home with their mother or, if she is dead, with their sisters and brothers. This pattern continues long after men have become fathers and have established a series of sexual partnerships with women, who are living with their own kin, friends, or alone with their children. A result of this pattern is the striking fact that households almost always have men around: male relatives, by birth or marriage, and boyfriends. These men are often intermittent members of the households, boarders, or friends who come and go; men who usually eat, and sometimes sleep, in the households. Children have constant and close contact with these men, and especially in the case of male relatives, these relationships last over the years.
The most predictable residential pattern
in The Flats is that men and women reside in one of the households of their natal kin, or in the households of those who raised them, long into their adult years. Even when persons temporarily move out of the household of their mother or of a close relative, they have the option to return to the residences of their kin if they have to.
GENEROSITY AND POVERTY
The combination of arbitrary and repressive economic forces and social behavior, modified by successive generations of poverty, make it almost impossible for people to break out of poverty. There is no way for those families poor enough to receive welfare to acquire any surplus cash which can be saved for emergencies or for acquiring adequate appliances or a home or a car. In contrast to the middle class, who are pressured to spend and save, the poor are not even permitted to establish an equity.
The following examples from Magnolia and Calvin Waters' life illustrates the ways in which the poor are prohibited from acquiring any surplus which might enable them to change their economic condition or life style.
In 1971 Magnolia's uncle died in Mississippi and left an unexpected inheritance of §1,500 to Magnolia and Calvin Waters. The cash came from a small run-down farm which Magnolia's uncle sold shortly before he died. It was the first time in their lives that Magnolia or Calvin ever had a cash reserve. Their first hope was to buy a home and use the money as a down payment.
Calvin had retired from his job as a seasonal laborer the year before and the family was on welfare. AFDC allotted the family SI00 per month for rent. The housing that the family had been able to obtain over the years for their nine children at 3100 or less was always small, roach infested, with poor plumbing and heating. The family was frequently evicted. Landlords complained about the noise and often observed an average of ten to fifteen children playing in the household. Magnolia and Calvin never even anticipated that they would be able to buy a home.
Three days after they received the check, news of its arrival spread throughout their domestic network. One niece borrowed S25 from Magnolia so that her phone would not be turned off. Within a week the welfare office knew about the money. Magnolia's children were immediately cut off welfare, including medical coverage and food stamps. Magnolia was told that she would not receive a welfare grant for her children until the money was used up, and she was given a minimum of four months in which to spend the money. The first surplus the family ever acquired was effectively taken from them.
During the weeks following the arrival of the money. Magnolia and Calvin's obligations to the needs of kin remained the same, but their ability to meet these needs had temporarily increased. When another uncle became very ill in the South, Magnolia and her older sister, Augusta, were called to sit by his side. Magnolia bought round-trip train tickets for both of them and for her three youngest children. When the uncle died, Magnolia bought round-trip train tickets so that she and Augusta could attend the funeral. Soon after his death, Augusta's first "old man" died in The Flats and he had no kin to pay for the burial. Augusta asked Magnolia to help pay for digging the grave. Magnolia was unable to refuse. Another sister's rent was two months overdue and Magnolia feared that she would get evicted. This sister was seriously ill and had no source of income. Magnolia paid her rent.
Winter was cold and Magnolia's children and grandchildren began staying home from school because they did not have warm winter coats and adequate shoes or boots. Magnolia and Calvin decided to buy coats, hats, and shoes for all of the children (at least fifteen). Magnolia also bought a winter coat for herself and Calvin bought himself a pair of sturdy shoes.
Within a month and a half, all of the money was gone. The money was channeled into the hands of the same individuals who ordinarily participate in daily domestic exchanges, but the premiums were temporarily higher. All of the money was quickly spent for necessary, compelling reasons.
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Matrifocality, Power, and Gender Relations in Jamaica 311
Thus random fluctuations in the meager flow of available cash and goods tend to be of considerable importance to the poor. A late welfare check, sudden sickness, robbery, and other unexpected losses cannot be overcome with a cash reserve like more well-to-do families hold for emergencies. Increases in cash are either taken quickly from the poor by the welfare agencies or dissipated through the kin network.
Those living in poverty have little or no chance to escape from the economic situation into which they were born. Nor do they have the power to control the expansion or contraction of welfare benefits (Piven and Cloward 1971) or of employment opportunities, both of which have a momentous effect on their daily lives. In times of need, the only predictable resources that can be drawn upon are their own children and parents, and the fund of kin and friends obligated to them.
REFERENCES
Fortes, Meyer. 1962. "Marriage in Tribal Societies." Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, No. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gonzalez, Nancie. 1970. "Toward a Definition of Matrifocality." In Afro-American Anthropology;: Contemporan' Perspectives, eds. N. E. Whitten and John F. Szwed. New York: The Free Press.
Goodenough, Ward H. 1962. "Kindred and Hamlet in Lakalai, New Britain." Ethnology 1:5-12.
-. 1970. Description and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.
Helm, June. 1965. "Bilaterality in the Socio-Teni-torial Organization of the .Arctic Drain Age Dene." Ethnology, 4:361-385.
Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. 1971. Regulating Ike Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Vintage Books.
Smith, Raymond T. 1970. "The Nuclear Family in Afro-American Kinship." journal of Comparative Family Studies l(l):55-70."
Stack, Carol B. 1970. "The Kindred of Viola Jackson: Residence and Family Organization of an Urban Black American Family." In Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives, eds. N. E. Whitten and John F. Szwed. New York: The Free Press, pp. 303-312.
Marsha Prior
Anthropologists have long recognized kinship units in which women maintain considerable control over the household earnings and decision making. While numerous studies have provided pertinent data and have contributed to the theory of social organization, the subject of female-focused kinship units has always been controversial, subject to bias,
Original material prepared for this text.
and confusing. The variations in terminology and a preoccupation with the origin of these units is responsible for much of the confusion. In addition, two biases, prevalent throughoul the twentieth century, have influenced our understanding and acceptance of female-focused units. One bias has been the predominant view that nuclear families are "normal"; the other bias is the failure to recognize the full extern of female roles in society. The un-
fortunate result of this is that very little is known about the dynamics within and between female-focused kinship units.
The term matrifocal, which is most commonly used to refer to households composed of a key female decision maker, was coined by R.T. Smith in 1956. Recognition of such households precedes the usage of this term, however. As early as the 1930s scholars noted that African-American and African-Caribbean households were not composed of nuclear families as were the majority of middle-class households in the United States and Great Britain. Observers were struck by the authoritative role of women in these households and the limited role of the father in the family. Mothers controlled the earnings brought into the household and made key decisions. Fathers were either absent or did not appear to play a major role in economic contributions and in household decision making. However, attempts to address this situation reveal more the attitudes and biases prevalent at that time—many of which remain with us today—than any real insight as to the nature of such units. These maternal families, as they were often called during this early period, were viewed by scholars as deviant structures (Mohammed 1988). The high rate of illegitimacy and instability among mating partners was cited as proof that these families were disorganized and detrimental to the well-being of their members (Henriques 1953; Simey 1946; see also Moynihan 1965).
The bias toward nuclear family organization that dominated early studies stems from nineteenth centuiy evolutionists who viewed the nuclear family as a superior system of kinship organization and from Malinowski who argued that nuclear families are universal {Collier, Rosaldo, and Yanigisako 1982). Thus, societies that exhibited large numbers of non-nuclear households were considered abnormal, and it was essential that their development be explained.
Scholars naturally turned to the common characteristics of these female-focused societies, noting that they were former slave societies from Africa. One explanation, suggested by Frazier (1939), held that maternal families were an adaptive strategy to the slave system
that defined slaves as individual property who could be traded to another plantation at any time. Nuclear families would have been torn apart with frequent trading of adult slaves. Plantation owners were less likely, though, to tear apart mother-child dyads, at least until the child reached adolescence. Thus, the stable unit in a slave system was a household consisting of mothers and their children. The other explanation common during this time period, argued that the maternal family stemmed from the traditional African system that survived in spite of the Africans' forced migration and subsequent integration into the slave system (Herskovits 1941). These two theories enjoyed a lively debate until the mid-1950s when scholars moved away from historical explanations and emphasized the role of present social or economic conditions.
M.G. Smith (1962) argued that family structure in the West Indies was determined by the already existing mating systems that vary somewhat throughout the region. Clarke (1957), R.T. Smith (1956), and Gonzalez (1960) focused more on the effect that the current economic system had on household organization. The prevalent household structure found among African descendants in the United States and the Caribbean was viewed as an adaptive strategy to poverty, unemployment, or male migration. Nuclear families with only two working adults per household are believed by some to be at risk in socioeconomic environments in which poverty conditions exist, unemployment is high, and adult men must migrate to find work (see Durant-Gonzalez 1982; Gonzalez 1970:242). Thus, in such societies we are more likely to see households composed of a mother, a grandparent, and children; a mother and children; adult siblings and their children; or adult siblings, their children, and a grandparent.
