Changing Modes of Production and the Sexual Division of Labor among the Yoruba

Abstract

Analysts of the sexual division of labor have recently begun to acknowledge that modernization theory in studies of women and development provides only a limited explanation of sexual inequality, in part because of its assumptions about the basis of the sexual division of labor. Underlying modernization theory are two basic notions: (1) that capitalist accumulation and expansion determine the sexual division of labor in all societies and (2) that historical process and the direction of change are the same throughout human history. The first assumption has given rise to the tradition of explaining women's status chiefly in terms of the degree to which females participate in production roles outside the home. However, recent comparisons of development patterns in advanced industrial nations and in Third World countries have revised this explanation of female subordination. In examining divergent patterns of development, these studies have made conceptual and methodological refinements that distinguish between the sexual division of labor as the cause of female subordination and the sexual division of labor as the effect of female subordination. These revisions have generated a new set of assumptions: that analysts must identify more than one causative factor of change; that a universal theory of change must be based on an understanding of autonomous historical processes; and that gender relations in both production and reproduction must be examined, because change in one sphere signals change in the other. In their reappraisal of Ester Boserup's work, Lourdes Benerfa and Gita Sen argue that Boserup ignores the significance of women's role in biological and social reproduction by concentrating on the sphere of