Balancing Subsistence Agriculture and Self-Employment in Small Businesses: Continuity and Change in Women's Labor and Labor Relations in Mozambique, 1800–2000

Abstract

Balancing Subsistence Agriculture and Self-Employment in Small BusinessesContinuity and Change in Women's Labor and Labor Relations in Mozambique, 1800–20001 Filipa Ribeiro da Silva (bio) ABSTRACT This article examines women's participation in the economy of Mozambique by looking into multiple forms of female work and labor relations in a historical perspective, covering the period from 1800 to 2000. To this aim, I present a tentative profile of the Mozambican female population and a preliminary analysis of women's activities in the different economic sectors, as well as of the ways in which they contribute to the economy of the household, the state and the market economy. This is done by examining different types of labor relations they appear involved in, comparatively to men, and by discussing main changes over time and possible explanatory factors. For this purpose, I use population counts, censuses, and statistical data produced by the Portuguese colonial state and the Mozambican government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, alongside reports from officials of the Portuguese colonial state and the concessionary companies. KEYWORDS gender, women, labor, business, agriculture [End Page 118] Introduction This article examines women's participation in the economy of Mozambique by looking into multiple forms of female labor and labor relations in a historical perspective, in the last two hundred years. To do so, I adopt and apply the new methodological approach that has been developed within the framework of Global Labor History over the last decade under the initiative of the International Institute of Social History (hereafter IISH). For this purpose, I use mainly population counts dating from as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as well as census data, reports from officials of the Portuguese colonial state and the concessionary companies operating in part of the territory of Mozambique, namely the Mozambique Company. Part of these sources are collected in different archives and libraries in Portugal. Others were produced by the Mozambican State in the 1980s and 1990s and in the first decades of the twenty-first century, such as censuses and statistical data. These are, for the most part, available online on the website of the Mozambican National Institute of Statistics.2 The methodological challenges posed by these sources will be discussed further in this text. In addition, I am also resorting to legislation on labor and women, information on main economic policies during the colonial period and after independence, as well as ethnographical and anthropological studies. Based on these source materials, I built a dataset on labor relations in Mozambique, which is used as the point of departure for this study.3 The classification of labor relations is based on the "Taxonomy of Labour Relations" (hereafter Taxonomy) developed by the "Global Collaboratory for the History of Labour Relations" (hereafter Global Collaboratory).4 This study aims, therefore, to analyze in comparative perspective the ways in which women and men have changed their engagement with the economy of the country, here broadly defined, and with the world of labor in four main chronological benchmarks (1800, 1900, 1950, 2000). These benchmark years have been chosen to allow us to assess the situation in key moments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely the situation before the European colonization,5 after the development of the colonial economy, and, finally, in the post-independence and post-civil war periods.6 The article is divided into four main sections. I start by discussing the sources used and the challenges they pose to the researcher in terms of chronological and geographical coverage, but also the issues they raise in terms of the criteria of classification of the population employed by the census-takers. This is followed by the presentation of a tentative profile of the Mozambican female population, in relation to the total population. To [End Page 119] do so, I pay attention to a couple of key demographic indicators, namely total population, geographical distribution, functional age groups, gender distribution, and marital status. In the third section of the paper, I offer a preliminary analysis of the participation of women in the Mozambican economy. To this aim, I look at the proportion of women that...