The emphasis placed on the socioeconomic environment marked a new trend in matrifocal studies whereby the relationship between men and women took a more prominent position. However, the studies placed more emphasis on the "marginal" or absent man than they did the ever-present woman and were criticized for ignoring the wide range of roles and tasks performed by
-"TP"
Matrifocality, Power, and Gender Relations in Jamaica 313
312    Gender, Household, and Kinship
women. Furthermore, Smith noted (1962:6) specific ethnographic data were used to generalize about matrifocal societies throughout the Caribbean. This proved to be problematic in understanding matrifbcal societies theoretically, and it generated confusion as scholars used different terms to refer to similar types of kinship and household organizations.
R.T. Smith used the term matrifocal to refer to the type of structure he originally witnessed among lower class British Guianese (1956). Taking a developmental approach, Smith noted that matrifocal households arise with time after a man and woman begin to cohabitate. Early in the cycle the woman is economically dependent on the male partner. Her primary role is to provide care for the children, but as the children grow older and earn money for small tasks and labor it is the mother who controls their earnings. The father, meanwhile, has been unable to make significant contributions to the household economy due to his overall low status within a society that maintains prejudicial hiring policies. Smith's concept of matrifocality focuses on two criteria—the salience of women in their role as mothers and the marginality of men (i.e., their inability to contribute economically to the household) (1956; 1973; 1988).
The study of household structure conducted by Gonzalez on the Garifuna (Black Carib) of Guatemala was not intended, nor originally identified, as a study on matrifocality per se, but Gonzalez did note the effect that male emigration had on household structure (1960). Gonzalez observed that households were comprised of members who were related to each other consanguineally (through blood); no two members of the household were bound by marriage. These consanguineal households developed in response to a socioeconomic environment that encouraged men to migrate as they sought employment (see also Gonzalez 1984 for comments regarding the applicability of dividing households into consanguineal and affinal types).
The terms and definitions for the household structures observed by R.T. Smith and Gonzalez were created to fit specific ethno-
graphic data. They were later applied by various scholars to other societies that exhibited5 similar structures, which created confusion (see Kunstadter 1963; Randolph 1964; M.G.: Smith 1962:6; and R.T. Smith 1973:126) and was exacerbated by the use of other terms to; rectify the problem (e.g., the use of matricent-ric or female headed). Thus, in the literature we see these terms used interchangeably to refer to structures in which women control household earnings and decision making and men are viewed as marginal, though the impetus behind such household formation may differ from one society to the next. The whole concept became so clouded with terms and biases that Gonzalez astutely noted that depending on which scholar one is reading, matrifocality can suggest (1) that women are more important than the observer had expected. (2) that women maintain a good deal of control over money in the household, (3) that women are the primary source of income, or (4) that there is no resident male (1970:231-232).
Recent authors have criticized the emphasis on men's marginality and the focus on women's domestic tasks that arose in the study of matrifocality (Barrow 1988; Mohammed 1988; Tanner 1974). Concentration on women's domestic tasks ignores the full extent of women's networks, their access to resources, control over resources, relations with men, and relationship between household and society, all ofwhich are important considerations when discussing matrifocality. Male marginality is problematic in part because the term is difficult to define. Does it mean that the father does not live in the household? Has he migrated out of the community? Does he contribute sporadically, or not at all, to the household economy? Is he not around to make household decisions?
As Tanner has remarked matrifocality should not be defined in "negative terms" (i.e., by the absence of the father). Instead, we should focus on the role of women as mothers, and note that in matrifocal systems mothers have at least some control over economic resources and are involved in decision making. According to Tanner, however, matrifocality goes beyond these two criteria. To be
matrifocal a society must culturally value the role of mother—though not necessarily at the expense of fathers. In matrifbcal societies the woman's role as mother is central to the kinship structure, but Tanner does not limit this role to domestic tasks. As mothers women may participate in cultivation, petty market-inn-, wage labor, in rituals, and so forth (3974). This broader definition allows us to recognize matrifocal units within a variety of kinship systems. Matrifocal units can exist in matrilineal or patrilineal societies, within nuclear families, and in bilateral systems. In any society with an emphasis on the mother-child dvad where this unit is culturally valued and where the mother plays an effective role in the economy and decision making of the unit, that unit can be defined as matrifocal (Tanner 1974:131-132).
Tanner's definition finally allows us to avoid some of the problems that previous studies encountered and permits us to further address issues pertinent to matrifocal units. Wc can examine gender relations within the context of gender hierarchies and the broader socioeconomic environment ofwhich matrifocal households are a part. One area that has received little attention is the relationship between physical violence against women and matrifocality. Violence against women and matrifocality seem to contradict each other due to the assumptions regarding power and the authoritative role of women in matrifocal households.
Women, having access to and control over resources and authority to make household decisions, are viewed as powerful. This view has been particularly evident in studies of women in the Caribbean where a large number of matrifocal households exist (Massiah 1982). Caribbean women are frequently portrayed as powerful, autonomous individuals (Ellis 1986; Powell 1982, 1986: Safa 1986). Although Caribbean women's control and power over resources and decisions is not to be discounted, fieldwork in a low-income community in Jamaica suggests that matrifocality and physical violence against women are not mutually exclusive. To understand the relationship between these two phenomena requires knowledge of sociocultural ele-
ments that affect both gender relations and matrifocal household organization.
The community of study is a low-income urban neighborhood approximately 0.05 square miles located in the parish of St. Andrew, Jamaica. During the time at which data were collected, 1987 to 1988, there were an estimated 210 households with a population of 1,300. The majority of the households were of wooden construction, many without electricity, and very few with running water. Some of the wealthier residents maintained houses constructed of concrete. No telephones were present in any household because telephone lines were not available.
Within the community a variety of household organizational units were observed. Nuclear families based on common-law marriage, legal marriage, or corcsidency existed. There were also single female-headed households, single male-headed households, and a variety of extended and collateral arrangements. Finally, there were households whose membership included kin and nonkin (i.e., a friend or acquaintance may reside in the household). This range in domestic organization demonstrates that household membership may vary in response to economic and social conditions.
What makes these arrangements more interesting is that the households are subject to change. During the course of the fieldwork households altered their membership; thus, a nuclear arrangement would shift to single female-headed with children as the father moved out, and it might have shifted again if a grandmother or sister moved in. Regardless of the various household arrangements, matrifocality was observed. Women certainly maintained control over the economic resources and were responsible for many household decisions. Women as mothers were structurally central to the kinship units, and mothers were culturally valued as indicated by both male and female informants.
Although Caribbean women are portrayed as powerful and autonomous, male-female relations, as anywhere in the world, are based on some form of interdependence. Within this community social and economic status are intricately tied to gender relations. Both
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Matrifocality, Power, and Gender Relations in Jamaica 315
genders support the basic notion that women are to provide sexual services and domestic labor for men, and men are to provide women with money and gifts. However, the relationships are not a simple equation whereby women provide sexual services and domestic labor in exchange for money. Women often spoke of sexual activity as something that they desired and enjoyed, and men felt free to request money from women with whom they have had relations (especially if she is the mother to any of his children). Nevertheless, there is an understanding that if a woman will not provide sexual services or domestic labor or if the man does not provide cash or gifts from time to time, the relationship will end. These expectations played key roles in understanding gender relations and the behavior of men and women.
In addition to these expectations, adult status is primarily attained by the birth of a child. At this socioeconomic level higher educational degrees, prestigious employment, and ownership of cars and houses are out of most community members' reach. Both men and women view the birth of a child as an opportunity to announce their own adult status. Thus, children are normally desired and are a source of pride for both the mother and father.
The instability that marks male-female relationships is recognized by community members and can be related to cultural values as well as to the socioeconomic environment that encourages men and women to seek more resourceful partners. Male and female informants readily acknowledged the shifting allegiances between men and women. Men were known to keep several girlfriends at one time, and marriage, common-law or legal, was no guarantee that monogamy will follow. Women also admitted to keeping an eye out for a better partner and said they would initiate a change if they so desired. Couples tended to set up visiting relationships whereby the couple did not coreside. Children, of course, may be born from these unions. If a Jamaican woman of this socioeconomic class married at all, it was more likely to occur after the age of thirty (see Brody 1981:253-255).
As households were observed and data collected through the course of fieldwork, it be-" came apparent that fathers and male partners were not marginal to the households. Whether or not they resided in the same household as the woman, they could potentially be very influential. It also became clear that in certain situations female control over household issues could be jeopardized. A brief look at some of the households and the gender relations among men and women will demonstrate these points.
MARY'S HOUSEHOLD
Mary is a twenty-seven-year-old mother occupying a one-room wooden house—no electricity or running water—with four children. The two oldest children were fathered by one man; the youngest two were fathered by another. Sexual relations with the first father had ceased several years ago; however, Mary does maintain sexual relations with the younger children's father, though he keeps other girlfriends.
Mary's primary source of income stems from sporadic petty marketing. When Mary has the capital to invest in goods, she sells clothing and shoes in a downtown Kingston stall that is rented by her mother. Mary is very much involved in politics; she attends meetings, distributes literature, and talks to anyone about her party's political candidates and officials. She was able to work for a few months as an enumerator during a national campaign to register voters. Mary depends on contributions from the two fathers of her children. The first father rarely comes to visit, but he is in the National Guard, draws a steady paycheck, and consistently sends money for the children.
The father of her two youngest children, who works as a cook and a driver, is usually good about bringing money but has, on occasion, lapsed. Such lapses can be a severe stress on Mary's limited household budget and was the source of domestic violence on one occasion. Earl, the father of Mary's youngest children, had promised to bring some money. When he showed up at her doorstep she
asked for the money, and he told her that he didn't have any. This made her angry so she began yelling at him, and a fight ensued. They began hitting each other with their fists, but the fight escalated when Earl picked up a shovel and hit Mary on the wrist. Mary fought back by taking a cutlass and striking him on the shoulder. Earl then left the premises, and Mary sought medical treatment for the pain in her wrist.
This was the first and only act of violence between the two in a seven-year period. Mary stated that they rarely even quarrel. Though not typical, the violence demonstrates the economic dependence of Maiy on the contributions of the fathers and the stress that can surface when she is threatened by the lack of such contributions. Mary admitted that she was extremely angry when he told her that he had no money to give her because he had promised earlier that he would bring her some. She was convinced that he had the money to give but was holding out on her.
DORA'S HOUSEHOLD
Dora, twenty-eight years old, lives under similar circumstances as Mary and has had comparable experience regarding fathers and money. Dora is the mother of three children. Two live with her; one stays with relatives in the country. Dora's one-room house has neither electricity nor running water.
The father of Dora's first two children provides some money to the household. Dora is almost totally dependent on these contributions because she is confined to the house and cannot work due to a crippling disease. Ned, the father of her youngest child, provides nothing to the household, which is a continuous source of grief to Dora. Dora is quiet and normally avoids conflict. Her one attempt to address Ned's negligence resulted in violence, as had Mary's. Dora had decided that because Ned did not provide clothes or money for their son, Michael, he did not deserve to see the child. She packed up Michael's belongings and sent him over to Ned's sister's house for a short while, believing that the sisterwould feed Michael and buy
him some clothes. When Ned arrived to take Michael for a visit to his own house, he questioned the child's whereabouts and became angry when Dora told him that he had been sent to Ned's sister's house. Ned began hitting Dora. She struck back once but relented when Ned punched her in the side and ran off. She did not see him again for several days. This incident occurred six months prior to our interview, and Dora has not asked Ned for anything since and vows that she never will.
RITA'S HOUSEHOLD
Rita lives in a household consisting of six members, including herself. Two of her four children, a granddaughter, a friend of her daughter, and Rita's boyfriend occupy a three-room apartment without electricity or running water. Rita is thirty nine years old. Her boyfriend, Tom, is 40 and has lived with her for four years. They have no common children.
Rita runs a successful neighborhood bar, giving her control over the major portion of the household budget. She receives some financial contribution from the father of one daughter. Rita and Tom have established a reciprocal relationship regarding money. She does expect him to contribute from his earnings as a taxi driver when he is able, but she may be just as likely to provide Tom with money when he is in need. Rita is aware of Tom's other girlfriends and realizes that a good deal of his earnings go to entertaining these women. With her own successful business Rita is less financially dependent on her male partner than other women. She does look to Tom, however, for companionship and emotional support. The time he spends with other women is reluctantly accepted, though on one occasion his infidelities did result in conflict. One night, as he came home late, Rita began cursing Tom and made derogatory remarks about Tom's other girlfriend. Tom responded by punching Rita. She fought back for a few minutes then they both simply let it go. In the past year Rita has avoided comment on Tom's affairs and is de-
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termined to put up with it, For now at least, because she is not ready to end the relationship. Rita's attitude is that most men do this, so there is little point in severing this relationship to find another boyfriend who will do the same.
HANNAH'S HOUSEHOLD
Thirty-six-year-old Hannah is an articulate and ambitious woman. She lives in a two-room house with seven other people (five of her six children live with her along with a friend her age and a friend of one of her daughters). Hannah worked as a domestic but lost her job during my stay in the community. She did have a job lined up, cleaning the office of a dentist.
Hannah's first three children were fathered by one man; her fourth child was fathered by another man; and her last two children were fathered by a third man. The first man to father her children is now sick and unable to work. He does not provide any financial support to Hannah's household. The other two fathers help out every now and then, but the support is not enough for her to rely on. She rarely sees any of her children's fathers now, but Hannah did relate an incident involving the last father, Gerald, that occurred nearly five years prior to our interview. At the time of the incident Hannah and Gerald were still intimately involved but did not coteside. Hannah had grown dissatisfied with the relationship because Gerald provided no support for herself or his children. Thus, she had decided to break off the relationship. When Gerald learned of her decision he became angry and abusive. One night after everyone had gone to bed, he came to her house, began yelling at her, and proceeded to destroy some of her belongings: He broke a lamp and smashed a small table. Another night he came to her window, tore off the screen, and began yelling at her again. He threw a bucket of water on her and the children and threw stones. Hannah, not wanting the children to get hurt, went outside to confront him, and he began physically assaulting her. Hannah managed to grab a broken bot-
tle and cut him with it. Gerald then left the premises, never bothering her much afterwards.
SUMMARY
Although women in matrifocal households often maintain control over resources and decision making within the household, the previous data indicate that the power associated with such control and authority can be compromised. Power, as defined by Adams, is the control over one's environment and the ability to control the environment of others based on access and control of resources that are of value to the other (1975:12). In the cases cited above the interdependence between men and women and the access that men have to certain resources must be addressed to understand female power and domestic violence.
As indicated previously, both genders view women as exercising control over sexual services and domestic labor, and men have access to some (though not ail) of the economic resources that women need. At this socioeconomic level men may not be able to contribute significantly to the household economy. Nevertheless, women view men as a source of monetary and material needs and feel they have the right to demand these resources. Though women are constantly seeking ways to earn money and often don't want to rely on contributions from male partners, many, again dtie to the socioeconomic environment, are dependent on male contributions, no matter how small. The data suggest that while men are dependent on women, they can more easily circumvent the control that female partners have over desired resources than women can circumvent the resources that men control. In this culture it is acceptable for men to have more than one female partner. While women complain of this it is expected and negates the control that individual women can exert. Women, on the other hand, may try to circumvent male control over economic resources, but they are also subjected to an economic system that exploits the lower class for their cheap labor and
Matrifocality, Power, and Gender Relations in Jamaica 317
that offers high unemployment. In addition to this interdependence these women are members of a culture that may value women as mothers, but women in general do not necessarily enjoy a high status. In otherwords the mother role is valued, but women are overall subordinate to men (Henry and Wilson 1975). Male informants felt it was their right to physically coerce or punish women as they saw fit, but a man would almost never physically abuse his own mother.
In relating the cases cited previously the intent is not to suggest that the women were weak, powerless, and always dominated by men. Women often fought back and worked to become as independent as possible. These cases are also not intended to promote negative images of men. I recount incidences of abuse to demonstrate the extreme to which men can affect matrifocal households, but I must emphasize that male influence can also be positive and rewarding for members of the household. Fathers were observed visiting their children, taking them to the health clinic, and providing money, food, and clothing.
The data collected from this study remind us that, in spite of a long interest in matrifocality, we still have much to learn. We must rid ourselves of biases that narrow our focus. Just as it was wrong to assume that men are marginal, that women perform only domestic tasks, and that the nuclear family is "normal," we must not assume that women in matrifocal societies are always powerful or that they consistently enjoy a high status within that society. The power that women exert must be documented and integrated into the overall cultural context that would also note gender relations, the socioeconomic environment, the political environment, and cultural values. Only then can studies on matrifocality provide us with a better understanding of human behavior.
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Adams, Richard N. 1975. Energy and Structure: A Theory of Social Power. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barrow, Christine. 1988. Anthropology, the Family and Women in the Caribbean. In Patricia Mohammed and Catherine Shepherd (cds.). Gender in Caribbean Development, pp. 156-169. Mona, Jamaica: University of West Indies.
Brody, Eugene B. 1981. Sex, Contraception, and Motherhood in Jamaica. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clarke, Edith. 1957. My Mother Who Fathered Me. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Collier, Jane, Michelle Rosalcio, and Sylvia Yanagisako. 1982. Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views. In BarrieThorne (ed.). Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist ihtestions, pp. 25-39. New York: Longman.
Durant-Gonzalez, Victoria. 1982. The Realm of Female Familial Responsibility. In Jovcelin Massiah (ed). Women and the Family, pp. 1-27. Cave Hill, Barbados: University of the West Inches, Institute or Social and Economic Research.
Ellis, Pat. 1986. Introduction: .An Overview ol"
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Women of the Caribbean, pp. 1-24. Kingston:
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Gonzalez, Nancic L. I960. Household and Family in the Caribbean. Social and Economic Studies 9: 101-106.
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In Norman E. Wirkten, Jr. and John F. Szwed
{eds.). Afro-American Anthropology, pp. 231-244.
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Henriques, Fernando M. 1953. Family and Colour in Jamaica. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Henry, Frances and Pamela Wilson. 1975. The Status ol"Women in Caribbean Societies: An Overview of Their Social. Economic and Sexual Roles. Social and Economic Studies 24(2): 165-198.
Herskovks, Melville J. 194 1. The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Kunstadter, Peter. 1963. A Survey of the Consanguine or Matrifocal Family. American Anthropologist 65: 56-66.
Massiah, Joycelin. 1982. Women Who Head Households. In Joycelin Massiah (ed.). Women and the Family, pp. 62-130. Cave Hill, Barbados: Llniversity ofWest Indies, Institute of Social and Economic Research.
Mohammed, Patricia. I98S. "Flic Caribbean Fam-
318    Gender, Household, and Kinship
Maria, A Portuguese Rsherwoman    319
ily Revisited. In Patricia Mohammed and Catherine Shepherd (eds.). Gender in Caribbean Development, pp. 170-182. Mona, Jamaica: University of West Indies.
Moynihan, Daniel P. 1965. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C.
Powell, Dorian. 1982. Network Analysis: A Suggested Model for the Study of Women and the Family in the Caribbean. In Joycelin Massiah (ed.). Women and The. Family, pp. 131-162. Cave Hill, Barbados: University of the West Indies, Institute of Social and Economic Research.
-. 1986. Caribbean Women and Their Response to Familial Experiences. Social and Economic Studies 35(2): 83-130.
Randolph, Richard R. 1964. The 'Matrifocal Family' as a Comparative Category. American Anthropologist 66: 628-31.
Safa, Helen. 1986. Economic Autonomy and Sexual Equality in Caribbean Society. Social and Economic Studies 35(3): 1-21.
Sally Cole
Maria lives in the small town of Vila Cha on the north coast of Portugal. She is a retired pescadeirn (fisherwoman) who still goes to the beach each day to help bait traps or unload fish or just to talk with other fishermen and women. The illegitimate daughter of a poor, landless woman, Maria began fishing when she was only ten years old. And throughout her life she worked both at sea and on land. She fished by net and hand line in one of the small, gaily painted, open wooden boats that, until the 1960s, were powered by oar and sail and were typical in the inshore fishery; on land she, like the other women, harvested
Original materia! prepared for this text.
Simey, Thomas. 1946. Welfare Planning in the West Indies. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Smith, M.G. 1962. West Indian Family Structure. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Smith, Raymond T. 1956. The Negro Family in British Guiana: Family Structure and Social Status in the Villages. London: Routleclge and Kegan Paul.
-. 1973. The Matrifocal Family, In Jack
Goody (ed.). The Character of Kinship, pp. 121-144. London: Cambridge University Press.
-. 1988. Kinship and Class in the West Indies: A
Genealogical Study of fa ma lea and Guyana. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Staples, Robert. 1972. The Matriccntric Family System: A Cross-Cultural Examination. Journal of Marriage and The Family 34(1): 156-165.
Tanner, Nancy. 1974. Matrifocality in Indonesia and Africa and Among Black Americans. In Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds.). Woman, Culture, and Society, pp. 129-156. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
and dried seaweed and sold it to local peasant farmers for fertilizer. By the age of thirty-five she was a licensed boat skipper, had bought her own boat and gear, and was fishing daily with crew she hired to work for her. Maria says this was simply the only way she knew how to make a living. She fishes, she tells us, because she was forced to, because her husband emigrated to Brazil abandoning her with three daughters. Nonetheless, she likes her profession and knows she is good at it—as good as any man. Fisherwomen like Maria say they fished "like men," and they mean that not only did women have the skill of fishermen, but at sea they became social men. They stress that women's sexuality was never tar-
geted when they were working with men. "There was more respect (respeito) on the sea than there was on the land," some say.
Maria is a large-boned women who dresses in the characteristic manner of rural Portuguese women who were born, raised, and married during the Salazar regime before i960. She wears her hair pulled into a bun at the back of her head and covered with a head scarf; she wears a dark wool shawl, skirt, socks, and chinelas (the mass-produced open-backed flat shoes that have replaced the home-made traditional clogs). Underneath her skirt she wears trousers—unheard of among women of her generation, and she walks with a masculine, lumbering gait and speaks in a deep, quiet authoritative voice.
On one hand Maria found my interest in her life surprising: "There is nothing remarkable about my life," she said. On the other hand, like other women in Vila Cha, Maria tells stories from her every day life in conversations with daughters, neighbors, relatives, and even clients for her fish. Women's daily activities on the beach, on the street, and at the fish auction, provide them with continual opportunities to constitute the female subject and to constitute the self. With this strong sense of self, Maria and other Vila Cha fisherwomen comfortably and skillfully constructed their life stories.
In the following narrative Maria assures us that she only did what she had to do. But we see, in her refusal of her estranged husband's request to take him back and care for him in his old age, how through her life of hard work and economic independence, she has constituted herself as an autonomous person and finds it impossible to do what her husband asks and what he considers to be a wife's duty.
There is nothing remarkable about my life. I am a poor woman. I did what I had to do. I worked hard—all the women here did. I have worked very hard all my life.
I was born in 1926, the third of lour children. We had no father. I was raised in Vila Cha by my mother who worked as a jornaleira (an agricultural day laborer), harvested seaweed, and sold fish in order to feed us. But often there was no food, and we had to beg from our neighbors.
In my childhood girls used to collect seaweed both from the beach in a hand net and from boats using a type of rake. It was also common for them to accompany relatives fishing. When only ten years old I began to accompany neighbors when they went fishing. When I was fourteen I took out my license, and 1 continued to fish as a crew member on boats owned by neighbors. These men are all dead now but it was they who taught me this work.
I married when 1 was only twenty years old, and I think this is too young. My husband was a pescador (fisherman) from a neighboring parish. He came to live with me and my mother and my grandmother and took up fishing in Vila Cha. I continued fishing whenever I could, and after my daughters were born I left them in my mother's care so that I could go out on the sea. I also worked on the seaweed harvest often going out alone in the boat to collect seaweed.
From the beginning my husband was selfish. He never helped me with my work but would instead go off to attend to his own affairs (a vida dele). I married too young. We had two daughters, and when I was pregnant with the third my husband emigrated to Brazil. He was gone for almost four years, during which time I heard nothing from him, and he sent no money. I decided to go to Brazil to find him. In 1955 I went by ship with my sister-in-law who was going to join her husband, my brother, in Brazil. I found my husband involved in a life of women and drink, and after a few months I returned home alone. I wanted to make my life in Vila Cha, and I missed my daughters. I took up fishing full-time and harvested seaweed when I wasn't fishing, and in this way I supported my mother and my children. In 1961 I bought a boat of my own and took out my skipper's license.
I like my profession, but I fished because I was forced to. My marriage became difficult. My husband went away to Brazil, leaving me in the street with three children, and I had to face life on my own. Fishing was not as productive then as it is now, and the life of a fisherwoman was a hard one. But I had to turn to what I knew. First I fished in a boat belonging to another pescador and then for eighteen years I owned and fished in my own boat "Tres Marias." About fourteen years ago I managed to buy this small house, which, little by little, I have fixed up, and this is where I live now.
Although in recent years I have been the only woman skipper, there have been no difficulties for me at all because I know my profession very
320    Gender, Household, and Kinship
Maria, A Portuguese Fisherwoman 321
well—as well as any of my comrades. Men used to like to fish with me because they knew I was strong. C, a member of my crew, used to say that I was stronger than he. Fishing holds no secrets for me, and besides 1 think that women have the right to face life beside men. What suits men suits women. I am respected by everyone, men and women. I have many friends, and when the weather prohibits fishing we all stay here on the beach working on the nets and enjoying conversation. I have always enjoyed my work on the sea. I was never one who liked to stay at home.
When my daughters were small I used to be at sea day and night—whenever there was fish. They stayed at home with my mother. Later, when they were older and I was fishing, my daughters assisted my mother harvesting seaweed, and in this way they contributed to the maintenance of the household. As soon as I returned from fishing I would start the housework. You see, I was at the same time housewife and fisherman (Olhe, ett era ao mesmo tempo dona da casa e pescador).
I retired in 1979. I sold my boat, and I gave my fishing gear to my son-in-law. I sold my boas to a fisherman in Matosinhos because I could not bear to see it anymore here on the beach. In 1982 I bought a piece of land, and two of my daughters are building a duplex on it now. My youngest daughter lives with me in my house along with her husband and three children. I have helped all of my daughters to establish their households. I have been very good to them. And, now that I am old and my heart is not good, they are looking after me. When I returned from Brazil leaving my husband there, I could have found another man to live with. I could have lived with another man. But I never wanted to do that because, if things didn't work out with us, I worried that he would take it out on my daughters because they were nothing to him. I preferred to have my daughters.
Recently, my husband has begun writing to me from Brazil. He wants to return to Portugal, and he wants me to take him back. He needs someone to care for him now in his old age. But I won't take him back. It's not right at all. I liked him once, but that's all over now. The best part of the life of a couple is passed. I'm not interested in his returning. I'm not an object to be put away and then picked up, dusted off, and used again. I am not an object. I am a person. I am human. I have the right to be treated like a person, don't you think? I managed to make a
good life for myself and my children here, but he arranged nothing for himself there—nothing. He's got nothing there, but he's also got nothing here. He has never done anything for me or my daughters, and now he wants to come back. Who does he think he is? I'm not crazy, He has no right whatsoever.
Maria describes her life of work in the inshore fisher)' as it existed in Vila Cha until the 1970s, by which time most households in the community had come to depend primarily on the wages earned by women in factories and men in construction work. This household-based maritime economy had depended on an annual round of diverse activities and on the seasonal availability of natural resources like fish and seaweed. On one hand the unpredictability of resources and weather ensured their poverty; on the other hand maritime production required the participation of all household members (including women and children) and thus created the conditions for the social and economic autonomy of women. The sale of fresh fish and seaweed fertilizer—both commodities that women controlled—enabled women like Maria to support themselves and their children without the assistance of men. Because Vila Cha, like other rural communities in northwestern Portugal, has sustained high rates of male emigration since at least the nineteenth century, the autonomy of women was also strategic.
Maria describes how she invested in property—a house, a boat and gear, and land for her daughters. Perhaps because men were often absent due to either temporary or permanent emigration, property in Vila Cha became identified primarily with women. It was a woman's responsibility to look after the house and garden plot and to look after the boat and gear—either by fishing herself or by hiring others to fish for her. Daughters were favored over sons to inherit property, and younger daughters (or the last to many) were favored over older daughters. Daughters were favored not only because sons might emigrate but also because parents wanted a daughter to stay on in the house to care for
them in old age and to tend their graves after death.
The relationship between women and property also determined residence patterns after marriage. As Maria describes after their marriage her husband came to live with her and her mother and her mother's mother. Maria was the third of four children and the youngest daughter. Maria lived with her mother all her life. Now, her own youngest daughter and her husband and children live with Maria and are caring for her in her old age-
The relations between these four generations of mothers and daughters are typical of relations among blood-related women in Vila Cha. Women's strong ties with their children, especially daughters, may be interpreted as having been among women's multiple strategies to provide for themselves and for their households in the absence of men. Thus, not only did women maximize their economic autonomy through their control of the sale of fresh fish and seaweed fertilizer and by assuming responsibility for the household property, but they also conceived of their children as a resource. Having children gave a woman adult status and the prerogatives (and responsibilities) of managing a household; having children also ensured that a woman— especially an unmarried woman or a deserted wife like Maria—would have someone to care for her in the frailty of her later years.
The importance women placed on having children may be seen in the high rates of illegitimacy that were common in Vila Cha until the 1960s and that are correlated with land-lessness and male emigration. Poor, landless women were already limited to finding marriage partners who were of the same low economic position. Male emigration further created a demographic asymmetry, so there
were not enough marriageable men to go around. Under these conditions poor women often were less concerned about getting married than they were desirous of having children. Maria's mother and her mother's mother are both women who never married but who had children and managed households. Although Maria herself did marry she tells us directly that her daughters were more important to her than any man could ever be, and for this reason, she says, she chose to live without a male partner when, still a young woman, she was abandoned by her husband. "I preferred to have my daughters," she said.
Finally, Maria describes how gender is negotiated through the relations of daily life and especially through work. Maria negotiated a dual or androgynous gender identity. She spent her entire life working with men in a profession that was locally defined as a masculine pursuit despite the fact that women also fished. This work enabled her to assume masculine roles and prerogatives in other spheres of life and to live without the support of a male companion. At the same time Maria fulfilled a woman's role: she was the mother of three children and the manager of a household. When Maria tells us that she was both "housewife and fisherman" she is telling us that to her children she was both nurturer and economic provider, both mother and father, and in the community she was both woman and man. Now, nearing the end of life, Maria and her husband have reversed positions: Maria once traveled to Brazil to entreat her husband to return and was refused; now her husband is begging her to take him back into her home and she is refusing. Maria, with her life of hard work behind her, cannot even entertain the contradiction. "1 am not crazy," she said. "I am not an object. I am a person."
322    Gender, Household, and Kinship
The Female World of Cards and Holidays 323
Micaela di Leonardo
Why is it that the married women of America are supposed to write all ihe letters and send all the cards to their husbands' families? My old man is a much better writer than I am, yet he expects mc to correspond with his whole family. If I asked him to correspond with mine, he would blow a gasket.
Letter to Ann Landers
Women's place in man's life cycle has been that of nurturer, caretaker, and helpmate, the weaver of those networks of relationships on which she in turn relies.
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice'
Feminist scholars in the past fifteen years have made great strides in formulating new understandings of the relations among gender, kinship, and the larger economy. As a result of this pioneering research, women are newly visible and audible, no longer submerged within their families. We sec households as loci of political struggle, inseparable parts of the larger society and economy, rather than as havens from the heartless world of industrial capitalism.1' And historical and cultural variations in kinship and family forms have become clearer with the maturation of feminist historical and social-scientific scholarship.
Two theoretical trends have been key to this reinterpretation of women's work and family domain. The first is the elevation to visibility of women's nonmarket activities-housework, child care, the servicing of men,
Reprinted with permission of The University of Chicago Press from Signs I2<3): 440-453, 1987. © 1987 by the University of Chicago. Ail rights reserved.
and the care of the elderly—and the definition of all these activities as labor, to be enumerated alongside and counted as part of overall social reproduction. The second theoretical trend is the nonpejorative focus on women's domestic or kin-centered networks. We now see them as the products of conscious strategy7, as crucial to the functioning of kinship systems, as sources of women's autonomous power and possible primary sites of emotional fulfillment, and, at times, as the vehicles for actual survival and/or political resistance.'1
Recently, however, a division has developed between feminist interpreters of the "labor" and the "network" perspectives on women's lives. Those who focus on women's work tend to envision women as sentient, goal-oriented actors, while those who concern themselves with women's tics to others tend to perceive women primarily in terms of nur-turance, other-orientation—altruism. The most celebrated recent example of this division is the opposing testimony of historians Alice Kessler-Harris and Rosalind Rosenberg in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's sex discrimination case against Sears Roebuck and Company. Kessler-Harris argued that American women historically have actively sought higher-paying jobs and have been prevented from gaining them because of sex discrimination by employers. Rosenberg argued that American women in the nineteenth century created among themselves, through their domestic networks, a "women's culture" that emphasized the nur-turance of children and others and the maintenance of family life and that discouraged
women from competition over or heavy emotional investment in demanding, high-paid employment.1"'
I shall not here address this specific debate but, instead, shall consider its theoretical background and implications. I shall argue that we need to fuse, rather than to oppose, the domestic network and labor perspectives. In what follows, I introduce a new concept, the work of kinship, both to aid empirical feminist research on women, work, and family and to help advance feminist theory in this arena. I believe that the boundary-crossing nature of the concept helps to confound the self-interest/altruism dichotomy, forcing us from an either-or stance to a position that includes both perspectives. I hope in this way to contribute to a more critical feminist vision of women's lives and the meaning of family in the industrial West.
In mv recent field research among Italian-Americans in Northern California, I found myself considering the relations between women's kinship and economic lives. As an anthropologist, I was concerned with people's kin lives beyond conventional American nuclear family or household boundaries. To this end, I collected individual and family life histories, asking about all kin and close friends and their activities. I yvas also very interested in women's labor. As I sat with women and listened to their accounts of their past and present lives, I began to realize that they were involved in three types of work: housework and child care, work in the labor market, and the work of kinship.1'
By kin work I refer to the conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross-household kin ties, including visits, letters, telephone calls, presents, and cards to kin; the organization of holiday gatherings; the creation and maintenance of quasi-kin relations; decisions to neglect or to intensify particular ties; the mental work of reflection about all these activities; and the creation and communication of altering images of family and kin vis-a-vis the images of others, both folk and mass media. Kin work is a key element that has been missing in the synthesis o! the "household labor" and "domestic net-
work" perspectives. In our emphasis on individual women's responsibilities within households and on the job, we reflect the common picture of households as nuclear units, tied perhaps to the larger social and economic system, but not to each other. We miss the point of telephone and soft drink advertising, of women's magazines' holiday issues, of commentators' confused nostalgia for the mythical American extended family: it is kinship contact across households, as much as women's work within them, that fulfills our cultural expectation of satisfying family life.
Maintaining these contacts, this sense of family, takes time, intention, and skill. We tend to think of human social and kin networks as the epiphenomena of production and reproduction: the social traces created by our material lives. Or, in the neoclassical tradition, we see them as part of leisure activities, outside an economic purview except insofar as they involve consumption behavior. But the creation and maintenance of kin and quasi-kin networks in advanced industrial societies is work; and, moreover, it is largely women's work.
The kin-work lens brought into focus new perspectives on my informants' family lives. First, life histories revealed that often the very existence of kin contact and holiday celebration depended on the presence of an adult woman in the household. When couples divorced or mothers died, the work of kinship was left undone; when women entered into sanctioned sexual or marital relationships with men in these situations, they reconstituted the men's kinship networks and organized gatherings and holiday celebrations. Middle-aged businessman AI Bertini, for example, recalled the death of his mother in his early adolescence: "I think that's probably one of the biggest losses in losing a family— yeah, I remember as a child when my Mom was alive . . . the holidays were treated with enthusiasm and love . . . after she died the attempt was there but it just didn't materialize." Later in life, when Al Bertini and his wife separated, his own and his son Jim's participation in extended-family contact decreased rapidly. But when Jim began a relationship
324    Gender, Household, and Kinship
The Female World of Cards and Holidays 325
with Jane Batemen, she and he moved in with Al, and Jim and Jane began to invite his kin over for holidays. Jane single-handedly planned and cooked the holiday feasts.
Kin work, then, is like housework and child care: men in the aggregate do not do it. It differs from these forms of labor in that it is harder for men to substitute hired labor to accomplish these tasks in the absence of kinswomen. Second, I found that women, as the workers in this arena, generally had much greater kin knowledge than did their husbands, often including more accurate and extensive knowledge of their husbands' families. This was true both of middle-aged and younger couples and surfaced as a phenomenon in my interviews in the form of humorous arguments and in wives' detailed additions to husbands' narratives. Nick Meraviglia, a middle-aged professional, discussed his Italian antecedents in the presence of his wife, Pina:
Mr/;; My grandfather was a very outspoken man, and it was reported he took off for ihe hills when he found out that Mussolini was in power.
Pina: And he was a very tall man; he used to have to bow his head to get inside doors.
Nick: No, that was my uncle.
Pina: Your grandfather too, I've heard your mother say.
Nick: My mother has a sister and a brother.
Pina: Two sisters!
Nick: Your're right!
Pina: Maria and Angelina.
Women were also much more willing to discuss family feuds and crises and their own roles in them; men tended to repeat formulaic statements asserting family unity and respectability. (This was much less true for younger men.) Joe and Cetta Longhinotti's statements illustrate these tendencies. Joe responded to my question about kin relations: "We all get along. As a rule, relatives, you got nothing but trouble." Cetta, instead, discussed her relations with each of her grown children, their wives, her in-laws, and her own blood kin in detail. She did not hide the fact that relations were strained in several cases; she was eager to discuss the evolution of prob-
lems and to seek my opinions of her actions; Similarly, Pina Meraviglia told the following story of her fight with one of her brothers with-hysterical laughter: "There was some biting and hair pulling and choking ... it was tenv ble! I shouldn't even tell you. ..." Nick, meanwhile, was concerned about maintaining an image of family unity and respectability.
Also, men waxed fluent while women were quite inarticulate in discussing their past and present occupations. When asked about their work lives, Joe Longhinotti and Nick Meraviglia, union baker and professional, respectively, gave detailed narratives of their work careers. Cetta Longhinotti and Pina Meraviglia, clerical and former clerical, respectively, offered only short descriptions focusing on factors of ambience, such as the "lovely things" sold by Cetta's firm.
These patterns are not repeated in the younger generation, especially among younger women, such as Jane Batemen, who have managed to acquire training and jobs with some prospect of mobility. These younger women, though, have added a professional and detailed interest in their jobs to a felt responsibility for the work of kinship.7
Although men rarely took on any kin-work tasks, family histories and accounts of contemporary life revealed that kinswomen often negotiated among themselves, alternating hosting, food-preparation, and gift-buying responsibilities—or sometimes ceding entire task clusters to one woman. Taking on or ceding tasks was clearly related to acquiring or divesting oneself of power within kin networks, but women varied in their interpretation of the meaning of this power. Cetta Longhinotti, for example, relied on the "family Christmas dinner" as a symbol of her central kinship role and was involved in painful negotiations with her daughter-in-law over the issue: "Last year she insisted—this is touchy. She doesn't want to spend the holiday dinner together. So last year we went there. But I still had my dinner the next day ... I made a big dinner on Christmas Day, regardless of who's coming—candles on the table, the whole routine. I decorate the house myself too . . . well, I just feel that the time will come when maybe
I won't feel like cooking a big dinner—she should take advantage of the fact that I feel like doing it now." Pina Meraviglia, in contrast, was saddened by the centripetal force of the developmental cycle but was unworried about the power dynamics involved in her negotiations with daughters- and mother-in-law over holiday celebrations.
Kin work is not just a matter of power among women but also of the mediation of power represented by household units." Women often choose to minimize status claims in their kin work and to include numbers of households under the rubric of family. Cetta Longhinotti's sister Anna, for example, is married to a professional man whose parents have considerable economic resources, while [oe and Cetta have low incomes and no other well-off kin. Cetta and Anna remain close, talk on the phone several times a week, and assist their adult children, divided by distance and economic status, in remaining united as cousins.
Finally, women perceived housework, child care, market labor, the care of the elderly, and the work of kinship as competing responsibilities. Kin work was a unique category, however, because it was unlabeled and because women felt they could either cede some tasks to kinswomen and/or could cut them back severely. Women variously cited the pressures of market labor, the needs of the elderly, and their own desires for freedom and job enrichment as reasons for cutting back Christmas card lists, organized holiday gatherings, multifamily dinners, letters, visits, and phone calls. They expressed guilt and defensiveness about this cutback process and, particularly, about their failures to keep families close through constant contact and about their failures to create perfect holiday celebrations. Cetta Longhinotti, during the period when she was visiting her elderly mother every weekend in addition to working a full-time job, said of her grown children, "I'd have the whole gang here once a month, but I've been so busy that I haven't done that for about six months." And Pina Meraviglia lamented her insufficient work on family Christmases, "I wish I had really made it tra-
ditional . . . like my sister-in-law has special stories."
Kin work, then, takes place in an arena characterized simultaneously by cooperation and competition, by guilt and gratification. Like housework and child care, it is women's work, with the same lack of clear-cut agreement concerning its proper components: How often should sheets be changed? When should children be toilet trained? Should an aunt send a niece a birthday present? Unlike housework and child care, however, kin work, taking place across the boundaries of normative households, is as yet unlabeled and has no retinue of experts prescribing its correct forms. Neither home economists nor child psychologists have much to say about nieces' birthday presents. Kin work is thus more easily cut back without social interference. On the other hand, the results of kin work—frequent kin contact and feelings of intimacy-are the subject of considerable cultural manipulation as indicators of family happiness. Thus, women in general are subject to the guilt my informants expressed over cutting back kin-work activities.
Although many of my informants referred to the results of women's kin work—cross-household kin contacts and attendant ritual gatherings—as particularly Italian-American, I suggest that in fact his phenomenon is broadly characteristic of American kinship. We think of kin-work tasks such as the preparation of ritual feasts, responsibility for holiday card lists, and gift buying as extensions of women's domestic responsibilities for cooking, consumption, and nurturance. American men in general do not take on these tasks any more than they do housework and child care—and probably less, as these tasks have not yet been the subject of intense public debate. And my informants' gender breakdown in relative articulateness on kinship and workplace themes reflects the still prevalent occupational segregation—most women cannot find jobs that provide enough pay, status, or promotion possibilities to make them worth focusing on—as well as women's perceived power within kinship networks. The common recognition of that power is re-
326    Gender, Household, and Kinship
fleeted in Selma Greenberg's book on non-sexist child rearing. Greenberg calls mothers "press agents" who sponsor relations between their own children and other relatives; she advises a mother whose relatives treat her disrespectfully to deny those kin access to her children.'■'
Kin work is a salient concept in other parts of the developed world as well. Larissa Adler Lomnitz and Marisol Perez Lizaur have found that "centralizing women" are responsible for these tasks and for communicating "family ideology" among upper-class families in Mexico City. Matthews Hamabata, in his study of upper-class families in Japan, has found that women's kin work involves key financial transactions. Sylvia Junko Yanagisako discovered that, among rural Japanese migrants to the United States, the maintenance of kin networks was assigned to women as the migrants adopted the American ideology of the independent nuclear family household. Maila Stivens notes that urban Australian housewives' kin ties and kin ideology "tran-scend women's isolation in domestic units."1"
This is not to say that cultural conceptions or appropriate kin work do not vary, even within the United States. Carol B. Stack documents institutionalized Active kinship and concomitant reciprocity networks among impoverished black .American women. Women in populations characterized by intense feelings of ethnic identity may feel bound to emphasize particular occasions—Saint Patrick's or Columbus Day—with organized family feasts. These constructs may be mediated by religious affiliation, as in the differing emphases on Friday or Sunday family dinners amongjews and Christians. Thus the personnel involved and the amount and kind of labor considered necessary for the satisfactory performance of particular kin-work tasks are likely to be culturally constructed.11 But while the kin and quasi-kin universes and the ritual calendar may vary among women according to race or ethnicity, their general responsibility for maintaining kin links and ritual observances does not.
As kin work is not an ethnic or racial phe-
nomenon, neither is it linked only to one social class. Some commentators on American family life still reflect the influence of work done in England in the 1950s and 1960s (by Elizabeth Bott and by Peter Willmott and Michael Young) in their assumption that wo ing-class families are close and extended, while the middle class substitutes friends fur anomie) for family. Others reflect the prevalent family pessimism in their presumption that neither working- nor middle-class families have extended kin contact.1- Insofar as kin contact depends on residential proximity, the larger economy's shifts will influence particular groups' experiences. Factory workers, close to kin or not, are likely to disperse when plants shut down or relocate. Small business-people or independent professionals may, however, remain resident in particular areas—and thus maintain proximity to kin-lb r generations, while professional employees of large firms relocate at their firms' behest. This pattern obtained among my informants.
In any event, cross-household kin contact can be and is effected at long distance through letters, cards, phone calls, and holiday and vacation visits. The form and functions of contact, however, vary according to economic resources. Stack and Brett Williams offer rich accounts of kin networks among poor blacks and migrant Chicano farmworkers functioning to provide emotional support, labor, commodity, and cash exchange—a funeral visit, help with laundry, the gift of a dress or piece of furniture.11' Far different in degree are exchanges such as the loan of a vacation home, a multifamily boating trip, or the provision of free professional sendees—examples from the kin networks of my wealthier informants. The point is that households, as labor- and income-pooling units, whatever their relative wealth, are somewhat porous in relation to others with whose members they share kin or quasi-kin ties. We do not really know how class differences operate in this realm; it is possible that they do so largely in terms of ideology. It may be, as David Schneider and Raymond T. Smith suggest, that the affluent and the very
poor are more open in recognizing necessary economic ties to kin than are those who identify themselves as middle class."
Recognizing that kin work is gender rather than class based allows us to see women's kin networks among all groups, not just among working-class and impoverished women in industrialized societies. This recognition in turn clarifies our understanding of the privileges and limits of women's varying access to economic resources. Affluent women can "buy out" of housework, child care—and even some kin-work responsibilities. But they, like all women, are ultimately responsible, and subject to both guilt and biame, as the administrators of home, children, and kin network. Even the wealthiest women must negotiate the timing and venue of holidays and other family rituals with their kinswomen. It may be that kin work is the core women's work category in which all women cooperate, while women's perceptions of the appropriateness of cooperation for housework, child care, and the care of the elderly varies by race, class, region, and generation.
But kin work is not necessarily an appropriate category of labor, much less gendered labor, in all societies. In many small-scale societies, kinship is the major organizing principle of all social life, and all contacts are by definition kin contacts.1"' One cannot, therefore, speak of labor that does not involve kin. In the United States, kin work as a separable category of gendered labor perhaps arose historically in concert with the ideological and material constructs of the moral mother/cult of domesticity and the privatized family during the course of industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These phenomena are connected to the increase in the ubiquity of productive occupations far men that are not organized through kinship. This includes the demise of the family farm with the capitalization of agriculture and rural-urban migration; the decline of family recruitment in factories as firms grew, ended child labor, and began to assert bureaucra-tized forms of control; the decline of artisanal labor and of small entrepreneurial enter-
The Female World of Cards and Holidays 327
prises as large firms took greater and greater shares of the commodity market; the decline of the family firm as corporations—and their managerial work forces—grew beyond the capacities of individual families to provision them; and, finally, the rise of civil service bureaucracies and public pressure against nepotism."'
As men increasingly worked alongside of non-kin, and as the ideology of separate spheres was increasingly accepted, perhaps the responsibility for kin maintenance, like that for child rearing, became gender-focused. Ryan points out that "built into the updated family economy . . . was a new measure of voluntarism." This voluntarism, though, "perceived as the shift from patriarchal authority to domestic affection," also signaled the rise of women's moral responsibility for family life. Just as the "idea of fatherhood itself seemed almost 10 wither away" so did male involvement in the responsibility for kindred lapse.'7
With postbellum economic growth and geographic movement, women's new kin burden involved increasing amounts of time and labor. The ubiquity of lengthy visits and of frequent letter-writing among nineteenth-century women attests to this. And lor visitors and for those who were residentially proximate, the continuing commonalities of women's domestic labor allowed for kinds of work sharing—nursing, childkeeping, cooking, cleaning—that men, with their increasingly differentiated and controlled activities, probably could not maintain. This is not to say that some kin-related male productive work did not continue; my own data, for instance, show kin involvement among small businessmen in the present. It is, instead, to suggest a general trend in material life and a cultural shift that influenced even those whose productive and kin lives remained commingled. Yanagisako has distinguished between the realms of domestic and public kinship in order to draw attention to anthropology's relatively "thin descriptions" of the domestic (female) domain. Using her typology, we might say that kin work as gen-
328    Gender, Household, and Kinship
The Female World of Cards and Holidays 329
dered labor comes into existence within the domestic domain with the relative erasure of the domain of public, male kinship.1H
Whether or not this proposed historical model bears up under further research, the question remains. Why do women do kin work? However material factors may shape activities, they do not determine how individuals may perceive them. And in considering issues of motivation, of intention, of the cultural construction of kin work, we return to the altruism versus self-interest dichotomy in recent feminist theory. Consider the epigraphs to this article. Are women kin workers the nurturant weavers of the Gilligan quotation, or victims, like the fed-up woman who writes to complain to Arm Landers? That is, arc we to see kin work as yet another example of "women's culture" that takes the care of others as its primary desideratum? Or are we to see kin work as another way in which men, the economy, and the state extract labor from women without a fair return? And how do women themselves see their kin work and its place in their lives?
As I have indicated above, I believe that it is the creation of the self-interest/altruism dichotomy that is itself the problem here. My women informants, like most American women, accepted their primary responsibility for housework and the care of dependent children. Despite two major waves of feminist activism in this century, the gendering of certain categories of unpaid labor is still largely unaltered. These work responsibilities clearly interfere with some women's labor force commitments at certain life-cycle stages; but, more important, women are simply discriminated against in the labor market and rarely are able to achieve wage and status parity with men of the same age, race, class, and educational background.1-'
Thus for my women informants, as for most American women, the domestic domain is not only an arena in which much unpaid labor must be undertaken but also a realm in which one may attempt to gain human satisfactions—and power—not available in the labor market. Anthropologists Jane Collier and Louise Lamphere have written com-
pellingly on the ways in which varying kinship and economic structures may shape women's competition or cooperation with one another in domestic domains.-" Feminists considering Western women and families have looked at the issue of power primarily in terms of husband-wife relations or psychological relations between parents and children. If we adopt Collier and Lamphere's broader canvas, though, we see that kin work is not only women's labor from which men and children benefit but also labor that women undertake in order to create obligations in men and chil-dren and to gain power over one another. Thus Cetta Longhinotti's struggle with her daughter-in-law over the venue of Christmas dinner is not just about a competition over altruism, it is also about the creation of future obligations. And thus Cetta's and Anna's sponsorship of their children's friendship with each other is both an act of nurturance and a cooperative means of gaining power over those children.
Although this was not a clear-cut distinction, those of my informants who were more explicitly antifeminist tended to be most invested in kin work. Given the overwhelming historical shift toward greater autonomy Tor younger generations and the withering of children's financial and labor obligations to their parents, this investment was in most cases tragically doomed. Cetta Longhinotti, for example, had repaid her own mother's devotion with extensive home nursing during the mother's last years. Given Cetta's general failure to direct her adult children in work, marital choice, religious worship, or even frequency of visits, she is unlikely to receive such care from them when she is older.
The kin-work lens thus reveals the close relations between altruism and self-interest in women's actions. As economists Nancy Folbre and Heidi Hartmann point out, we have inherited a Western intellectual tradition that both dichotomizes the domestic and public domains and associates them on exclusive axes such that we find it difficult to see self-interest in the home and altruism in the workplace.-1 But why, in fact, have women fought for better jobs if not, in part, to support their
children? These dichotomies are Procrustean beds that warp our understanding of women's lives both at home and at work. "Altruism" and "self-interest" are cultural constructions that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and we forget this to our peril.
The concept of kin work helps to bring into focus a heretofore unacknowledged array of tasks that is culturally assigned to women in industrialized societies. At the same time, this concept, embodying notions of both love and work and crossing the boundaries of households, helps us to reflect on current feminist debates on women's work, family, and community. We newly see both the interrelations of these phenomena and women's roles in creating and maintaining those interrelations. Revealing the actual labor embodied in what we culturally conceive as love and considering the political uses of this labor helps to deconstruct the self-interest/altruism dichotomy and to connect more closely women's domestic and labor-force lives.
The true value of the concept, however, remains to be tested through further historical and contemporary research on gender, kinship, and labor. We need to assess the suggestion that gendered kin work emerges in concert with the capitalist development process; to probe the historical record for women's and men's varying and changing conceptions of it; and to research the current range of its cultural constructions and material realities. We know that household boundaries are more porous than we had thought—but they are undoubtedly differentially porous, and this is what we need to specify. We need, in particular, to assess the relations of changing labor processes, residential patterns, and the use of technology to changing kin work.
Altering the values attached to this particular set of women's tasks will be as difficult as are the housework, child-care, and occupational-segregation struggles. But just as feminist research in these latter areas is complementary and cumulative, so researching kin work should help us to piece together the home, work, and public-life landscape—to see the female world of cards and holidays as it is constructed and lived within the changing
political economy. How female that world is to remain, and what it would look like if it were not sex-segregated, arc questions we cannot yet answer.
NOTES
Many thanks to Cynthia Costello, Kayna Rapp, Roberta Spalter-Roth. John Willoughby. and Barbara Gelpi, Susan Johnson, and Svlvia Yanagisako of Signs for their help with this article. I wish in particular to acknowledge the influence of Rayna Rapp's work on my ideas.
1. Acknowledgment and gratitude to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg for my paraphrase of her title, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs: journal oj Women in Culture and Society l.no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-29.
2. Ann Landers letter printed in Washington Post (April 15, 1983); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 17".
3. Heidi I. Hartmann, "The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework," Signs G, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 366-94; and Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books. 1977).
4. Representative examples of the first trend include Joann Vanek, "Time Spent on Housework," Scientific American 231 (November 1974): 116-20; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "A Case Study of Technological and Social Change: The Washing Machine and the Working Wife," in Clio's Consciousness Raised, ed. Marv Hartmann and Lois Banner (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 245-53; Ann Oakley, Women's Work: The Housewife, Past and Present (New York: Vintage, 1974); Hartmann; and Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books. 1982). Key contributions to the second trend include Louise Lamphere, "Strategies, Cooperation and Conflict among Women in Domestic Groups," in Woman, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), 97-112; Mina Davis Caulfield, "Imperialism, the Family and the Cultures of Resistance," Social-
330    Gender, Household, and Kinship
The Female World of Cards and Holidays 331
ist Revolution 20 (October 1974): 67-85; Smith-Rosenberg; Sylvia Junko Vanagisako, "Women-centered Kin Networks and Urban Bilateral Kinship," American Ethnologist 4, no. 2 (1977): 207-26; jane Humphries, "The Working Class Family, Women's Liberation and Class Struggle: The Case of Nineteenth Century British History," Review of Radical Political Economics 9 (Fall 1977): 25-41; Blanche Weisen Cook, "Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman," in A Heritage of Her Own, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979); Temma Kaplan, "Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910-1918,"%»s 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 545-66.
5. On this debate, sec Jon Werner, "Women's History on Trial," Nation 241, no. 6 (September 7, 1985): 161, 176, 178-80; Karen j. Winkler, "Two Scholars' Conflict in Sears Sex-Bias Case Sets Off War in Women's History," Chronicle of Higher Education (February 5, 1986), 1, 8; Rosalind Rosenberg, "What Harms Women in the Workplace," New York Times (February 27, 1986); Alice Kessler-Har-ris, "Equal Employment Opportunity Commission vs. Scars Roebuck and Company: A Personal Account," Radical History Review 35 (April 1986): 57-79.
6. Portions of the following analysis are reported in Micaela di Leonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class and Gender among California Italian-Americans (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), chap. 6.
7. Clearly, many women do, in fact, discuss their paid labor with willingness and clarity. The point here is that there are opposing gender tendencies in an identical interview situation, tendencies that are explicable in terms of both the material realities and current cultural constructions of gender.
8. Papanek has rightly focused on women's unacknowledged family status production, but what is conceived of as "family" shifts and varies (Harma Papanek, "Family Status Production: The 'Work' and 'Non-Work' of Women," Signs 4, no. 4 [Summer 1979]: 775-81).
9. Selma Greenberg, Right from the Start: A Guide to Nonsexist Child Rearing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978), 147. Another example of indirect support for kin work's gendered existence is a recent study of university math students, which found that a major reason for
women's failure to pursue careers in mathematics was the pressure of family involvement. Compare David Maines et al.. Social Processes of Sex Differentiation in Mathematics (Washing-ion, D.C.: National Institute of Education 1981).
10. Larissa Adler Lomnitz and Marisol Perez Lizaur, "The History of a Mexican Urban Family," fournal of Family History 3, no. 4 (1978): 392-409, esp. 398; Matthews Harna-bata, Crested Kimono Power and Love in the Japanese Business Family (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, "Two Processes of Change in Japanese-American Kinship," fournal of Anthropological Research 31 (1975): 196-224; Maila Stivens, "Women and Their Kin: Kin, Class and Solidarity in a Middle-Class Suburb ofSydncy, Australia," in Women United, Women Divided, eel. Patricia Caplan and Janet M. Bujra (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 157-84.
11. Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). These cultural constructions may, however, vary within ethnic/racial populations as well.
12. Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network, 2d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1971): Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), and Family and Class in a London Suburb (London: Routledge Sc Kegan Paul, 1960). Classic studies that presume this class difference are Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962); and Mirra Komarovsky, Blue-Collar Marriage (New York: Random House, 1962). A recent example is Ilene Philipson, "Heterosexual Antagonisms and the Politics of Mothering," Socialist Review 12, no. 6 (November-December 1982): 55-77. Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975), epitomizes the pessimism of the "family sentiments" school. See also Mary Lyndon Shanley. "The History of the Family in Modern England: Review Essay," Signs 4, no. 4 (Summer 1979): 740-50.
13. Stack; and Brett Williams, "The Trip Takes Us: Chicano Migrants to the Prairie" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-paign, 1975).
14. David Schneider and Raymond T. Smith,
Class Differences and Sex Roles in American Kinship and Family Structure (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973), esp. 27.
15. See Nelson Graburn, ed., Readings in Kinship and Social Structure (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), esp. 3-4.
16. The moral mother/cult of domesticity is analyzed in Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer 1966): 151-74; Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Women's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); and Ruth Bloch, "American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815," Feminist Studies 4, no. 2 (June 1978): 101-26. The description of the general political-economic shift in the United States is based on Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Peter Dobkin Hall, "Family Structure and Economic Organization: Massachusetts Merchants, 1700-1850," in Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700-1950, ed. Tamara K. Hareven (New York: New Viewpoints, 1977), 38-61; Michael Anderson, "Family, Household and the Industrial Revolution," in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1978), 38-50; Tamara K. Hareven, Amosheag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Mary Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County,'New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge:  Cambridge  University Press,
1981) ; Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to'Work: A History of Wage-earning Women in the United Stales (New York: Oxford University Press,
1982) .
17. Ryan, 231-32.
18. Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, "Family and Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups," Annual Review of Anthropology S (\979): 161-205.
19. See Donald J. Treiman and Heidi I. Hartmann, eds., Women, Work and Wages: Equal Pay for fobs of Equal Value (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1981).
20. Lamphere (n. 4 above): Jane Fishburne Collier, "Women in Politics," in Rosaldo and Lamphere, eds. (n. 4 above), 89-96.
21. Nancy Folbre and Heidi I. Hartmann, "The Rhetoric of Self-interest: Selfishness, Altruism, and Gender in Economic Theory," in The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, ed. Arjo Kla-mer and Donald McCloskey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).